Development Goal: Become Financially Sustainable
Why This is a Priority
Our education and training development program is large, well received, and scalable, but it is financially negative. Student registration fees do not cover the cost of our teaching assistants and software, and definitely do not cover the cost of support staff, like operations, project managers, or similar roles to support it. Our existing funders have indicated that they do not plan to fund our organization like this indefinitely and that it needs a sustainable model. If we do not become sustainable, then it is likely we would have to stop offering our programs, and this would not be best for our community.
Justification and Sources
Most data for this comes directly from our financial reporting. These can be seen in our 990 reports on our website or found in Google drive. See more under 
Finance . Further, this supported by feedback from our funders. Our funders have indicated that they do not plan to fund our organization like this indefinitely and that it needs a sustainable model. Finally, this is evidenced from an analysis of other nonprofits. While those with very, very big reach can accrue longer term donations (Khan Academy, for example), even these nonprofits face pressure to reduce dependence on donations and have had to find models to support sustainability (Khan World School, for example).
Finance . Further, this supported by feedback from our funders. Our funders have indicated that they do not plan to fund our organization like this indefinitely and that it needs a sustainable model. Finally, this is evidenced from an analysis of other nonprofits. While those with very, very big reach can accrue longer term donations (Khan Academy, for example), even these nonprofits face pressure to reduce dependence on donations and have had to find models to support sustainability (Khan World School, for example).
For 'social good' activities like our educational programs, one hope is that an extremely wealthy donor will endow the program. A review of endowments suggests that over 80% of endowments come from alumni of the school and most of the remaining endowments come from wealthy founders of programs. It is extremely unlikely than an endowment will be granted to us in this current timeframe of our work. It is not a good strategy to rely on an endowment as a primary means of sustainability. While we will keep trying to secure an endowment, the best move is to plan on sustainability and then appreciate an endowment if it happens.
Stakeholder Impact
To ensure that we continue to exist and keep offering our programs to the students, mentors, teaching assistants and all other stakeholders involved, we should attempt to achieve sustainability. Right now, 45% of our students do not pay fees. If we cannot find a way to improve our sustainability, it is likely we would not be able to offer our programs to a significant portion of this group of students that needs to waive their fees to attend.
What Does Success Look Like?
For most educational programs, tuition is what completely covers not just the instructors, but also provides funds to pay for the building, researchers in it, and other personnel. Our expenses are lower, but our primary staff operations to deliver our established programs such as our education program (academy), professional development events, and facilitate our community should all be covered by overall program earnings or ongoing revenue.
We aren't trying to make a "profit". We are trying to cover our costs. Our costs don't just include the teaching assistants, they include a set of staff (both full time and part time).
Generally, our goal, is to make sure that are always incentivized to take on more students and promote our program to the widest group of students possible. This is only possible if the average revenue impact of adding a new student is zero or greater.
Success:
- Per-student average revenue is greater than zero
- Six month revenue generation covers costs of all employees except those specifically named on fixed contract grants.
How is Success Measured?
Measurement here is easy. We will tally our costs of people (staff, TAs, contractors) and services (Zoom, AWS, subscription services like SendGrid, Stripe Fees, etc) and measure that against total revenue, earnings, and continuous donation commitments. Earned income from our programs and activities should cover all of these costs.
Potential Activities
Work that might address this include many different possible experiments or paths. Please feel free to suggest your own. We see two big areas of potential development, but there could be many other possibilities, and likely the solution will involve successful implementation of several of these.
If you see a new activity that is not on here and would like to pursue it, follow the 
Research and Development process to create a new team and project area.
Research and Development process to create a new team and project area.
Adjust Financial Model of Academy
Adjust Classroom Pod Ratios
Pod ratio (number of students to TAs) has a significant impact on revenue per student as TAs are the primary cost of academy. This is one of the most easy and most effective. We are not sure the impact it would have on learning outcomes.
We have increased pod size by 1 student for 2024.
Adjust Financial Model of Academy
Subscription or University Partnership Model for Academy
Many students cannot afford the course and must waive, or some choose to waive because getting reimbursement from a university is hard. If we could do a partnership or subscription model with universities, it might help reduce waive rates.
