Charter School Capital Funding Supports Provisional Accelerated Learning Center’s Success
In this School Spotlight, we share how Charter School Capital funding helped Provisional Accelerated Learning Center (PAL) become financially solvent. Read this full case study to learn more about PAL and how they partnered with Charter School Capital to fill funding gaps.
In the mid-1980s, San Bernardino’s traditional public high schools were suffering a dropout rate of 40-50%. The system was failing. The community was in desperate need of help, and The Provisional Accelerated Learning (PAL) Center opened to provide a new path.
Understanding how critical a strong education is to success, The PAL Center began as a not-for-profit tutorial program in 1984 to help those students most at-risk. As the program expanded, it evolved into a charter school that now serves approximately 700 students. The PAL Center welcomes students in grades 9–12 hoping to earn their diploma as well as 19– 21-year-olds seeking job skills training and career placement assistance.
“We’re all about giving young people a second start in life,” says Lawrence T. Hampton, chief financial officer for The PAL Center. “We have specialized in working with students who have been the hardest to serve.” Though designed to focus on those students most in-need, Hampton notes an interesting trend that has occurred in recent years.
“We’re becoming more of a school of choice. When we first started, we strictly took those students that were headed toward dropout,” he explains. But in the late 2000s, “we started seeing more incoming freshmen choosing to come to school here instead of being referred… So it’s been fun to watch that transition.”
The reasons The PAL Center has grown from a school of last resort to the first choice for so many are the non-traditional benefits it offers students.
The school operates from 7:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. four days a week, providing students with the open schedule many of them need to hold jobs or help with their families. In addition, the school is located just outside of the city in a quiet area surrounded by mountains. This picturesque setting helps encourage calm and focus.
Finally, class sizes average around 21 students, helping teachers provide more personal attention than students would receive at other area high schools where class sizes are larger.
Despite the school’s successful track record, Hampton has had to manage challenges threatening The PAL Center’s existence. Deferrals of state payments in California forced the school to tap into its savings, which proved to be insufficient as the deferrals increased. The school also obtained a credit line, but it quickly ran out. School administrators – having made a promise to the students and families of San Bernardino – needed to find a more permanent solution.
The PAL Center’s accountant referred the school to Charter School Capital for funding. Within a few weeks, the two organizations began a long-term relationship that at times has been a lifeline to the school.
“The relationship has allowed us to stay financially solvent, and I can honestly say without that we would’ve been out of the charter school business,” says Hampton. “This school would have folded.”
“They have taken a personal interest in seeing us survive, and that comes through quickly when you’re talking to them. It’s more than just business, and I’m grateful for them.”
Charter School Capital is committed to the success of charter schools and has solely focused on funding charter schools since the company’s inception in 2007. Our depth of experience working with charter school leaders and our knowledge of how to address charter school financial and operational needs have allowed us to provide over $1.6 billion in support of 600 charter schools that educate 800,000 students across the country. For more information on how receivable sales will benefit your charter school, contact us!
CHARTER EDtalk: Email Marketing for Charter Schools
On this CHARTER EDtalk, Stephanie Ristow, Sr. Marketing Programs Manager at Charter School Capital and Janet Johnson, CMO at Charter School Capital sat down with Michael Barbur, SVP, and Chief Creative Officer at Godfrey to get his insights, expertise, and perspective on email marketing for charter schools. Below are the video and transcript from this informative episode.
Janet Johnson (JJ): Hi everyone, welcome to Charter EDtalks today. I’m honored to be speaking with Michael Barber. He has been a digital marketing guru for many – including working with Charter School Capital– for many, many years. Welcome. And, Stephanie Ristow, who is leading up all of our digital Demand Gen efforts at Charter School Capital. So, if you’re seeing this, it’s probably as a result of Stephanie’s work. We’re going to be talking about email marketing today for charter schools. So, Stephanie and Michael Take it away. Stephanie Ristow (SR): To get us started, let’s begin with the obvious question. Does email marketing still work, and why? Michael Barber (MB): It works really, really well. I mean, no matter where you look across the research studies, we continue to see that consumers, regardless of audiences, regardless of industries, this continues to be a channel that they gravitate towards.
Adobe has probably done the most work around this channel in terms of research and consumption habits. And, for the past five or six years, they’ve put into the market a really, really good study on email consumer behavior. And, year over year over year continues to show that email is still the number one revenue generator for organizations and it is still the channel that brands are going to be using to push out content to consumers, or to their constituents, or their audiences. It’s still the place they say they want to receive that message from. Now, on the why. This one’s an interesting question. I think personally, there’s a lot of research out there that’s looking at the why of this, but I think it’s got to do with everything that consumers are being faced with in terms of choices of where they’re participating online.
