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The economics are changing for independent schools. Tuition revenue is increasingly insufficient for compounding expenditures per student. Costs are now prohibitive for most families, and greater financial assistance must often accompany tuition increases. Capital improvements and endowment growth are necessary merely to remain competitive, but sympathetic benefactors are besieged with funding requests from every organization. Charter schools are emerging as an alternative for middle-class parents, able to leverage charitable gifts with state tax funding.
Strategic, integrated financial planning is the critical next step for schools struggling to build capital improvement and program funding capacity. It is more than just a capital campaign, more than issuing tax-exempt bonds. It is evolving beyond a hand to mouth existence, beyond that worry at the beginning of the year when you are not sure you will make your budget. Again.
Available resource material is often too conceptual, too focused on very wealthy schools, or too one-dimensional and vendor-oriented to be truly helpful to the diverse constituency of the independent school community. The goal of this site is to discuss the practical aspects of financial planning and to show why the components must be understood, and in fact only work efficiently, when considered as a whole. Many of the individual concepts may seem obvious or redundant. But it is this sum of points, executed together, that make the difference.
The blog will discuss various topics in financial planning, spanning from general strategies to executable tactics. Many concepts will be borrowed from the larger not-for-profit community. Guest authors will range from mutual fund managers discussing their investment criteria, to fund-raising consultants and endowment fund managers. There will also be case studies of successful approaches, by schools and other not-for-profit organizations, from which we can learn.
Subscribe in a reader or the email feed, and automatically receive notification every time the blog is updated. If there are topics of immediate interest please do not hesitate to contact me
Enjoy the site.
Nick
