Your friends and family are good people who want to see you and your children succeed in life and they want to help you. Your friends and family want to contribute into your child’s 529 college savings plan. My company, Freshman Fund, commissioned a nationwide study to test the idea of shifting gifts from plastic Barbie Dolls into something more meaningful, college savings. Before we started the business we wanted to know if parents were receptive to the idea. The main points we wanted to know were would parents use a service that allows them to consolidate gift contributions into their child’s 529 college savings plan, would they ask friends and family for contributions and would they contribute into their friends child’s 529 college savings account in lieu of giving physical gifts.
We figured if we got a 50% favorable response to the survey for a new service that requires a slight change of behavior we could build a profitable business. To our surprise the response was overwhelmingly positive. About 80% of the parents polled said they would use the service, they would ask for contributions and they would gift into their friends accounts.
The survey was a national survey of 500 families with college bound children. The survey was conducted by Greenfield Online and the data was normalized for the the entire U.S. population by Morpace Market Research and Consulting in October, 2007.
