Everyone involved in your school benefits when it’s bringing in good money.
High revenue allows your school to give students, parents, teachers, and staff all the support and materials they need to thrive.
Fortunately, if you’re looking to boost your school’s revenue, there are numerous techniques you can try, from expanding your school’s services to renting out your school grounds to local businesses during the off-hours.
Let’s go over five of the most effective methods for increasing your school’s revenue.
- Minimize Your Expenses
- Maximize Student Enrollment
- Expand Your Offerings
- Rent Out Your School Grounds
- Apply for School Grants
- Conclusion
Minimize Your Expenses
Schools should do their best to minimize expenses through efficiency gains and strategic investments in technology, not by cutting corners and reducing teacher salaries.
Below are some of the best ways to reduce school costs without sacrificing quality:
| Reduce school waste | Figure out which items you keep buying, that almost always end up in the trash, then reduce your purchase size or stop buying them altogether. |
| Go paperless | Using software instead of paper helps you stay organized, reduce printing and paper costs, and save precious time. |
| Improve inventory management | Optimize inventory procurement and tracking with inventory management software, as this will help you avoid buying furniture, cafeteria food, supplies, and other items in excess. |
| Cut utility costs | Turn off the lights when you leave a room, drop the heat after the classes end, and consider switching to LED light bulbs and solar panels. All of this can result in serious savings over the long term, especially as energy prices rise. |
Because all of the above are big projects, you can focus on one at a time. Pick the one that, if done successfully, will result in the biggest reduction in expenses.
For schools drowning in paperwork, that might mean going paperless, and for schools with absurdly high utility bills, focusing on reducing or changing energy usage might take priority.
In California’s schools, a significant sum of money, 28%, goes to school site management:
Source: EdSource
Many schools in that area might benefit from taking a look at their inventory and utility management processes to find ways to save money.
In sum, all schools handle their money differently.
It’s crucial that you run an analysis of your school’s spending to identify where the waste is happening, and where serious changes need to be made.
Maximize Student Enrollment
Getting more students to attend your school has the highest potential upside for school revenue of all the strategies in this article, since just one additional student means thousands of dollars of extra income per year.
In fact, if you’re charging about the national k-12 private school average for annual tuition, attracting one new student to your school means an extra $12,350 per year, according to Education Data’s report.
Source: Education Data
That said, there are numerous methods you can use to increase enrollment, from adopting new digital marketing techniques to engaging in more community networking.
Below are some of the most effective strategies for increasing enrollment:
| Invest in digital marketing | Market your school and its value to your target audience via social media, blogging, YouTube, and other methods. Share stories of successful students, post curriculums, and speak about the benefits of attending your school over others. |
| Get active in your community | Form relationships with parents as well as other professionals in your area who work with children—after-school program directors, religious leaders, and community center administrators. They can tell parents and children about your school. |
| Ask families to review your school | When parents are researching a new school, they rely a lot on online reviews from other parents, so it’s important to get some positive reviews of your school on review sites like Google, and on your school’s website. |
You could also do a competitive analysis of schools similar to yours and figure out what they’re doing exceptionally well so that you can borrow their strategies.
For example, you might find that a lot of schools are using Facebook to market their schools to parents.
It’s worth trying that technique out for your school to see if it’s as effective a method as the high usage rate implies.
The most critical component of improving student enrollment is convincing people of your school’s value.
Find ways to clarify your school’s value proposition, make it more exciting to your target audience, and spread it across various marketing channels.
Expand Your Offerings
To generate more revenue, schools should expand their offerings to include summer classes, online courses, tutoring, and more.
For example, a school might offer a math lab program that meets Mondays after-school and offers children struggling with the subject some extra assistance.
Some schools even offer on-site cafes where parents can hang out and buy coffee and treats after dropping their kids off or while waiting to pick them up.
For most school directors, offering school-related services like online courses or after-school programs is going to be the easiest transition.
Plus, they offer tremendous benefits to your students and their in-school performance:
Source: MAP
Running after-school programs is a simple initiative to take on if you already have teachers who are interested in working more hours of the day, as they can staff these programs.
When you expand your school’s offerings, there’s going to be a lot more to track and manage, from applications to attendance and outstanding invoices.
It’s helpful to get an enrollment management system like Regpack that helps you manage everything, from online registrations to payment processing.
Here are just some of the software’s powerful features:
Source: Regpack
With the software, you can do things like set up automatic billing or online registration, which reduces your workload and makes it easier for parents to make payments and sign up.
And when you make registration and payment convenient for the parents, they’re going to be more likely to follow through with their idea of sending their children to your program.
If you want to increase your school’s revenue, expanding your offerings is a great strategy, provided that you have the technical infrastructure to manage the various aspects of these new programs.
Rent Out Your School Grounds
School administrators should consider renting out their school grounds and spaces when they’re not in use to generate some extra revenue.
This is a great way to earn income because the costs are low for your school. Very few, if any, staff members are required to manage it. And some open space is all you need.
For example, you could rent your classrooms after hours to an SAT tutoring service that needs space to host their group tutoring sessions.
Or, you could rent out your football field and gymnasium to various local businesses when they need space to hold large outdoor or indoor events.
For instance, a local engineering firm might need space to host a gala for their clients, and your school’s gymnasium could be the perfect size for it.
Or, an organization might want to use it for a fundraiser event:
Source: The Creativity Exchange
When renting out your school’s space, be sure to use an effective contract that puts the liability on the rentee should anything in your school break or become damaged during their event.
Renting out your space for events isn’t the only way to turn empty space into passive income for your school.
Consider giving local businesses a chance to advertise on your school grounds.
For instance, businesses could pay to run ads on your football field’s scoreboard or on the side of your school, facing a busy street.
Overall, renting out your school grounds for events on the weekends, breaks, and weekdays after school is a phenomenal way to boost your school’s revenue.
Apply for School Grants
Depending on a number of different factors, schools might be eligible to apply for and receive grants for different purposes.
Non-profits, charity foundations, government bodies, and even some companies with corporate responsibility requirements give grant money to organizations or causes that they feel provide some necessary public good.
For example, the Department of Education, a government body, has a budget meant for funding school initiatives that align with its goals.
On their website, they post grants to apply for, as well as the criteria your school needs to meet in order to apply.
Here’s one of their grants for educational organizations that are supporting deaf-blind children:
Source: US Department of Education
Applicants will have to write a grant proposal, explain how they plan to spend the money, state their quantitative and qualitative objectives, and follow any other steps required by the grantor.
In the above case, the winner of the grant will win a sum of money in funding that they must use to create better special needs services for deaf-blind students.
The available grant opportunities will depend on your area. For example, California’s Department of Education offers a grant opportunity for charter schools looking to expand their on-site meal options to include breakfast:
Source: CDE
Grants are a great way to get funding for specific projects and initiatives, but navigating the grant application process can be tricky.
Therefore, it’s often a good idea to hire a grant writer or consultant to handle it for you. An expert will increase your chances of finding the right grants and winning them.
For more on grant writing in general, check out Inc’s article on how to write a winning grant proposal.
Conclusion
Increasing your school’s revenue allows you to hire the best teachers, create amazing facilities, and improve the experience for your students.
Some of the most effective ways to boost revenue include increasing student enrollment, diversifying your offerings, renting out your school’s grounds and facilities, and applying for grants from government bodies and charitable foundations focused on education.
We hope you find these strategies useful and that they’ll soon help make your school a money-making machine.