Financial Health

As an organization supported completely by contributed income, New Dramatists is keenly aware of our responsibility to manage our finances with consistency and vigilance, ensuring that the resources entrusted to us are devoted solely to our mission of service to playwrights. We budget carefully and thoughtfully approach all expenses, seeking to operate with a balanced budget year-in and year-out. We also own our facility outright and have no debts of any nature, which enables us to steer our financial resources more directly to our mission.

Our supporters are critical to our mission. We make significant efforts to maintain these important relationships while identifying and connecting to new institutional partners. We are also supported by a dedicated pool of individual donors, a committed and generous Board of Directors, and a small, but robust slate of fundraising events. In the last few years, we have also amplified our efforts to grow individual gifts through targeted cultivation and engagement events, social media interaction, and expanded audience tracking and analytics via our company-wide customer relationship management software.

Alongside these efforts, our careful planning and management of our nimble and responsive resources ensures that our 50+ playwrights are consistently and equally supported in their artistic endeavors. As a result, New Dramatists generally operates with a balanced budget each year directing any surplus resources, or large one-time gifts or bequests to our reserves for operating needs in a year when revenue projections may not meet goals, or to fund capital repairs, ensuring that the next generations of playwrights can count on New Dramatists to support them.

Our most significant challenge this year took place in the funding landscape—New Dramatists lost a major source of support when the Time Warner Foundation announced in 2017 that there were no funding opportunities available in the near future, due to the uncertainty surrounding their planned merger with AT&T. In FY19, ND’s challenge was to replenish this sudden loss of $115,000 in support. In response, our Board elected to launch a Bridge Campaign with a goal of raising an additional $40,000 in support from among their ranks and from other major donors. We’re pleased to share that we raised just over $55,000 in this campaign. We were also prepared to “roll forward” a $50,000 portion of the prior year’s surplus, to help cover our operating expenses for the year. However, we found that this was unnecessary due to a positive fund balance at the close of FY19.

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