Q: We have an opportunity to partner with a local Arts council to provide registration and marketing services only to their instructors. Our program would not hire the instructors and offer the courses as our own, but we would publish them in our schedule and take registration for them. Is there any guideline set up that you are aware of that would help us assign an appropriate cost to this activity? I have some thoughts – but just wanted to touch base to see if other programs are doing this and be sure I’m not leaving any factors unaccounted for. Any information would be greatly appreciated.
A: The need here would be for you to recover your costs for promotion of the courses and the time spent on handling registration. You can, of course, calculate the promotion costs by looking at how much you spend on printing and mailing your brochures and assigning the appropriate percentage of the cost to the partner organization. So, for example, if 20% of your brochure was devoted to the arts partner's programs, you could charge 20% of the promotion costs in order to break even. Likewise, you would need to calculate the amount of time your registration staff spend on taking and processing registrations for your partner and assign the appropriate percentage of cost to them. If you intend to also generate a "profit" from your service, you would then add that to the total cost you are assessing the other organization.