"This summer, I worked for Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, a nonprofit that advises on and manages more than $400 million in annual giving by individuals, families, corporations, and foundations. I worked closely with both the COO and CFO on building a financial model that calculates profits and loss at the individual client level, rather than at the firm level. The revenues that each client brings to RPA are somewhat straightforward, but expenses tend to be aggregated into large buckets, such as salaries, marketing, and infrastructure costs. Not all clients require the same level of engagement from RPA, so the model that I built breaks these large buckets down into constituent components and allocates them proportionally based on each client’s resource requirements. Once client revenues and costs can be granularly determined, RPA’s senior management can clearly see which clients are most and least profitable to the firm. While there are important reasons that nonprofits may continue to work with unprofitable clients, having these insights can be helpful for both external decisions (e.g., determining the fee structure for each client) and internal decisions (e.g., how to staff each client project).

Much of what I learned during my time at Columbia Business School contributed to my ability to complete the model. For example, the financial modeling work that was done in Corporate Finance, Business Analytics, and the Analytics Advantage courses was helpful for determining how to create a spreadsheet that incorporates various inputs to arrive at a particular conclusion. I also drew on what I’ve learned about business strategies in classes like Strategy Formulation and Driving Strategic Impact to determine which data points would be most useful to ultimately arrive at a fair allocation methodology. Once I understood which data points would be most relevant, a significant part of the project was interviewing key stakeholders across all of RPA’s departments to get a sense for how they would allocate their resource expenses across projects. The soft skills I learned in classes like LEAD, Power and Influence, and Managerial Negotiations were helpful for determining the best way to communicate with each department so that they understood the purpose of the project and could share the information that I needed

Coming from a background in finance, the biggest challenge I faced was cultural. The world of finance may have a reputation for being cold and insensitive, but the focus on efficiency also leads to clearly defined structures and standardizations of policies and procedures. The goals of a nonprofit are different — ultimately, everybody at RPA is in their role because they want to help people. I have a lot of respect and admiration for the colleagues that I worked with at RPA, but I did notice that they tended to have fewer formal structures in place, and they also tended to be more forgiving of lapses in adherence to strict protocol. From my perspective, this is completely understandable because people seemed to really focus on what was truly important — serving clients. That said, these lapses tended to make it difficult for me to gather precisely accurate data and to synthesize information from different departments and different systems. Part of my project also involved offering recommendations for more standardized data input and aggregation procedures, though I made sure to stress that the reason for having stricter policies is ultimately to help senior management make more informed decisions that will help them to serve their clients and drive greater impact

Overall, I really enjoyed my time with RPA and am very grateful for the experience. To be honest, I came to Columbia Business School without a specific idea of what I wanted to do. I just knew that I came from a traditional finance background that didn’t feel aligned with my personal values and ambition to make the world a better place for the most vulnerable groups in society. Working at a nonprofit for the first time was eye-opening for me. It was the first time that I was surrounded by colleagues who were not only talented but also empathetic, kind, and deeply mission-driven. There are people who work in finance who share these qualities, but I often felt like conversations about personal values and social missions were taboo at my old firm. At the very least, it was significantly more common for people to talk about how to make more money for themselves than how to make the world a better place. At RPA, we were encouraged to talk about what is important to us and to really see each other as full people, complete with both professional skillsets and personal values. I’m still not completely certain of where I will work when I graduate, but I know that wherever I end up, I want to be able to bring my full self to work — values, passions, personality, and all."