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CommunityAmerica
College Cost & Compare
CommunityAmerica · 2018
- Problem
- For a lot of families, paying for college is the biggest money decision they’ll ever make. And they were making it on the sticker price, which is the one number that isn’t real. What they’d actually pay after aid was the number that mattered, and there was no simple way to see it. Meanwhile we had College and Career Planners who could help, under-booked, with no obvious path from a worried parent to a real conversation. Two gaps, one tool.
- Constraints
- My first year here. No product process to lean on, and a main CMS too rigid to ship anything quickly. So I built it as a microsite on a subdomain. A workaround that became the lab’s way of shipping what the big system couldn’t, for years after.
- Process
- Built it end to end. The concept, the content, the design, the code. Launched in the spring of 2018. It grew into a family of tools. A public site, a financial-aid comparison, a companion chatbot. By the next year a dozen other credit unions were licensing it.
- Outcome
- Early on, more than 10,000 families used it, and meetings with our planners tripled. It picked up an EdTech Awards finalist spot and a CUNA award, and some national press. But the number I keep is the meetings. The tool’s whole job was to end at a human who could actually help.
- Lessons
- It was the first thing I built here with real reach and a number attached, and that mattered more than I understood at the time. It set the bar for everything after: a tool is only as good as the conversation it starts.