[Oasfaa] FW: [SWASFAA Team Chatter] The Mystery of the SWASFAA Membership Database

[Schmerer, Mendy M. (HSC)]

Ever feel like the SWASFAA database is a puzzle and you're missing a piece?  Andrew provides that missing piece with his latest blog post.  Personally, I think he might be that guy who hides one piece of a jigsaw puzzle so he can sneak in at the last minute, snap it in place, and claim he finished the puzzle.  

-----Original Message-----
From: SWASFAA Team Chatter [mailto:blog at swasfaa.org] 
Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2014 11:08 AM
To: Schmerer, Mendy M. (HSC)
Subject: [SWASFAA Team Chatter] The Mystery of the SWASFAA Membership Database

SWASFAA Team Chatter has posted a new item, 'The Mystery of the SWASFAA Membership Database'

I love a good mystery. When I was a kid, I read a series of detective novels that inspired me to spy on my brothers. I wanted to catch them committing a crime so the police would have to cart them away to prison. At last, I would have my own bedroom!

It serves me right that I now have a career that requires me to play detective every day as I sort through the tangled web of title IV regulations. It took me a long time to unlock the secrets of R2T4, and I finally figured out the sordid complexities of clock hours and how they relate to SAP.

As much as I love mysteries, I hate loose ends. To make life easier for others, I like to simplify processes whenever I can. One of the mysteries that I’ve heard people talk about is the SWASFAA membership database. The purpose of this blog is to teach everyone some tricks on keeping the database current.

Updating Your Institution’s Information

Each institution should have a primary contact who can access the institutional portion of the database. Normally, the primary contact will review this information when he or she completes the annual membership application. But sometimes information needs to be updated in the middle of the year.

Making updates is easy. First, go to the www.swasfaa.org homepage. Under Member Services, go to Update Your Institution; then select Update Your Institution’s Member List. If you are the designated primary contact for your school, you can log in with your username and password. At this point, you can add or remove the financial aid professionals at your institution. You can also update your institution’s profile, including the primary contact and the one voting member. Be sure to discuss this with your entire office so there’s no confusion about who the primary contact and voting member should be. The primary contact and the voting representative do not have to be the same person. Some schools want the director to be the primary contact, but the voting member is someone else on the staff. The decision is up to each institution.

It’s important to keep this information current so that everyone at your institution can enjoy the benefits of membership, including access to the listserv. Also, you must be a member of SWASFAA in order to register for events like the Annual Conference, Boot Camp, or the Leadership Workshop. If you try to register for one of these events and you have trouble, it may be because your institution’s member list is not up-to-date.

Updating Your Member Profile

If your institution is a member of SWASFAA and the primary contact never added you to the school’s member list, then don’t worry—you can still add yourself. This might be an issue for new hires who are trying to register for Boot Camp or the Conference and don’t show up in the database.

From the www.swasfaa.org homepage, under the Member Services menu, go to Manage your Membership, and click on Update Your Member Profile. Once again, you must log in with your username and password. Your profile will show if you are the primary contact for your school or if you are the voting member. You can also subscribe to the SWASFAA listserv on this page.

Finally, this is the place where you can change your password. When I first received my SWASFAA username and password, the password was something impossible to remember, like S&K!*2. It looked like a curse word, which is appropriate, because I could never remember it. If you look at the second field on the Member Profile page, you’ll see a place to change your password to something easier to remember.

Hopefully, this information will help you to work through the mystery of the SWASFAA database. We have an election coming up, and we want to make sure all our institutional members have a voting representative who can participate in the process. One of the advantages of this blog is that you can refer back to old entries for future reference, so this information will always be available to anyone who needs to review it. Then you can mark the case “solved” and move on to the next mystery.

You may view the latest post at
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v1/url?u=http://swasfaa.org/b/general/the-mystery-of-the-swasfaa-membership-database/&k=7DHVT22D9IhC0F3WohFMBA%3D%3D%0A&r=3FzektddOA%2BuX1sZs6OX4Y4OSdCLjHnFYl%2FJvLARkCU%3D%0A&m=gu3Yobs0eydXbXElkfqzRD1F%2BGrJz5ItM%2FhRZyoSHuY%3D%0A&s=b0564caabb58b9870e9b58b3add6e08fc54190876f3b4a51d43148500a8d454b

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