One reason to review a college foundation Form 990 is to verify that the foundation actually does what it says it does—a useful thing to know for grantmakers, development audits, benchmarking, and prospective executives.
Here are 16 issues a Form 990 can help address:
- Do the numbers on the Form 990 support the amounts shown elsewhere?
- Personnel expenses paid for by the foundation (Usually the college pays for personnel expenses.)
- Outside fundraisers or fundraising consultants paid by the foundation
- College payments made to the foundation
- Endowment information, including decreases in endowment balances that may reveal the foundation is not properly managing endowments
- Event revenue and expenses paid by foundation, including grosses & nets (This can be tricky and requires reading the entire return.)
- Five-year history of fundraising revenue
- Diversification of revenue (you’ll get a partial picture)
- Two-year trend in grants amounts paid to college
- Program areas of grants to college
- Total foundation expenses
- Revenue less expenses
- Existence of uncommon organizational practices, revenue streams, and operations
- Number and names of board members
- Unrelated business income
- Investment management fees