studienaktie.org: facilitating education through mentoring, coaching and investing

An increasing number of investors and members make more and more educational projects become reality:
By September 2011, 72 aspirants (people with educational projects) received funding from 140 educational investors providing loans with a total amount of about CHF 550,000.
But loans are not the only benefit for our aspirants: About 400 candidates received coaching, financial consulting and gained certainty with respect to the feasibility and financing possibilities of their educational projects.

Aspirants:
Our aspirants usually don’t fit the criteria to get scholarships by official state agencies and private foundations. Therefore we facilitate education especially in such cases where it seems impossible – regardless of criteria like origin, financial situation, gender, and age of the individual.

Young persons from disadvantaged socio-economic milieus:
With our school workshops we reach people who usually don’t have access to higher education due to their socio-economic situation. Our “ambassadors of perspectives” inspire them to seize higher education as a valid option to take their life into their own hands.

We have developed one of the very first and, so far, few ways to make social, sustainable and profit-yielding investments in education. With studienaktie.org, education becomes investible. With studienaktie.org, education visibly receives value. Both represent and drive a shift in European culture in which education still is perceived as expenditure – and not as investment.

People and their educational projects come in all forms and sizes. We at studienaktie.org embrace and support such diversity by opening our platform to everyone. It is our belief that for every single educational project, somewhere, thanks to our processes based on personal relationships, there is someone willing to invest in it. – And if there is not, we simply have not found that educational investor yet and need to further broaden our investor base. Not applying any criteria for exclusion makes studienaktie.org the single program to truly support the education of persons of any talent.

Since 2006, studienaktie.org was able to yearly double in terms of members, applications and contracted loans – 2011 being the strongest year, giving us the confidence that we will continue growing at this pace over the next years. Extrapolating from today’s situation, area-wide spreading throughout Switzerland would result in an estimated potential of 500 new aspirants per year.
Furthermore there are numerous opportunities to replicate our financing model for educational projects in other countries.

studienaktie.org is a fast growing social enterprise with proven social impact on the way to financial sustainability.
Building on a strong member base and a high degree of voluntary engagement, the business model of studienaktie.org is designed around three pillars of revenue streams:

1. Income from membership, transaction and management fees; events and services for individual members (1/3 of budget)
2. Income from own co-investments with aspirants and from cooperations with cantons and grant providing foundations (1/3 of budget)
3. Income from company-cooparations in the field of talent development and recruiting (1/3 of budget)

Income stream 1 is working and grows with the operations. Income streams 2 and 3 are in a development stage with first pilot projects. studienaktie.org plans to implement all three revenue streams in 2012 and reach break-even in 2014. studienaktie.org is in a strong growth phase at the moment. This growth is to a large part financed by grants from large Swiss foundations. Operational incomes are developing as planned but still represent only a small part of total revenues. The proportion of operational incomes will grow year by year and should reach 100% in 2014. All donations will be invested in the further development of operational processes and will directly contribute to the enhancement and scaling of Studienaktie’s social impact.