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.

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. In FY18, thanks to an extraordinary, unexpected gift from the Howard Gilman Foundation (which bolstered our cash reserves and expanded the Opportunity Fund to our writers’ collaborators for child-care reimbursement), new funding from the Hearst Foundations and the Staff Grantmaking Fund of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and continued, significant support from stalwart donors like the Shubert Foundation, and many others, FY18 concluded with the organization’s largest surplus in our history—and surplus funds were directed to our reserves.

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.

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