By Katie Rendon, Hebrew Union College, Live from #AACRAO2026
The AACRAO Government Relations team, the AACRAO Federal Compliance Committee, and the AACRAO State & Regional Relations Committee joined together to host a session, “Government Relations and Federal Compliance Roundtable: Resources, Advocacy and Messaging,” on how individuals can work to keep up with regulatory updates, advocate for their state or region, and share this information with their local organizations and institutions. The session was designed to demonstrate the government relations and advocacy tools available to AACRAO members while also providing best practices for compliance tracking and communication.
The session began with Michael Bilfinger of AACRAO presenting a walkthrough of the AACRAO Advocacy Center. Participants were shown in real-time how to navigate the Advocacy Center. Within the Advocacy Center, a demonstration of key action tools was shared, including how to view issues that AACRAO is tracking, find templates for contacting your congressional representatives on key higher education issues, how to track bills at the federal and state levels, and find information on key elections. Additional AACRAO resources covered:
AACRAO Transcript is a weekly newsletter delivering policy and industry news of interest to the membership. Beyond its value as an informational source to the membership, the Transcript also serves as the main archive of the association’s public policy activities and its policy priorities.
AACRAO Podcasts cover a variety of higher education topics, some of which also touch on regulatory updates and compliance best practices. Check out some of these recent podcast episodes:
AACRAO Hill Day allows members to engage with congressional offices to discuss their work and share their perspective, as practitioners, on how policy impacts the work they do daily.
The next section of the presentation revolved around best practices for tracking compliance information, presented by Sam Carrell of Michigan State University. In order to be a compliance champion, three key factors were outlined: assessing the situation, finding campus allies, and checking your resources. When assessing the situation, you can follow a five-step process:
Identify the Concern: What is the challenge or gap? What is the issue?
Identify the Stakeholders: Who are the stakeholders? How can you come to a consensus on the next steps?
Frame the Conversation: Identify the risks and barriers. What data can help illustrate your points?
Have the Conversation: Include all relevant stakeholders, document concerns or barriers, and the results of the discussion.
Follow-up: Send follow-ups with next steps. Document the decisions made and who is responsible for resolving all next steps.
Finding campus allies is also critical in remaining compliant. Compliance and staying on top of regulatory changes are a group effort. Beyond more obvious campus partners like General Counsel/Legal Affairs or Institutional Research/Reporting, don’t forget to engage with other campus partners that have compliance concerns and can help collaborate on solutions. Some examples of other campus partners might include: accessibility services, athletics compliance, faculty affairs, fire marshals/safety officers, information security, international affairs, IRB coordinators, military student services, or ROTC.
This section of the presentation concluded with examples of the variety of resources that one should check/sign up for updates from in order to stay on top of compliance and regulatory changes. These lists are broad, so make sure to engage those campus partners to help cover the work. Some examples of those compliance and regulatory resources include:
Accrediting bodies: both institutional accreditors and programmatic accreditors.
Local sources (on your campus, in your city, or in your state): examples include your academic catalog, city and county ordinances, fire codes, MOUs, union contracts, or vendor contracts.
National/federal sources: examples include ADA, FERPA, Higher Education Act, NCCA, or VA Education and Training Benefits.
Nathan Hoff of Missouri State University closed the presentation by speaking about his work with Missouri ACRAO’s Government Relations Committee. Nathan spoke about the importance of sharing the information that you find with others. Emphasis was placed on the fact that you don’t need to work in government relations or have a PhD in this area in order to gather information and share it with others. Anybody can be a regulatory champion.
- What’s important is that you start doing the work, a little bit at a time, through reading articles, collecting the information, and sharing it with others in a consistent and understandable way.
- When collecting information, if you have people in your office who like to research, write, or organize, those are great people to lean on for help in this area.
- If you don’t know the answer, it’s also ok to share that you don’t know. You don’t have to be a regulatory expert to contribute to the work, you just have to be willing to converse about issues and ask questions.
- You can lean on your peers, your state & regional organization, your AACRAO colleagues (ask a question on Exchange!), AACRAO webinars, etc. to grow your own knowledge base.
When sharing legislative and compliance information with other stakeholders, keep in mind the following considerations:
This information can be intimidating: consider providing key concepts so that stakeholders know which pieces of information are most relevant for them.
This information can be very technical and hard to follow: consider providing a quick summary.
Be aware of your sources: Be cautious of slanted political commentary and the source of the information; try your best to keep messaging apolitical and from neutral sources.
Be consistent: using a consistent format can help people absorb information more quickly.
To chat with other AACRAO members about advocacy concerns, check out the Advocacy Community on Exchange.
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