They’re getting bombarded by Facebook, bombarded by Instagram, Twitter. You look at what’s happening from a geopolitical perspective right now, and the inbox is the one place that everyone understands. It’s been largely the same for the last 25 years, if you will, since Hotmail came out in 1986. So, they don’t have to get accustomed to the Facebook newsfeed changing or wonder how they post a story on Instagram … reply, forward, reply to all, contact lists. They’re largely the same as they’ve been since the beginning of email. So, it’s a place where people are really comfortable. SR: It all totally makes sense. So specifically, when we’re looking at charter schools, how should they be using email marketing? MB: I would say, not for students, anybody under the age of 18, unless they’ve got a very specific reason to have an email, like an Amazon account or they signed up for one of these social networks using email. They probably don’t even have one unless they’ve been required to by their school, which you do see some high schools require students to have email addresses, but it really just depends on the school. So, this is a marketing channel that you’re going to want to use for parents. You’re going to want to use it for potential board members, for community and government involvement with your school. For all of those constituent groups that surround your students. So those are the audiences that likely have an inbox if not multiple email addresses. That’s the place you’re going to want to use email when it comes to charters. Largely for all the audiences that surround the students in the cause you’re trying to bring forward. SR: That makes sense. So, I know for a lot of these charter schools, they want to know which tools – which platforms– they should be using from a thousand-foot level (like if they have the budget) and then at a grassroots level, what realistically makes sense for them. MB:So, a thousand-foot level just really depends on how you want to use email from a tactical perspective—from a marketing perspective. A lot of the turnkey student enrollment platforms, especially as you’re maturing as a school, will have some sort of email marketing component built into their platform. So that can be used for student enrollment activities, or for letting people know what’s happening at the school on a weekly basis. What activities are students participating in, what do parents need to know on any given week, month or year, if you will? Most of them have really robust toolsets built into their platform so that you can utilize them as a sort of 360 solution or an all in one solution.
At a grassroots effort if you’re just starting up and you’ve got no budget, and no time, and no energy… Almost all the really great platforms that are out there offer some sort of either free or sponsored model around their platform. For the sake of example, MailChimp is a great one to use. If you have under 5,000 subscribers, they will allow you to use the platform for free as long as their little logo can be at the bottom of your email footer. There are multiple platforms that are out there (Constant Contact, Vertical Response, MailChimp, Emma) that do the same sort of monetization model that aren’t going to charge a lot for a small subscriber base. Now, as you get more sophisticated, those platforms have got be able to grow with you and as you add more subscribers, you’re probably going to be having to pay for that email service provider. That being said, not a huge expense, even at 10, 20, or 30,000 contacts. If you’re not doing significant activities around the platform, you’re probably getting away with something under the neighborhood of say, $100 per month. But as you get more sophisticated, these platforms get more expensive and there’s certainly more platforms out there that you could do a lot more with as you mature as a school. SR: There are definitely some folks out there that haven’t used an email platform before and might not understand the benefits of it. What’s the benefit of say a MailChimp over a just using thousand-person BCC line? Cause I’ve seen it before. MB: This is a really good question. This comes down to really two things, one—deliverability. When you’re BCC-ing a thousand people, if someone marks your email address – your @charter school’s domain or whatever your domain is – as spam, that reflects against your domain really heavily. And the last thing you want to do is compromise the deliverability of just your normal day to day, professional ‘to’ and ‘from’ emails getting characterized as spam. So, having an email service provider gives you some layer of protection from that deliverability perspective.
The second big piece of this is just all the data that goes around these users and these contacts. Any one of these email service providers, whether it’s Constant Contact, Vertical Response, MailChimp, Emma or the like … or anyone of the hundreds that are out there, allow you to build data profiles around individual email addresses—from what’s her first name and last name—so that you can do some personalization inside of that email campaign. It allows you to segment groups. So, let’s say you’ve got grades one through five. You can segment your parents – or whoever is in those lists – by where their students are at so that you can target those communications really well. Also, it’s a lot easier to manage those communications. If somebody unsubscribes, the provider deals with that unsubscribe for you. You don’t have to manage your list that way. There are a lot of benefits that get you so many better features than just having a thousand people on a BCC list.
[Everyone laughs] SR: We laugh, but I’ve seen it. MB: One of the most important things that schools can do is build their brand, right? What does the school stand for? And how do you bring that to life visually through your logo and your identity and your colors and your fonts? And, certainly designing an email inside of Outlook or Gmail is not great. You know you can only do so much. You want to have an email that looks great, regardless of whether you’ve got a parent that’s on a phone or whether they’re on a Mac, right? Then all of those email service writers will help you create templates that’ll look great, that will work for your brand, that will build that brand identity for you. There are any number of key features – going outside of Outlook or Gmail or wherever you’re doing that thousand-person BCC list – that you’ll get from an email service provider like MailChimp. SR:I totally agree. And one more bonus question for you, because I think we have the time. I know often when we talk to these schools, they’re like, great, I want to do email, but how do I start my list? How do I create the list to send to people? I know that that’s a gorilla of a question, but in a 30-second clip, what do you think you’d say there? MB: The first thing is to make sure you’ve got your data cleaned up. So, you’re not going to want to import what we would call a ‘dirty list’ of old subscribers or parents that aren’t part of the school anymore. The second thing is, is there’s a couple of key campaigns that you want to try and set up if you can and have the bandwidth. Your “Welcome” series – which is the first email that someone receives when they subscribe – is by far the most important email you’re going to work on because you want people to get that right away.