NiNick Halper
We have pulled a list of the top 10 universities that send the most students to Neuromatch and are reaching out to department level contacts there. We have consulted with The Carpentries to talk about this sales process and this form of outreach.
We have reached out to program and department heads at these six and cannot get any reply:
.1Columbia (Allison Ong?)
.2New York University
.3UCL (Done)
.4Cairo
.5Zewail City of Science and Technology in Egypt
.6Zhejiang in China
Adjust Financial Model of Academy
Reduce student waive rates by making the process more difficult
Right now students can easily automatically waive their fee without question. While this offers maximum accessibility, this may also be too easy such that people that could pay are just choosing to do this because it is easy. We have put significant effort into this in how we communicate about the fee, alternative payment formats we offer, and similar tactics, but one possibility would simply be making the waiver not automatic.
One good suggestion by an external consultant would be to make this a scholarship rather than a waiver. In this way, students have to put a bit more difficult into it. We could even basically auto-approve all of them, to give the same equity effect, but not have students know this. Students with scholarships may be more likely to complete the course, which is useful because, as it stands, students that waive the course fee are more likely to drop out.
Adjust Financial Model of Academy
Reduce student waive rates by encouraging universities to include student fees on grants.
We could encourage universities to engage students as part of the broader impact points of the grants. See Broader Impact Proposal
Adjust Financial Model of Academy
Adjust TA pay based on Cost of Living
Our student fees are adjusted by cost of living, but the instructor payments are not. If we see ourselves more as a facilitator of matching students with instructors, it would make sense for instructors to get paid more similarly to their local pay rates.
This has the added benefit of improving the resilience of the program. With this, the student population can adjust over time (like we have seen it do) and still remain net positive.
We should also consider that this is necessary to do to follow our board-implemented pay-policy in Hiring and Compensation Policy and we currently violate our own policy with our pay structure.
Adjust Financial Model of Academy
Reduce cost of delivering course by reducing TA hours
Right now, students get 1.25 TAs all day long during the intensive course, but much of the material is designed to be student lead and used in a peer to peer format. Additionally, there are challenges in continuity by having two TAs for the project period. Students often have to re-explain their project to their TA, their project TA, and their mentor, which is a time waste.
New Revenue Earning Programs
Job Matching and Recruiting
We have tons of students, they are looking for jobs after school or this course, it is common for agencies to earn funds based on recruiting or sourcing activities. We could match students to jobs and charge the hiring entity a fee for finding them a person.
New Revenue Earning Programs
Course or Curriculum Design as a Service
We design amazing courses. Could we do it for others for a fee?
New Revenue Earning Programs
Matching as a Service
Our matching algorithm is amazing. Most people are so impressed and amazed by it. It feels like magic to them. It can be used in lots of different contexts: networking, conferences, grant application collaborator matching, etc.
New Revenue Earning Programs
Conferences as a Service
Our online conference software is actually pretty smooth and well built and we had so many attendees at our conferences, so we must have figured out how to make online conferences engaging. Could we sell it to others or offer it as a service for others?
New Revenue Earning Programs
R&D Partnerships
We have amazing group of talented people that are computationally skilled. Could we match them with remote, online R&D opportunities in academic labs or companies and charge a fee for doing so?
Many labs lack the resources and capabilities to work on machine learning, data pipelines, software engineering, and cloud infrastructure, but these are core to enabling computational sciences research. By providing these types of skills to academic and industry labs, we can further the field and provide research and development opportunities globally.
This one worked, but we still need to build the team page.
New Revenue Earning Programs
Grant Finder or Collaborator Finding Service
Many professors are looking for new grants, but finding the right ones is difficult. We could use our matching algorithm to match them to grants or help them match to each other.
We are trying to start building a trial of this one in Q3 and Q4 2024.
- Implementing New Revenue Earning Programs
- Matching as a Service
- We piloted this one! We provided networking services to over 10 different conferences, but many weren't willing to pay more than $1000 to $3000 USD. Unfortunately, based on our expenses, this means we would need around 300 scientific conferences and societies to participate every year to make our org sustainable. Based on our market research, this might meet or exceed the total number of scientific conferences of the appropriate size (200 people or more) for our matching algorithm.
-