IASFAA Business Meeting
April 13, 2012

Des Moines Embassy Suites

Executive Council Members In Attendance: Gary Adams, Gisella Baker, Shelly Brimeyer, Don Duzik, Kristi Fuller, Amy Gaffney, Heather Gaumer, Erin Gjerde-Bailey, Mary Jacobsen, Joan Meyer, Chad Olson, Robert Piechota, Marie Pleggenkuhle, Jen Sassman, Jen Schroeder, Cindy Seyfer, Mary Jo Smith, Brandi Stone-Miller

The meeting was called to order by President Amy Gaffney at 12:20 p.m.

Prior Meeting Minutes
Motion –JenSchroeder made a motion to accept the minutes from the Fall, 2011business meeting.
Second–Shelly Brimeyer seconded the motion.
Motion passed.

Treasurer’s Report – Jennifer Schroeder
Current assets total $71,359.50. Money market CDs total $57,900.

Gisella explained to the IASFAA members in attendance at the Business meeting that the Treasurer-Elect accepts checks, money, registrations and memberships and records this information. The Treasurer writes checks. Gisella asked that the new Treasurer-Elect Greg G. includes all invoices when he needs her to write checks.

John Parker had a question on the CD information listed on the balance sheet provided to the membership. There is a negative listing on the balance sheet. Per Jen Schroeder this is because this CD matured, was cashed out and reinvested. John also wonders if there could be a way to pay membership dues on-line via a credit card. Per Amy Gaffney, we will explore this.

Linda Schwinn wondered if the Treasurers name and address could appear on the invoice for mailing purposes. This can be done for the future.

Motion – Joan Meyer made a motion to accept the Treasurer’s Report.
Second – Robert Piechota seconded the motion.

Officer’s Report

Past President – Joan Meyer
I have attended MASFAA Exec Council meetings as Award Chair. I want to remind everyone that MASFAA award nominations are due on or BEFORE June 30th. Go to the MASFAA website and look at the descriptions and email your nomination to me. Let’s shoot for another IASFAA sweep of the MASFAA awards!

President – Amy Gaffney

  1. Held executive council meeting prior to conference where we discussed Blog name, “reality store” name change, and other items.
  2. Preparing for MASFAA meeting in May
  3. Urge current chairs and officers to work with incoming chairs and officers –prepare end of year summary, etc…
  4. May want to review insurance policy details—update some address info, etc… NASFAA surveyed state and regional presidents with the idea of possible group insurance rates.
  5. Thanks to all officers and committee chairs and to all members for their support and encouragement this past year.

President-Elect – Heather Gaumer
During the spring conference, IASFAA members raised $506 in Cathy Remakel’s memory and $1350 to support JDRF. A big thank you to everyone that donated an item for the auction, helped coordinate the charity efforts, and/or made a monetary contribution.

I am beginning the planning of the 2012-2013 Executive Council Summer Retreat. The retreat will take place June 28th – 29th at the Simpson College campus. I will share more detailed information with the incoming Executive Council after the spring conference.

2012-13 Incoming Executive Council:

Past President – Amy Gaffney

President – Heather Gaumer

President – Elect – Jennifer Sassman

Vice President – Cindi Reints

Secretary – Carolyn Schwendeman

Treasurer – Gisella Baker

Treasusurer-Elect – Greg Geistkemper

Delegates – Shelly Brimeyer, Don Duzik and Todd Brown

2012-2013 Committee Chairs:

Awards – Mary Jo Smith

Community Outreach – Marie Pleggenkuhle

Exhibit Relations – Robert Piechota

Electronic Services – Mary Jaconbsen

Federal and State Issues – Ean Freels

Long Range Planning – Joan Meyer

Newsletter – Brandi Stone Miller

Professional Development – Julie Haack

Program – Kristi Fuller

Site Coordinating – Chad Olson

As IASFAA President, I will travel to the West Virginia Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators conference on April 25 – 27, 2012 through the MASFAA State Exchange Program. I am looking forward to the opportunity to attend a different state’s conference and gather new ideas for IASFAA.

Vice-President – Jen Sassman

1)The bank reconciliation for the bank statement ending March 31, 2012 is complete.

2)I wrote the draft for new session Business Solutions. It was reviewed by the Executive Council and tweaked. We tested the model the first day of the conference. We welcome vendor and conference attendee feedback so we can continue to serve vendors and schools with tools to help them be success assisting their students.

3)My predecessor, Cindi Reints, and I determined that she could not attend the Summer Retreat in June. We are planning a time to meet before then to hand over the vice president duties to her and review my year-end report.

Secretary – Cindy Seyfer

Now that the Fall Business meeting minutes have been approved, they will be posted to the IASFAA website. It has been a pleasure to serve the association during the past year. I would encourage everyone to get involved. I want to thank the other members of the executive council for all their hard work during the past year.

