College Money Matters Inc

College Money Matters is a 501 (c ) 3 nonprofit which was started with the goal of interrupting the cycle of student debt by helping high school students and their parents understand that decisions about choosing a college need to be integrated with decisions about paying for college.

Our goal is to reach all college-bound high school students who will need to borrow for college (about half) with the information they need to about paying for college so they can reach their goals without excessive levels of debt.

Recognizing that not every student has access to financial aid counseling, the College Money Matters team decided to produce a website and YouTube channel to enable students to learn this valuable information on their own. After several years of research with high school students to understand what they needed to know and their learning preferences, collegemoneymatters.org was launched. It presents over 40 topics, using short articles, videos, games, and engaging graphics. We are reaching over 2,000 people a week as of July 2022.

Our dream is to make sure that no student borrows for college without a complete understanding of the financial implications of their choice.

We have spent the last 10 months adding engaging content and measuring analytics. We are confident that our website and Timely Topics bulletins are meeting the needs of our audience. Our goal now is to build awareness and visibility. We will achieve this by:

o Networking to form alliances with mentoring and youth nonprofits
o Working with major financial literacy organizations so they can share our content
o Improving public relations and press
o Continuing to work with school counselors and school districts
o Google adwords support
o Social Media
o Newsletters
o Conferences

We have an excellent group of talented volunteers and vendors who share our enthusiasm in achieving our goals. Our board consists of active and retired business owners and executives and parents. We have received systems and technical support from volunteers.

We hope to raise money to build awareness; and we have the funds on board to maintain and keep our site up to date.

After researching the needs and launching our website; we tested and re-launched it in September. Since then we have added content pieces on Scholarships; FAFSA; financial aid timetables, reading financial aid packages, Timely Topics for school counselors; developing a nonprofit mailing list of 2000 school professionals. We will continue doing research on users this year to improve our content.

Between September 2021 and July of 2022, we have had 55,000 visits averaging 4 pages viewed per visit with less than 1% bounce rate. Recently we have been seeing about 2,000 visitors per week.