General Fundraising

The golden goose

Most schools are looking for new sources of non-fee income. Actually, there is a way of boosting the bottom line while, at the same time, attracting more pupils to your school. Rachel Kerr explains the twin benefits of lettings

Most independent schools are familiar with the concept of facilities letting. Hiring out the sports courts, the main hall, and the pool – if you have one – are part and parcel of school life. But what, if any, strategic importance does your school place on lettings? Is this revenue-generator working as hard as it can for you, or are you happy to let it to tick along haphazardly?

There is an understandable tendency for schools to create clear dividing lines between the main educational life of the school and the peripheral non-school activities that take place as part of the lettings programme.

However, whatever the rationale for maintaining internal operational divisions, the fact is that the people visiting your school see only the school, whether they are coming to the parents’ evening with their spouse on a Wednesday, or hiring the five-a-side court with their work colleagues on a Thursday.

How they see your school
As far as they’re concerned, their relationship is with the school, even if it says “trading company” at the top of their invoice. In fact, everything that happens on school premises is a reflection of your school and, while you may prefer to create artificial divisions for operational and/or accounting purposes, don’t kid yourself that your visitors recognise the difference. To them, the school is just the school.

Eight years with responsibility for my own school’s trading company – during which time profits have almost quadrupled – have taught me that this side of school life can do so much more than contribute to the coffers, important though that is. Even the term “lettings” does little justice to the potential of hiring your facilities to what are, after all, either current or prospective parents, pupils, sponsors and advocates for your school. In essence, school trading companies can play a vital part in recruiting new pupils.

What are you doing and why?
When considering how to promote the letting of your facilities, first stop and consider what you want to achieve. Your first thought may naturally be to create a sustainable additional income stream. Fine, but how about something more? Develop an income and a positive impact on your pupil recruitment strategy. The types of customers you target can dictate whether you are likely to attract children, their parents and grandparents into the school. Over time, enjoyment of and familiarity with the buildings naturally progress to an application to join the school.

At my own school in Leeds, children in admissions interviews routinely tell teachers that they already know the school because they attend a regular theatre class, practise in our cricket nets with their local club, or come with their mum to collect dad after his weekly diving lesson.

Weekend and vacation-time exhibitions, such as our city’s main horticultural show, help to break down perceived barriers by bringing a wide range of people onto the school site, some of whom might otherwise never have visited us. We also cater for business and community conferences; provide meetings rooms for organisations as diverse as the regional health authority and a major property plc; host adult evening classes twice a week for the leading local FE college; and offer a private events service for dinner dances, wedding receptions and children’s parties.

How we do it
Our operation has become so holistic that most of these events now include at least a smattering of existing pupils, parents or someone with a family link to the educational life of the school, even though we don’t overtly market our trading company services to our existing parent base.

Whether your own trading company is a full-scale, fully staffed operation, or consists of just one or two events a week supervised by staff with a dual role, the principle remains the same: embrace the trading company as part of your whole-school marketing strategy and, over time, it will pay dividends for your pupil recruitment.
You may decide that you are only interested in an additional income stream and don’t want to use your trading company as a means of recruiting new pupils. That’s a reasonable point of view. However, it’s worth being aware of whom you hire your facilities to, the kinds of events they hold on your premises, and the service you provide for them, as they all impact on your reputation as a school.

Whether you manage the process or not, people will form their own perception of your school, and this will affect pupil recruitment, if only on the margins, so you may as well use it to your full advantage.
There are a number of companies that can help you assess your potential, advise you on the most profitable ventures, and even run your income generation programme for you. However, they may expect you to make an initial investment that requires an entrepreneurial leap of faith in the outcome. If you can’t afford to risk that kind of investment, do it yourself. It’s not rocket science. Some schools run private membership clubs, for instance, which can be a highly lucrative use of your sports facilities; profits can, in time, be used to purchase more and better equipment, which benefits pupils as well as club members.

Whatever your approach, it is important to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve and why, and to make conscious business decisions accordingly.

Whose benefit?
The concept of what constitutes public benefit is, of course, of current concern to many independent school charities. Charitable status gives schools a social purpose which informs their activities. Most independent schools will wish to remain charities for that reason, irrespective of a financial imperative. With this in mind, schools across the country are no doubt reviewing their policy on means-tested bursaries.

But many schools know they cannot afford to fund such places, which is where trading companies can play another strategic role. Peripheral though trading company activity is to the main charitable objectives of most schools, what you choose to do with the profits can provide a direct and highly relevant public benefit that strikes at the heart of your educational purpose. It could be that, by beginning to fund bursaries from trading company profits, what for most of us usually begins as “a bit of extra cash on the side”, can grow into a vital and socially relevant part of school life.

Rachel Kerr is director of marketing at The Grammar School at Leeds.

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