Delegates – Shelly Brimeyer, Don Duzik and Erin Gjerde-Bailey
Updated the Policy and Procedures Manual with revised Committee Descriptions, revised Award Descriptions, and added detailed information regarding the Treasurer’s duties (Quick books) and the Annual Closing of the IASFAA Books (Audit).

Early in the year, the Delegates were asked to evaluate individual membership against any foreseeable benefits to possibly changing to institutional membership. Ultimately, the
Executive Council decided the change was not warranted at this time.

The delegates also discussed extending members’ electronic access to the IASFAA website until the fall conference had concluded to provide members with fall conference information beyond the membership renewal date of June 30. This would assist those members who typically renew their membership with the fall conference registration. Using research conducted by the Electronic Serviceschair, it was approved to have the Electronic Services chair establish an additional Announcement listserve that would be managed by certain administrators in order to post relevant information that would reach both current and past members within the last three years. This motion was approved during the February 7, 2012 Executive Council meeting with the only cost being a one-time charge of $75.

The Delegates made a lot of good changes to the P & P manual so that more detailed information is passed on to new officers.

Committee Reports
Awards – Mary Jo Smith
The Awards Committee was very busy this past year. We gathered nominations for the various awards given at the Fall and Spring Conferences. In the fall we gathered nominations for the John Heisner Memorial Lifetime Award, the Distinguished Service Award, the Meritorious Service Award and the Student Success Story Award. These award recipients were selected and awards were presented at the Fall Conference.

It was decided by the committee to refresh the descriptions of all the IASFAA Awards to make certain the membership understood the intent of each award. In February, the new rewritten descriptions of the awards were presented to and accepted by the Executive Council for inclusion in the Policy and Procedures Manual.

This Spring, after the nomination process, we presented the Outstanding Committee Member of the Year, the Outstanding New Professional Award and the John Moore Award.

The committee would like to appeal to the membership to think about nominating a deserving person in the fall when the request for nominations comes out. There is no greater feeling than to receive the honor of an award of recognition from your peers. I challenge each of those who received awards this year to begin thinking about who you could nominate next year.

I would like to thank my committee, Susan Ladd, Drake University and Elizabeth Minard, University of Northern Iowa for their time and talent they shared this year for the benefit of the membership.

Bylaws – Delegates
The delegates are currently working on updating the IASFAA fact book.

Community Outreach – Erick Danielson
The Reality Store was held in September. Amy described the basic concept of the Reality Store to the membership. In many ways it is the game of life with students proceeding through stations with a checkbook needing to make financial decisions and choices.

Erick presented Luther College with the Frieda Award for their efforts during Financial Aid Awareness month.

Electronic Services – Mary Jacobsen
We did many things using the IASFAA website this year.

  • Redesigned homepage.
  • Online volunteer submission.
  • Will be adding IASFAA Talk blog.
  • Upgrades for Exec Council use,
  • Committees expanded use of the website.
  • NASFAA News headlines on the home page.
  • Voting
  • Registrations for conferences, director’s drive-in workshop, leadership, business solutions, exhibitors, membership.
  • Newsletters
  • Awards nominations
  • Listserve
  • Conference handouts prior toconference.

If anyone has ideas for new features please give them to Mary or Chris.

Exhibitor Relations – Chris Ditter and Robert Piechota
There were seven exhibitors who participated in the IASFAA Spring Conference: Discover, Great Lakes, iHELP, iLINK, Iowa Student Loan, Nelnet and Wells Fargo. Five of the exhibitors (Discover, Great Lakes, iLINK, Iowa Student Loan and Wells Fargo) also participated in the first offering of Business Solutions Sessions which was well received by conference attendees.

Federal & State Issues – Ean Freels
2012-13 Goals:

  • Create an active environment for the exchange of information concerning important issues and topics (i.e. an interactive federal and state issues blog).
  • Re-establish an IASFAA Legislative Day
  • Up-date the IASFAA website to include helpful information concerning interaction and communication with legislators at the federal and state level.
  • Establish an IASFAA interest session hosted by the Federal and State Issues Committee

Committee Sponsored Events/Activities:

  • The committee worked on getting ourselves back on the map as an active and valuable resource.
  • No committee sponsored events were held.

Highlights/Notable changes:

  • Identified a new committee chair and solicited an active committee member.
  • Exchanged important information via the IASFAA list serve on numerous occasions.
  • Established regular bi-monthly committee meetings.

Finance – Amy Gaffney
1.We have some CDs coming due and the EC will need to decide what to do with them early May.

2. (This is in Aaron’s report as well) According to the Long range Plan, membership dues are set to increase to $85 this year. The EC needs to decide if they wish to follow this plan or not this year.

Long-Range Planning – Aaron Steffens
The majority of this year has been spent tracking the fiscal portion of the IASFAA 5 Year Plan. Adjustments were made to the income and expense numbers after the close of the first year of the plan (2010-11) to better predict the next four years. An additional year (2015-16) was added to the plan as it represents the year that MASFAA returns to Iowa which traditionally means that we only have one state conference.

