Know-How Exchange : Strategy

First, review the financials and find a way to stop the cash bleed. Preserve the cash you can while you do your turnaround.

Go where the parents are. Fusion market your after school program with the local schools. Make presentations to the major employers. 3x a year emails is not marketing-- is there follow up to assure these actually get inserted?

Is there any grant money available?

Carol
Sell Well and Prosper tm

How's the other children club doing? it is good to benchmark to know if there are areas where you need improvement.

why should children go to your club and not the other one - what are your selling points and are these selling points important to the parents and the kids OR whoever is the decision maker?

If the selling points should definitely strike the heartstrings of the parents and kids, are you doing a good job in driving the message consistently,constantly and effectively to the parents & kids?

Hi Juliet,

Haven't heard from you in a while. Hope you're having a great day but more importantly a very wonderful life.

You've asked a great question and I hope what I share will help you see things a little differently. You know the NPF called Glenwood School for Boys & Girls where I mentor nearly 50 of the most amazing *At-Risk Children were 3 MILLION dollars down when the doors were about to close but we raised 1.8 MILLION in 30 days and the checks are still flowing in. Some even right from the hands of Marketingprof's experts here on line.

KEY # 1 STRENGTHEN LOCAL RELATIONSHIPS...
I informed the president of the organization that it was not directly ---the lack of money--- that was the problem but ---a lack of relationships--- and strong integration between the local community and the organization. Part of my solution to them was to strengthen the local relationships. Why?

BECAUSE MONEY FLOWS THROUGH RELATIONSHIPS...
Money is like "the ocean". The ocean flows through currents moving across the water. Money is often called currency because it flows. Where "Good RELATIONSHIPS" are in operation you will find currency (or money moving like a current). Money very rarely flows through poor communities and if it does it flows very, very slowly because people are less preoccupied with good relationships. In affluent communities money flows very, very quickly because people are much more preoccupied with good relationships.

KEY #2 CREATE A COMMUNITY CHALLENGE...
Now it appears you live in an affluent community if you live near the Oil Capital of Europe. So here's what I'd challege you to do. Get the organization to set a 30 day goal to raise in thirty days what they would normally generate in a whole year. That's what we did on one of the Glenwood School campuses. We raised $300,000 in 30 days from that campus alone. Normally it takes that particular campus 1 year to raise that kind of money but they did it in 30 days BECAUSE they made a "Community Challenge". They believed that the money was in the community and that what they did for the community had great value.

MAIN KEY # 3...NEXT SOLICIT THE WOMEN OF YOUR COMMUNITY...
Why?

If you study history you will find that it tends to be women that are at the foundation of a good local community drive of any kind. Women nurture children, women are cultivators, they are the farmers of the soil of good community activity and they are the ones who are really concerned about what opportunities are available for their children. That's why women get to carry the children because they are the ones who cherish, encourage, support and foster development of the little ones. So locate some really committed community minded women and WATCH what happens next. That's who I petitioned and challenged to help our organization out...Plus most women direct the spending of most households here in America and I know that's true even in the UK.

KEY #4 DO WHAT WORKS!
In my preoccupation with children through, NPF organizations, schools, synagogues and churches I have discovered that there are a lot of things one can do but only a few things acutally work. So as a good foundational reference remember the mantra "Do What Works". Also for every community you work in you will have to alter the approach or strategy a little or a lot so that you are customizing your approach with the local community at large.

KEY #5 CONTACT ME OFFLINE FOR A PROPRIETARY IDEA that I've used in poor communities and in affluent communites. The idea works and if your contacts are good like mine I did the whole campaign for FREE and the money we raised was total profit. Between this idea and the challenge you should have some good results if there is zero cost to you. Please let me know what you think Juliet. REMEMBER... our only real problem in life is our failure to be "MORE Creative" than we’ve ever been. If you “Invent” your opportunity YOU WILL most definitely create your future. I'm only an email away from you if you need my help. Is there anything else I can do for you?