Beyond that make sure the data’s clean and test your campaigns. Always makes sure – before you send out that first campaign – to have a group of subscribers (could be a parent, a teacher, it could be admin individuals or a group of people that you trust) to send out a test so they can see what your emails are going to look like and then you get a little bit warmed up to actually having to hit that send button and send to hundreds – or thousands – of people. SR: I would like to make one more plug. If you want additional resources on how to get those leads in the first place or some of the tools and platforms that Michael talked about. We have those on our site. Just go to our Charter School Capital resources page. MB: Thank you, Stephanie. SR: Thank you, Michael! JJ: Michael, we can’t thank you enough for coming and being here with us today. We really appreciate all that you’ve done for us. For sure. MB: My pleasure. Thank you. JJ: Thank you, Steph. Thanks, Michael. And, thank you for showing up for Charter EDtalk.
Watch our Webinar On-Demand: Digital Marketing for Charter Schools
If you want to up your digital marketing game for your school, you can watch this informative webinar at your own pace and on your own time! Charter school growth requires solid student enrollment and retention programs that position schools for future replication or program growth. Having at least some digital marketing prowess can help you reach and exceed your school’s growth and/or expansion goals.
Sharing Charter School Capital’s Values: Accountability
Sharing our Values
At Charter School Capital (CSC), accountability is key. We hold each other accountable to core company values as the driving force and foundation of what we do. These values are our guiding principles as we work together to more effectively support the growth and development of our charter school partners. And, as a result, Charter School Capital is a proven catalyst for charter school growth. In CSC’s ten years, we very proud to say that we’ve helped finance the education of more than 800,000 students in over 600 charter schools across the United States.
We measure everything we do by these core values:
• Best-in-Class
• Empowerment
• Innovation
• Teamwork
• Accountability
In this blog series, we wanted to spotlight how all of us at CSC work to exemplify these core values. For this, the final post of the series, we’ll dive deeper into what accountability means to us and how we embody and reflect this goal both internally and what that means for our charter school partners. To get some expert insight into how we strive to live up to the value of accountability, I was looking forward to sitting down with Matt Percin, Manager of Financial Analysis and Risk here at Charter School Capital. Matt is part of our finance team who are responsible for two key things:
Building out valuation models
Financial analyses
For each school we’re working with, our team looks at their entire financial situation in order to provide the tailored support they need. If we find any potential issues or gaps in their cash flow where they may need support, we then help those schools figure out exactly where the problems are—and even build out plans for them—to show them how to support their stability and growth.
Matt– selected by CSC leadership as the embodiment of the value of accountability here at CSC – has been with Charter School Capital for five years, starting as a Financial Analyst, then moving up to Sr. Financial Analyst, and most recently he’s been promoted to be the manager for the Finance and Risk team.
Sitting down with Matt I was curious to know:
• How having accountability adds value to our teams
• How accountability helps us directly support our clients
• How our culture of accountability builds trust
• If accountability helps us be more invested in our mission
How does having accountability add value to our organization?
In this series about Charter School Capital’s values, we’ve spoken about empowerment, being best-in-class, teamwork, and innovation. All of those values seemed pretty straight-forward as to how they impact our daily work and add value to our company. I’m not sure why, but accountability seemed a little more nebulous to me. I directly asked Matt that question. Why is accountability one of our values and how does he think it impacts our organization?
“Accountability is important as an internal value here. We’re trying to serve a specific population in the education space. And, a lot of what we do in the financial realm is pretty technical. So we’d definitely have to hold each other accountable for all things—both the good things and even the mistakes.
You have to own your own work because, like with any organization, everything you’re producing always flows to somebody else. So always being able to take accountability for whatever you’re producing is very important… it’s actually vital to hold yourself accountable or even hold somebody else accountable—even though sometimes it’s difficult.
That’s how people actually learn. And there’s always some type of coaching or learning moment that comes out of a mistake. There are always things here that pop up – and it might be one little thing that nobody would notice. But if you can figure it out and then share it with the people around you (that have a similar role) everybody benefits.“
It’s all about our clients
If it seems like a broken record, apologies, but the fact remains—we care about the success of our school partners. In other words, we take accountability for their sustainability, growth, and longevity. I asked Matt his thoughts on how we best serve our clients and support their mission.
