I often get asked the question: “Who uses NGPF?” My answer has changed over the past few years from “a few dozen teachers” to “a few hundred teachers” to “thousands of teachers in classrooms in all fifty states.” We have accomplished this, in spite of:

• No brand name recognition
• Limited marketing budget: We spent very little in our first few years as we focused on building curricular resources and PD training opportunities that teachers would love.
• A crowded field: Over 200 teachers responded to our flash survey in May 2015. They told us that they were using 80 different curricula with many indicating that they had created their own (an entrepreneurial bunch!). Go to a typical conference and you will find NGPF exhibiting with 20-30 other resource providers.
• No strategy to contact state education officials, district administrators or principals. Ok, early on I did have one meeting with a local superintendent who connected me with the asst. superintendent in charge of curriculum. In the course of that meeting, she mentioned that it would be a year-long process and lots more meetings to get a personal finance elective proposal in front of the education board. I thought my time might yield greater returns elsewhere.

Instead, our thesis several years back was the following:

We needed to do two things right to succeed:

1) Listen (and keep on listening) to our customers (teachers) and create curricular resources that are curated, current, comprehensive and customizable. Our would be a unique product offering amid a sea of choice that lacked one or more of these attributes.

2) Deliver PD training opportunities that deliver what teachers tell us they want: a combination of collaboration, content knowledge and curation of resources they can use in their classrooms. FinCamp, virtual PLCs and flash surveys are just a few of our innovations.

We felt if we did these things right, word would spread at the grassroots level and we would grow. So while it might just be one teacher at a time finding and using our resources (often they are the only one in the building teaching the subject), that one teacher would be making the choice to use. 

I mention this since one of the dominant distribution models for personal finance is what I will call, the sponsorship (or “top-down”) model. A bank or other financial institution sponsors a district, a state or a region, and voila, those schools have a FREE curriculum that someone else has decided they should use. We know how much educators love that:)

What could possibly go wrong? Well, we got a reminder of what can go wrong late last year in a story reported in USA Today:

“Earlier this week, Fifth Third said it ended a six-year sponsorship of Ramsey’s financial education programs. In a Wednesday statement to The Enquirer, Ramsey’s company Lampo Group accused Fifth Third Bank of “attempting to steal our customers” and likened the move to “going to a dinner party and stealing the silverware.”

Accusations aside, suddenly the schools with the 150,000 students using Ramsey’s programs would need to come up with the money to pay for it or could use the new program that Fifth Third would be sponsoring, EverFi. What was the basis for Fifth Third making the switch? Did they deem EverFi to be a better program? Did sponsorship of EverFi cost the bank less than what Ramsey was charging? We may not know the answer to those questions, but what we do know is that suddenly the schools are being whipsawed into either 1) paying for existing curriculum that was FREE or 2) using a new program. And frankly that’s the downside to the sponsorship model, where someone else far from the classroom is making decisions about curriculum.

As for NGPF, we will continue to execute our grassroots model to distribute our FREE curriculum. We think that educators are the best judges when it comes to what works in the classroom.

About the Author

Tim Ranzetta

Tim's saving habits started at seven when a neighbor with a broken hip gave him a dog walking job. Her recovery, which took almost a year, resulted in Tim getting to know the bank tellers quite well (and accumulating a savings account balance of over $300!). His recent entrepreneurial adventures have included driving a shredding truck, analyzing executive compensation packages for Fortune 500 companies and helping families make better college financing decisions. After volunteering in 2010 to create and teach a personal finance program at Eastside College Prep in East Palo Alto, Tim saw firsthand the impact of an engaging and activity-based curriculum, which inspired him to start a new non-profit, Next Gen Personal Finance.