Scholarship Fund Management Questions
I am trying to gauge what other community foundations are doing to manage their scholarship funds.
- What is your minimum amount to start a fund? Ours is $50k currently but we want to make sure that the awards from the endowment (usually 4%) are large enough to be worth it to students, so we are looking to raise this minimum. Is that too much?
- What are your management fees you charge the donor? Ours are currently 1.5%. Do you do a sliding scale?
- Do you have a "general" fund managed by your CF? How does that work and how is it funded? We are looking to start one, which would include sweeping up some little-awarded scholarships into it.
Comments
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Our scholarships are $25,000 minimum endowment fund. We have many smaller pass thru scholarships. We are also flexible if people are fundraising to get to the $25k minimum but don't have it up front
For funds in the investment pool, the fee for scholarships is 1.50% of market value less than $500,000, with a minimum annual fee of $250. There is also about another .5% paid to investment managers. Fees are assessed to the fund monthly. Funds not in the investment pool only have an administrative fee of $250/year.
We do have a general scholarship established by the Board with broad criteria. If we get a donation for scholarships or someone wants to do a one-year scholarship, we put it in that fund. We have also discussed putting smaller scholarships into this fund. Right now we don't charge a fee for one-year scholarships that use this fund, but we allow more specific criteria and a special award letter. If we do more of this or include multiple funds, we'll have to think about fees.
We will be revisiting all our fees in the near future.
Clearly we have been too flexible! We are at a point in our growth where we need to streamline. We're beyond administrative capacity.
Hope this helps!
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