Your Servant,

Deremiah, *CPE (Customer Passion Evangelist)

*At-Risk Children: In this community are just those who are unfortunate in that most live in bad neighborhoods, come from single family homes with hard working mothers who are just not receiving support from the men who fathered the children into the Chicagoland communities. Glenwood School helps to preserve the integrity of the local communities by turning these children into great citizens for our country.

Hey Juliet,

So glad to hear your positive response. It appears your committment from the fathers who are involved especially those who sit on the committee and those who are actively involved in picking up and dropping off their children will bring an added significant difference to the equation.

LEVERAGE THOSE WHO ARE COMMITTED...USE THE 90/10 RULE...
So to answer your question YES, this will create even more possibilities. So I believe you should LEVERAGE the committed relationships. Get your organization to use the 90/10 RULE...10% of your organizations committed customers are involved in actually creating 90% of the momentum necessary to keep your organization running at maximum capacity.

CREATE MOTION WITH THE MOMENTUM OF THE INFLUENTIAL TEN PERCENT ...
These same 10% are the ones who actually have the ---Greatest Influence---, the ---Greatest Contacts/Relationships--- and also the ---Greatest Exposure--- to influence others in your community. IF you approach this properly you can create some amazing motion with the momentum of the influential 10%.

USE OCCAM'S RAZOR...
As a matter of fact you can probably raise the entire budget of $48,000 for the whole entire year in 30 days if you can leverage the relationships and apply Occam's Razor (a 12th Century Franciscan Monk https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q... ) Most people make things way more complex than they have to be. All though Occam did not create the rule so popularly referred to by his name he used it so much others gave him credit for it. In a nutshell Occam was always looking for the most easiest, simplest way to achieve the end result he was trying to obtain. So if you were my student I would ask you...How can you raise the $48,000 your organization needs for the whole year in the shortest amount of time? I learned this approach from my GodFather Brian Tracy who challenged my friend Mark Victor Hansen, co-Author of "Chicken Soup for the Soul" books to use this method. To date Mark Victor Hansen and Jack Canfield have used Occam's Razor to sell over 100 Million books.

CONNECT THE LEGGOS...CREATE PARTNERSHIPS...
Now take the 10% within your organization and create more motion of energy when you link the 10% up with the teachers, principals, head teachers and the deputees in your community. Now you're partnering the leaders of your organization with the leaders or your local educational community. This link will also leverage more relationships with 10% of the parents who are concerned about their children and are willing to take action to do something. *AM taught us that our need for group association is a powerful driving force. You might be surprised to find out how valuable and powerful group associations can be. Only use these these methods for the good of everyone involved.

DISENCHANTMENT MAY MEAN DIS-CONNECTED...
Juliet often when people are disenchanted this may mean that they are also dis-connected. This could mean they are...dis-connected from one of the 5 P's:

* dis-connected from their Purpose
* dis-connected from their Project
* dis-connected from their Priorities
* dis-connected from their Passion
* dis-connected from their Points of Communication

There is an ancient PROVERB in the Torah that says ---Hope deferred makes the Heart grow sick---. Often when peoples hopes have been put off they slowly began to lose faith for what they were hoping for. But don't you do this. Keep the fire of faith burning for what you believe in. This is one of the major reasons why businesses fail is because people no longer believe in what they are doing.

REDUCE THE WORK LOADS AND SPREAD THE WORK...or CREATE TIERS/LEVELS FOR VOLUNTEERS...
If people are already over committed you can reduce the work loads and spread the work out more evenly among them. The women's Junior League here in America uses an amazing volunteer strategy to harness the diverse levels of time the volunteers can put in. You would be wise to learn from them. They have three categories for the level of committment a volunteer would like to contribute. Your organization might be wise to create tiers or levels of committment from volunteers. That way you have an idea of where they are and if they might want to decrease or increase hours worked. Is there anything else I can do for you?

Your Servant,

Deremiah, *CPE

Juliet

I'm missing something here.

How did you get 50k in the bank when the place is running at such a loss?

Has the place received any government funding?

