TeleFact’s future funding remains uncertain

The fate of TeleFact’s future funding lies in the hands of administrators who remain undecided on the issue.

TeleFact, an over-the-phone fact-finding service whose purpose is to assist Pitt students with any questions they have as they make their journey through college, receives its funding from the Student Activities Fund, a $2.3 million fund to which all non-College of General Studies Pitt undergraduates contribute $80 each semester through the Student Activities Fee. At a public meeting last December, the 2012 Student Government Board called TeleFact’s validity as an automatically funded formula group into question and recommended an end to Activities Fund allocations for the group. But the Board deferred the final decision on funding to the authority of Vice Provost and Dean of Students Kathy Humphrey, who said in an email Monday that she is currently reviewing the recommendation.

As previously reported in The Pitt News, the Board passed a resolution to recommend that by the start of the 2014 fiscal year, TeleFact no longer be recognized among the four other organizations — Pitt Program Council, Panther Prints yearbook, Student Volunteer Outreach and 92.1 WPTS-FM — known as formula groups. Formula groups are Student Life Affiliated Groups that are funded yearly by fixed percentages of the Student Activities Fund, which the Board distributes.

The Student Government Board developed TeleFact in 1990, and the service currently operates from noon to 9 p.m. seven days a week. If the organization’s status as a formula group is lost, TeleFact will be forced to petition for funding from Student Government Board instead of automatically receiving 3.4 percent of the more than $2 million Student Activities Fund each year.

At the December meeting, Board members linked the rise in prominence of smartphones to a decline in the service’s popularity, and current SGB President Gordon Louderback said that last year’s Board, on which he served as a Board member, found TeleFact no longer relevant to student needs.

“Within a 4-year span, their call percentages dropped approximately 75 percent, yet their budget did not change,” Louderback said, adding that the resolution that began the allocation of fixed percentages of the Student Activities Fund to the formula groups has not been revised since it was passed in February 2009. He said the resolution needs to be updated to re-asses the funding provided to each of the groups.

Kenyon Bonner, associate dean of students and director of Student Life, who serves as an adviser for TeleFact, validated the argument of the Board.

“Based on data collected and reported by TeleFact,there has been a significant and progressive decrease in [TeleFact] usage over the last 5 to 6 years,” Bonner said in an email.

But Bonner said he also believes that, in addition to call rates, students’ opinions of TeleFact and other student-run services should be considered in their funding.

TeleFact Coordinator Kayla Mormak said in an email that despite the prevalence of smartphones in modern society, TeleFact is still a service worth keeping.

“Nearly 50 percent of the student population still uses a standard phone with no Internet connection,” she said. “There are currently more students without smartphones on Pitt’s campus than there were total students at Pitt when TeleFact first opened.”

Mormak confirmed that last year’s 23,265 calls fell below past yearly totals, but she claims the decline resulted not from a decrease in need but, rather, from a lack of advertising.

Mormak said that information about TeleFact was dropped from the Pathfinders’ tour scripts in 2009, and emails sent last fall to the SGB advertising chair, which the organization made in an attempt to develop more TeleFact advertising through SGB, went unanswered.

According to Louderback, there was no advertising chair last fall — only a public relations chair.

“Our public relations chair was to publicize [SGB’s] activities, not those of other groups,” said Louderback, who created an fundraising and advertising SGB subcommittee just earlier this calendar year to help interested student groups find and develop their own means of funding.

Mormak said that TeleFact is needed especially at Pitt because the academic bureaucracy is somewhat confusing. She said that miscommunication sometimes arises between different departments within the University, leaving students unclear on course-registration and graduation information. Telefact, she said, could help students to navigate the bureaucracy.

“That’s what we do: We pull all parts of the University together to provide an expert Pitt service, even when the rest of the offices are closed for the night,” Mormak said.

Mary Anderson, a freshman at Pitt, said that she had not heard of TeleFact before, but, after reading about the service that TeleFact had to offer, she was willing to give it a try.

“Now that I know what TeleFact is, I would probably use it to get quick answers to questions that I couldn’t easily find the answer to,” Anderson said.

TeleFact is currently running a “SaveTeleFact” campaign through its Twitter account. Every day, service employees tweet fun facts to increase the organization’s number of followers. Mormak said the group is up 500 followers since September. As of press time, Telefact had 1,539 followers on Twitter.

TeleFact is also developing new question-answering strategies in order maintain its relevance. Mormak said she is drafting a proposal to make TeleFact more technologically friendly through the use of text messages, Twitter and possibly live chat. She hopes that these additional measures will help keep TeleFact alive.

“TeleFact has been my love since I started at Pitt in 2008,” said Mormak, who started working as an operator in January 2009. “I would truly hate to see such an interesting and unique Pitt tradition die because we were underappreciated,” Mormak said.