Central Student Government strives to provide valuable services, programs, and events to students at the University of Michigan. Student organizations on campus are perhaps the most important part of the Michigan experience, and putting on quality programs, events, and services requires resources, including financial resources. We spend the plurality of our money on providing funding to student organizations. We know that it is not only important to have the funding, but for there to be a consistent, predictable, and timely process for receiving it. At the same time, we are an entirely student-run operation, and we have to balance our own coursework, research, jobs, engagement, and personal life with our work in CSG.
Therefore, we have created this article to explain the process and the level of service you can expect from us when submitting an application for funding. Note that these service standards apply only to funding requests to SOFC through the ticketing system.
System availability
CSG’s website and the funding application system, TeamDynamix, are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, as are other major tools used in the funding cycle. The only exception is that TeamDynamix does routine system maintenance on Saturdays from 12 midnight to 4am EST on some Saturdays. As with any system, scheduled and unscheduled maintenance events and incidents happen, and can usually be viewed at the ITS Service Status page. If you believe we are experiencing an outage, please immediately contact the Director at csg.studentorgs@umich.edu, and request assistance from the ITS Service Center if you know it is an issue with which ITS must assist.
Requesting funding
We offer nine funding review periods (called “waves”) per fall and winter semester, and six during the spring-summer term. We review all applications we receive by the posted deadlines for each wave, usually Thursdays at 5pm. Should we require more information from an organization, or if an organization is dissatisfied with their award, we offer appeals, which usually have deadlines of Fridays at 5pm. A full listing of our deadlines is always available at csg.umich.edu/sofc.
Our target response times
Response times are based on calendar days, including weekends, except for University holidays, select academic breaks, and scheduled work stoppage periods for the well-being of the members of SOFC. You can contact the Director for a full list of upcoming dates that will result in an exclusion of certain dates from our response times.
These response times are per action, not per ticket. If we have to request additional information from you before we take further action, the clock resets. Note that we do not currently have a standard for "start-to-finish"—it really varies based on the situation, so instead, we have response times per action.
- Initial application review: No later than the posted decision release date for that wave
- Appeal review (if applicable): No later than 3 full calendar days after the appeal deadline
- Proof of payment review, general assistance, and anything not elsewhere specified: No later than 3 full calendar days after submission on the ticket
- Responses to compliance issues and Director approval of reimbursements: No later than 36 hours after submission on the ticket
- Reimbursement processing (approval by our authorized signer and transfer to your account by our accounting team): No later than 3 business days after Director approval
After our process
When the money makes it to your account, we will mark your ticket as "Closed". This is the end of the process with us. To actually receive your money, pay your vendors, etc., you will have to perform a transaction with SOAS yourself. We have no control over this process. Unfortunately, at this time, proof of payment does not carry over.
Example of an application timeline (without user errors)
- The Google Fan Club submits an application on Monday, September 20
- SOFC completes its review and issues a decision on Monday, September 27
- SLE met: based on specific date outlined in the schedule
- The Google Fan Club submits its proof of payment on Thursday, September 30
- SOFC reviews the proof of payment submission on Sunday, October 3
- SLE met: three full calendar days (target time is 4 full calendar days)
- Director approves the proof of payment 3 hours later
- SLE met: three hours (target time is 36 hours)
- The Treasurer approves the transfer and our accountant completes the transfer by Tuesday, October 6
- SLE met: two business days (target time is 3 business days)
In this example, CSG has met its target response times for all parts of the ticket. We will close the ticket and notify you, and you will see the money in your organization's account by 10pm on the date of the transfer. After that, processing times for the next steps (reimbursement to members, payments to vendors, transfers) widely vary based on the type of transaction, and the organization and SOAS are entirely responsible.
Responses to missed service expectations
If you believe we are missing our target response times or any other measures listed here, you should not hesitate to add a comment to your ticket, visit SOFC’s office hours available at csg.umich.edu/sofc, and/or email csgfunding@umich.edu or csg.studentorgs@umich.edu. We value your feedback, and we will strive to do better to meet your expectations, even if we find that we are within our target response times but you remain dissatisfied with the service we are providing.
If the Director notices (or you point out) that we are missing our target response times, they will take action to more expeditiously handle the ticket. More concretely, if we have missed any target response time by more than 36 hours, the Director will reassign the ticket to the Chair of SOFC or CSG’s professional accountant, whichever is appropriate, or take responsibility for the ticket themselves, and we will upgrade the ticket to high priority status and make every effort, using every available resource, to close out the ticket (i.e. send to SOAS for transfer) within 24 hours. We report any ticket that must be escalated in this manner to the President and Program Manager of CSG. We also conduct an assessment of these incidents to fix the problem that caused the missed target response time, and report this to the President and Program Manager of CSG as well.
Full SLE document
This article is a condensed version of our service level expectations. The full Service Level Expectations document is attached to this article.
Questions? Please email csg.studentorgs@umich.edu.