How has the pricing been set?

How do you compare with the other after-school club?

Are these places run as for-profit or NFP?

Is there really room for two clubs?

Do they fulfil different purposes?

Could you merge the two together and get some economies of scale?

How is the other club doing?

You may have a marketing problem, I'll be the first to admit. But it sounds to me like here is a profound management problem first - and if that is the case, all the marketing success in the world will struggle to cover that up for long.

BTW congratulations on being an excellent two-way participant here. All too often, questioners ask and never return to interact. Your interactivity assures you of getting the most value out of this forum.

Cheers

Chris

Hi Juliet,

Thanks for your wonderful compliment. Hope you're having a great day today. Chris has asked some good questions and you have done an excellent job of answering those.

I CAN GET YOU SOME ADDITIONAL RESOURCES IF YOU'D LIKE...
I've dug up some additional information and welcome the opportunity to provide you with some excellent resources that I've researched out for you. I'll send it to you offline. My last post about spreading the workload and creating tiers led me to contact some of my Junior League friends off line. A few years back the JL hired me to speak to their Junior League of Kane and Dupage county here in Illinois. Their organization was so impressive I took notes on how they ran their organization. Here are a few points I would like to make about them that you might *CP, *Cut & Paste a few ideas from. I firmly believe that we should avoid recreating the wheel when we can *CP most of our concepts and ideas. It helps us to learn quicker and grow faster and in this generation growing faster is important.

BENEFITS OF CREATING TIERS AND TRAINING...
The docs you can get from me (if you would like)will provide you with some basis on how to become an effective but trained NFP volunteer. Most people who volunteer have not received any training or very poor training in most cases. But the Junior League provides their women base of volunteers with great training which gives their women the following:

1.) An introductory knowledge of what they should expect.
2.) An opportunity to identify their skill sets with where they can fit in as a volunteer.
3.) An overall vision for the future if they decide they want a long term relationship with the organization.
4.) They will also get immediate training to support their current level of giving as a volunteer. This will cause new volunteers to have more confidence about the organization. After training they will know where they can go within the organization and how committed they might want to be.

The tiers they break their volunteers up into are the following.

Provisional volunteers: are over 22 years of age who volunteer for 1 year
Actives volunteers: (are more advanced in volunteer time than provisional’s.)
Sustainer volunteers: are at least 40 years of age and older who have volunteered for five years.
Emeritus volunteers: (were former sustainers)

Contact me off line and I’ll send you the attached resources and will even explain the benefit of each for your assistance. This is the least I can do. The docs I have for you will give advertisers profiles, volunteer profiles, Board member profiles, membership profiles and even application guidelines that you can *Cut and Paste ideas from that will cause your organization to gain a stronger internal strategical approach. Wishing you all the best. Is there anything else I can do for you?

Your Servant,

Deremiah *CPE

Dear Juliet

It’s great to hear from you on the forum with a question and quite a challenging one at that. It also rather stands UK Government policy on its head: They are encouraging businesses to lend their expertise to running schools – it would appear that they would be better off getting head teachers (Principals to our American friends!) to lend their expertise to business!

Next, I’m afraid I’ve got some more questions which have little to do with marketing but lots to do with business and financial planning. There isn’t quite enough information in the posting thus far, so I’m going to have to make some deductions and the odd assumption. Please correct the figures to take care of my inevitable mistakes.

The good news is that. Even if my assumptions are wrong, unless they are terribly incorrect, your situation looks to be eminently correctible using a blend of sponsorship, fund raising and getting that 60% occupancy up to something greater.

Here are the conclusions which I have come to based on your figures and some basic assumptions. You can try possibly correcting these, but the basis of my calculations assumes that you will, under the status-quo continue to lose $48,000 a year unless you do something and that if you fill the spaces available these losses will turn into a surplus. My contention is that it is rarely possible to get to a 100% take up of places, but, some mixture of higher occupancy and fund raising or sponsorship will meet your goals. Further good news is that the figures (If I’ve got them even close to being right!) indicate that the gap you are seeking to fill is not too daunting to be impossible.