“We’re always going above and beyond, but I think accountability is also about being creative and figuring out new strategies to help clients. There’s a lot of schools that have very unique situations. We understand the intricacies of the charter school movement and over time, have gained a lot of experience. We continually strive to get better at being able to adapt quickly for new problems.
Sometimes clients come to us asking for something we’ve never done before and so we may not even know what that solution is when first approached. But all of a sudden, we get a team of people that just start researching and trying to figure out how to solve the problem. Figuring out how to accelerate the most capital possible for clients while they’re growing adds a lot of value because they can keep ramping up and serving more kids in the community and building out their mission.”
Accountability=Trust
Our clients trust us to go the extra mile. At CSC all arrows point to the fact that we take the time and care to build relationships with our school partners. Every team member on each account feels responsible for the school’s success and ownership for their part of the equation. By having this team of dedicated professionals who connect with school leaders in this way, trust is a natural – and happy – consequence. I asked Matt about what trust means both internally and externally with our clients and how that ties into being accountable.
“I think there’s a lot of trust in our organization. And it stems from the top down. Everything needs to start with the leadership for everyone below the leadership to feel empowered to do whatever their job or their role is. Because if the leadership trusts all the people they’ve hired and mentor, it flows to everybody else.”
But of course, accountability is about more than trust within the organization, right? I asked Matt how trust plays a role in his client relationships.
“There are some clients I’ve been working with for years now and there’s definitely a very strong connection and mutual trust that has been built. We’ll be asked things that normally we wouldn’t have been asked because the relationship is so strong. They may come to us and say, ‘Here’s something we’ve been working on, can you add your insight and expertise to it?’ That relationship adds up to you being accountable to them and feeling that connection.”
Accountable Accounting
Because everyone here is so mission driven, we are truly motivated by how many students we serve. And we know that by helping our schools be successful, we are helping them serve even more students. Matt’s team of comprehensive and caring finance professionals seems to always go above and beyond with our clients to do everything in their power to ensure that they succeed and grow. I asked Matt if he had any specific examples of how our culture of accountability directly impacted our school partners as it related to his work.
“There are several examples where we have found unique ways of looking at things and have helped clients tremendously beyond where they normally think we would help them. There was actually an error made at one state’s Department of Education with the amount of money that was sent to one of our school partners. We did some math and looked at our value models and said to them that we think you’re actually owed a substantial amount of additional funding from the state. After sending over our calculations, the issue was escalated it to the county (or whoever ended up looking at our math) and then the state realized ‘you guys are right, we didn’t do that correctly’. And then they sent the school a wire for the amount they deserved.”
Now that’s some accountable accounting. (Apologies, I couldn’t resist.)
Motivated by the Mission
At CSC, our ultimate goal is to help the charter school movement grow and flourish, and as mentioned (repeatedly), serve more students. Because we take pride in the social impact that we’re supporting by helping charter schools succeed, I asked Matt how that mission helps direct and motivate his work – and how that ties back to being accountable to the success of our clients.
“I think the charter school movement is a powerful movement. I’m on the financial side of the role and am looking at numbers a lot. But, over the past couple of years, I’ve had the opportunity to meet, interact, and engage with the clients I’ve worked with in person. Remembering the powerful things that schools are doing and actually seeing the kids inside the school reminds you that what you’re doing in [the office] is actually benefiting somebody and it makes it all tangible.
Some of the clients that I work with rely on us for extra assistance and guidance. Sometimes, just being face to face makes that interaction much more successful, especially if you have to overcome a difficult obstacle together. It helps our clients realize that we actually are their partner. That is a pretty unique thing, that type of relationship. ”
Conclusion
So did that nebulous concept of accountability become more clear to me after speaking with Matt? Absolutely. Here’s what I now know:
Being accountable, or having accountability means;
• we’re responsible for our client’s success,
• we own our work,
• accept and learn from our mistakes, and
• earn the trust of our co-workers as well as our school partners.
And, it means that when we see a need – beyond what’s right in front of us – we go the extra mile to help us achieve our mission and even more important, help our school partners achieve theirs.
Charter School Capital is committed to the success of charter schools and has solely focused on funding charter schools since the company’s inception in 2007. Our depth of experience working with charter school leaders and our knowledge of how to address charter school financial and operational needs have allowed us to provide over $1.6 billion in support of 600 charter schools that educate 800,000 students across the country. For more information on how we can help support your charter school, contact us!
In the mid-1980s, San Bernardino’s traditional public high schools were suffering a dropout rate of 40-50%. The system was failing. The community was in desperate need of help, and The Provisional Accelerated Learning (PAL) Center opened to provide a new path.