As of the end of March, IASFAA has approximately $11,700 in net income for the fiscal year. This includes a $2,100 gain from the sale of a CD, but does not include all of the income and expenses for the Spring 2012 conference. At this point, it appears that the majority of the income and expense lines will come in close to projections. I don’t believe that we will have any line items that will exceed their budgets, and a couple that will be well under budget.

The fiscal plan does call for an increase in dues to $85 for the upcoming year. While income has held above projections and expenses slightly below projections, we continue to lose exhibitor support under current economic conditions. The other trend we are seeing is an increase in conference costs driven almost exclusively by the cost of food. This is despite the fact that the Site Committee continues to be very conservative in meal selection. With these factors in play, it does seem necessary to raise the dues according to the plan. This is already a one-year delay from the original plan.

Newsletter – Carolyn Schwendeman
The newsletter committee has published three newsletters so far this year. A special edition was published in February highlighting Financial Aid Awareness month. The newsletters are packed full of information about the wonderful things IASFAA and your colleagues at other schools have been up to. Our next newsletter will go out in May so when we send out the email requesting articles, please submit anything that you feel is newsworthy. This includes new hires, retirements, marriages, birth announcements, etc.

Professional Development – Marie Pleggenkuhle
The professional development committee had 10 IASFAA members participate in Leadership Symposium and graduated on Wednesday, April 4th. Thanks so Kristi Fuller, Jen Sassman and Julie Haack for their help with Leadership. Over 30 participants from various colleges across Iowa participated in the Drive-In Directors workshop which was held in February at AIB. A big thank you goes out to Julie Haack and Heather Gaumer for taking charge and making sure all went well for the event. Professional Development also assists the Program Committee with the 1st time conference attendees. We have had over 40 newcomers attend our fall and spring conference and would like to thank all of the people who volunteered to be mentors for the newcomers.

Program Committee – Tracie Pavon
The Spring conference had great attendance numbers. We offered federal and state updates, new business solutions sessions, and a variety of interest sessions. Our conference was once again be self-supportive as was fall. We are currently in the process of calculating evaluations, which will be used again to plan in the coming year for both our fall and spring conferences.

Site Coordinating Committee – Gary Adams and Chad Olson
I would like to thank the members of the site committee for the work they put into organizing and assisting with the many things that go into putting together a successful conference. Members of the 11/12 site committee were Chad Olson, who will be your 12/13 Site Chair, Joan Meyer, who is the 12/13 Site Co-Chair, Beth Cole, and Jennifer Schroeder. I look forward to continuing to work on the site committee by helping in anyway I can.

I also want to thank everyone that was kind enough to provided equipment for the spring conference, which was Chad Olson, Joan Meyer, Karen Gagnon, Shelly Brimeyer, and Amy Gaffney. There support through allowing IASFAA use of their equipment truly keeps our costs low since we do not have to rent the equipment from the hotel.

Lastly, I would like to urge everyone to attend the Fall Conference in Council Bluffs!

Motion – Jen Sassmanmade a motion to accept the committee & officer reports.
Second – Jen Schroeder seconded the motion.
Motion passed.

Old Business
Mary Jo presented a service award to Julie Haack for 15 years of service since this was inadvertently missed at the Fall 2011 conference.

New Business
Wednesday the Executive Council met and discussed the Reality Store name. It was determined that this is a trademarked name. MASFAA was given permission to use the name but IASFAA does not have permission to use this name. ICAN offered the use of their “Life Store” name. The Executive Council came up with the name “Real Life Zone” and we plan to use this for the future and may look into trademarking this.
Amy expressed her appreciation to the University of Dubuque, Tim and her other colleagues at UD, the other EC members and friends and colleagues who offered support during the year. She thanked everyone for their active participation throughout the year and encouraged IASFAA members to get engaged with each other.
Amy presented Heather with the gavel. Heather presented Amy with the 2011-12 President’s award. This is the highest award that IASFAA can offer to its membership.
Heather echoed Amy’s year from the prior year of “sure, why not?” Heather encourages professional development. She is very pleased that the leadership symposium has been recently revitalized. She is excited about the possibility of a legislative gathering. This new initiative would be spearheaded by the Federal & State Issues committee.

Motion –Don Duzikmade a motion to adjourn.
Second – Amy Gaffneyseconded the motion.
Motion passed.

IOWA ASSOCIATION OF FINANCIAL AID ADMINISTRATORS
Balance Sheet
As of April 10, 2012
Total
ASSETS
Current Assets
Bank Accounts
Money Market Checking / $71,359.50
Total Bank Accounts / $71,359.50
Total Current Assets / $71,359.50
Other Assets
American Express Centurion Bank Salt Lake City UT / $15,000.00