Get the Skills and Move On
As a financial program manager with the Army, Kent Thompson's task-driven financial classes are akin to the no-nonsense approach of basic training: get in, get the skills and move on. "One of my weak points, honestly, is the icebreaker. I'm more of a nuts and bolts kind of guy: You came here for this kind of class – let me give you the class," he says.

The Accidental Icebreaker
While stationed at Camp Ederle in Vicenza, Italy, Thompson planned to use the Money Habitudes cards during a class, but when a few soldiers arrived early, he gave them the cards to kill time.

"I said, ´Hey, you got some cards there, why don't you read the instructions and mess around with them for a little bit while we're waiting for everyone else to show up.´ So I didn't even give them any instructions. I didn't tell them anything. So they started messing around with them and they started laughing and giggling with each other about, ´No, that's not you,´ ´Yeah, that's you!´ Some of them were friends and they knew each other's attitudes about money a little bit and they kind of treated it like a game, at first. And it worked," says Thompson. "It does kind of run itself."

Quite by accident he had found his icebreaker.

Relevant and Engaging
As it turned out, Money Habitudes served a larger purpose: helping make the classes more approachable and non-threatening – and, ultimately, more relevant and enjoyable – even given the large number of attendees who didn't want to be there.

"A lot of classes are filled with people who are told they have to be there, or they finally recognize, on their own,that they need to be there, but they're uncomfortable with it, especially when you're doing a group class. And this is a battle we fight on a daily basis," says Thompson who sees that, by using Money Habitudes, "It softens them up. It puts that light-hearted attitude on it."

Attracting Students
Getting students to attend a financial class has some additional challenges: generally they don't want to be there and it's hard to compete with programs that rely on that old, reliable attendance booster: food. Unfortunately, because Army Community Service (ACS) runs on specially allocated funds, Thompson was prohibited from dipping into his already limited budget to buy food to increase attendance.

"If you tell someone you're going to offer a class, they're like, ´Whatever.´ But if you say that you're going to provide the class with free pizza, then all of a sudden everyone wants to show up. We can't do that because we can't use appropriated funds for buying food or drinks."

Making Finances Fun
Thompson realized he needed to be creative. "I needed a draw: If I can't provide food, I can at least say that we're going to have some games of some sort," he says. Thus, he advertised financial classes with card games, using Money Habitudes along with some other games that he and his colleagues created to complement it.

While Thompson concedes that disguising his financial offerings as card games may have been a bit disingenuous, it did bring in students and he was true to the spirit of making the experience more fun and rewarding than PowerPoint slides – even if he couldn't offer pizza.

"You kind of have to approach it as, ´This is a game, ´ and try to make it fun for them," Thompson says. "One of the times I just said, ´Do this because it's important and no one wanted to do it because it was important. But if I say, ´Do this because it's fun, ´ it puts a whole different spin on it," he says, noting that a class doesn't need to be dry and boring just because the subject is perceived as dry and boring.

To Be Continued
However, Thompson not only wanted to bring more soldiers (and their families) in for financial help, he also hoped that they would continue to take advantage of the other classes offered by ACS. To make sure that students returned to future classes, he needed a hook and that hook was Money Habitudes. Recalling his experiences using the cards in which students always wanted to keep playing with them beyond the 10-15 minutes allotted at the beginning of each one or two-hour class, he developed an effective "to-be-continued" approach. "We'd get them interested [in the cards] and then we'd say, ´Come back for the next class and we'll finish this up´ or ´Come back to the next class and we can do it again,´" says Thompson.

Opening Doors
Beyond inducing attendees to return to finish the Money Habitudes activity, Thompson also used the quick icebreaker exercise to open the door to other financial classes.

"The last 10 minutes of the class, I said, ´I want you to be serious with this and really pick the attitudes you have; put the cards in the right pile and we'll see what it says.´ And, again, I didn't go over it with them in terms of ´This is what this means´ but what I did do is say, ´Now take your yellow cards and see what it says about you.´ Most of the people in the class said, ´You know, I really didn't think that would be a challenge for me, but now that I think about it, it is,´" he says, noting that this fits in well with his ACS colleagues´ strategy to tie classes together so that current offerings logically feed into upcoming classes.

"A lot of them were like, ´Yeah, I need to work on that.´ So it almost became a self-starting thing," he says, adding that the soldiers keyed in on the challenges of their money personality. "I could identify certain attitudes that people had and then get them into other classes."