[Natfinwellness] Co-branded financial wellness centers

[Bill Vanderburgh]

Hi Nate,

I'd be interested to see any off-list responses you receive.  This is a
topic that came up when I was starting the Office for Student Money
Management at Wichita State University.

Several considerations made us shy away from pursuing corporate
sponsorships. As I think about it now, they fell into two sorts of
categories, namely avoiding influences contrary to the mission we wanted to
pursue, and realities of fundraising in a university setting.

Under the heading of avoiding undue influence, the first and most decisive
consideration we found against pursuing corporate sponsorships for a
financial literacy office was that we didn't want to implicitly or
explicitly endorse any particular financial institution (the likeliest kind
of corporation to support a fin lit center) over any others.  (This was
soon after the financial crisis, too, when financial institutions were
looking more-than-usually morally problematic.)  Second, we didn't want to
have to modify (or worry about modifying) our activities to satisfy the
demands of any corporation. After all, much good personal financial advice
would have people avoid things the banks, etc., want them to do--e.g.,
borrowing more than they need using expensive loan products. (We may have
been especially sensitive to this issue because the Koch brothers are major
funders of Wichita State and the founder of Rent-A-Center paid to name the
entrepreneurship building there.)

The third issue we ran into, now talking about things under the heading of
the realities of university fundraising, is that the university controls
naming rights (for everything from paving stones and park benches to
offices, colleges and buildings) and the donation level for naming an
office was pretty high--higher than we had realistic hopes of securing, we
thought.  The amount will likely vary by institution, but just about any
university will insist on being involved in (i.e., controlling) the naming
process.  A fourth issue, related to the third, is that your fundraising
arm doesn't want you pursuing funding without their involvement--in
particular they want to avoid situations where you ask for $10k while they
are in the process of asking the same entity for $10M.  Fifth and finally,
we learned that very few funders are interested in donating to support
ordinary operating expenses, which was most of what we needed.  (Funders
typically want to buy a thing or build a building.)

I'd be curious to hear other arguments for and against seeking corporate
funding for fin lit centers!

Bill Vanderburgh


On Wed, Aug 3, 2016 at 4:37 PM, Nate Peterson <pete2787 at umn.edu> wrote:

> Hey all!
>
> Is anyone aware of any financial wellness centers/programs that are
> co-branded with a corporation outside of the college or university that
> houses the program? Feel free to email me directly at pete2787 at umn.edu.
>
> Nate
>
>
> --
> Nate Peterson
> Interim Associate Director|One Stop Student Services | onestop.umn.edu
> 222 Pleasant Street SE, 225D Bruininks Hall
> University of Minnesota | umn.edu
> *pete2787 at umn.edu <pete2787 at umn.edu>*  | 612-625-0160
>
>
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