Here are the figures I was working on. This forum is unfortunately not very good at representing maths or tables, so the layout is a bit difficult to make clear – I’ll email an excel spreadsheet to your home address so that you can look at the figures and correct them to your local reality!

Items Class of 36 Class of 42

Current Average Attendance 22 22
Current Roll 50 50
Maximum Attendance 36 42
(Room dependent)
Current % Occupancy 61% 52%

Spare Capacity 14 20
(Pupils) to fill

Price per session $14 $14
(Work days)
Price per session $32 $32
(Vacation Full)
Price per session $18 $18
(Vacation Half)
Price per session
(Vacation Average) $25 $25

Total Work days 220 220
group runs for
Total Vacation 65 65
days group runs for

Revenue work days $67,760 $67,760
Revenue Holidays $35,750 $35,750
(Average)
Approx Total revenue $103,510 $103,510

Spare capacity revenue $43,120 $61,600
(Work Days)
Spare capacity revenue (Vacs) $22,750 $32,500
Approx Total Additional $65,870 $94,100
Revenues

Grant $27,000 $27,000
Total current assumed $130,510 $130,510
revenue

Total possible revenue $196,380 $224,610
on 100% Occupancy

Current Shortfall on $48,000 $40,000
occupancy of 22
Possible Surplus on $17,870 $54,100
occupancies of 36 and 42

Assumed current running $178,510 $170,510
cost from this model

Simply by adding pupils, the break-even for your current model is 10. averaged out over Vacation and Work days – well that still represents a loss of $900 per annum but you could raise funds to cover that. 11 additional pupils would give you a surplus of about $3000.

The point of all these figures is that your goal is achievable and through a mixture of the excellent advice you have received to date to enact marketing programmes to raise the pupil role numbers and to add to your additional fund raising you should be able to keep this smashing resource going.

One point which does come out – the revenue from pupils, simply because of the number of days they attend, multiplied by the modest fees you charged, multiplied by the number of pupils you have and the additional ones you need, dwarf the fees which are usually able to be raised by fund-raising events. There is a limit to the number of coffee mornings and jumble sales, you can hold, especially in a small community, so if you need to make up, say half of your shortfall by local fundraising, you would be well advised to go for the larger ticket items which can produce the equivalent of a potential pupil’s annual revenue. This involves being very creative and either going for sponsors who would be willing to fork out around £4000 of to hold events which will raise about the same amount through offering perceptible value for money.

We’ve done both in the (sometimes) ridiculously well heeled and well connected South East of England. I can imagine that there are some strong synergies in the “Dallas” of Scotland!

I added to the jumble sale and garden parties of one organisation by getting a patron who was a member of the Royal Academy, and also a world famous architect to draw a litho sketch of the village and to show it along with his own art collection in his rambling mansion. We produced a limited edition of 120 set of prints and sold them. This raised £5000 for an organisation which was used to doing £150 at a jumble sale. I asked David Gilmore, who borrows half the barn where we keep our silly cars to be guest speaker (With his Guitar) at a luncheon to talk about the music business with Pink Floyd. We also asked him to do a specially signed CD of his latest album which we sold along with tickets to visit his recording studio in a house boat on the Thames. The next one on my list is Mike Rutherford from Genesis! The thing is, if these luminaries, and I guess that there must be a few of them around Aberdeen take a shine to your project, or one or your parents knows one (Sheen Easton? Midge Ure? The Kaiser Chiefs?) or knows someone who know one, then you can turn a £5 a ticket fundraiser into a £30 a ticket fundraiser with the venue falling over itself to give you a brilliant deal.

One last point. None of these ideas will work in isolation. You have to sift through all the points raised, work out which ones have a chance and which you and your fellow parents and potential sponsors will relate to and do as many of them as possible, capitalising of the cross fertilisation and press opportunities which diversity will generate.

Good luck and here’s to doing the marketing bits. Do the figures first though!!


Best wishes


Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions