1000 x 25
another post about numbers
The two biggest challenges of having an acupuncture school are 1) making sure that we offer solid, accurate preparation for acupuncture practice, which almost always means working in or starting up an acupuncture small business, and 2) keeping tuition down while fulfilling all of our institutional obligations, particularly the bureaucratic ones. I think we might have figured out where those challenges overlap and how to address them together — to solve one of our problems with another, so to speak. If so, that represents big progress for POCA Tech! Let’s talk about numbers (because I always want to talk about numbers).
Back in the day, when a lot of acupuncturists were trying out the community model for the first time, we identified the number 1000 as an important threshold. When a new clinic had 1000 patient charts, it had a good chance of continuing to grow and stabilize. (At the time, those were paper charts not electronic health records, so they took up physical space and you could see them.) Clinics that couldn’t get to 1000 patient charts had a hard time building up the necessary word-of-mouth in their communities and also a lower chance of survival. Of those 1000 charts, some of them would be patients who tried acupuncture once and never came back, while others would be committed regulars who came in every week without fail. And there were always a handful of super-fans who not only came regularly but referred everyone they knew.
We learned, though, that your mindset around those 1000 charts was important: it wasn’t good to obsess about how many one-and-dones you had versus how many committed regulars. It was best if you just focused on trying to get to 1000 and trusting that if you did, within that total there would be enough people who got good results and wanted to spread the word. It was a numbers game! Picture a new clinic owner gazing hopefully and lovingly on their pile of charts the way a gardener gazes at a seedling.
Most of us didn’t learn about growing a patient base in school, but we all wished we had. These days we talk to POCA Tech students about it all the time. We particularly like this diagram as a visual representation of the basic unit of community acupuncture, which is the acupunk at the center of a little electron cloud of patients:
Nonetheless, it can be hard for students to feel what a big enough electron cloud — let’s say 1000 patients — would feel like. I was thinking recently, what else can we do to help make that concept of enough people tangible?
And then I thought about our little school’s shoestring budget.
Over the years we’ve learned that it’s a good idea to fundraise specifically around our bureaucratic expenses. It seems reasonable for students to pay tuition to cover, say, the rent on the classroom where they learn. But how about the costs that an acupuncture school has to pay just to be a school at all, the costs that don’t scale down for us because our school is so tiny? I think a lot of people understand why we’d rather not pass those costs on to students. Here’s a sample from this year with the numbers rounded up:
Yearly cost of state licensing fee plus annual dues to remain accredited by ACAHM: $11,000
Yearly costs of specialty accounting for accreditation (we can’t just do our taxes like a normal business, they have to be audited or reviewed): $8000
Accreditation costs related to a special site visit because we moved our classroom: $3500
Which brings us to a total of $22,500 in specific bureaucratic costs just to be an acupuncture school in 2024.
We’re also a little concerned about the heating bill this winter on our beautiful new space with its high ceilings so we decided our target for our year-end fundraiser is $25,000.
But instead of a traditional fundraiser, we’re going to do an all-school assignment. A big group project! (Can you hear the groans? POCA Tech does a lot of group projects.) The assignment is for each individual student at POCA Tech to ask 30 people to each donate $25 to POCA Tech by December 31st. Students will write a paper describing what they learned from the experience. Administrative staff are going to participate too.
At this moment we have 30-some students enrolled, so the idea is that all of us working together will assemble a list of 1,000 people — an approximation of the patient base a new clinic needs — who each donate $25, the cost of a treatment at WCA at the low end of the sliding scale.
It’s like building a scale model of a patient base, all of us together, so it’s less daunting for any one person.
Here’s the thing: nobody likes asking for money. Most people don’t like asking for help in any form. One of the experiences that prepared me most for starting a small business was a summer in college that I spent canvassing, going door to door soliciting donations for a peace advocacy nonprofit. I was, in theory, earning money for school and I was paid on commission, which was terrifying. But canvassing definitely got me over my fear of asking people for things, and turned into a skill that I could practice routinely — which really came in handy when WCA was getting off the ground.
When I brought up this assignment with students, one of them commented that she’d much rather give $25 to 30 people who asked her for it than to ask herself. I think that’s a really common place for acupuncture students to start from! We’re all attracted to helping people because we like to give — but we can’t just give. Having a small business means getting used to dealing with money, including asking for and receiving it, in ways that lots of acupuncture students aren’t expecting. The more they can cross this threshold in school — as opposed to being surprised by it after they graduate — the better. I told the students that if it would help, they should feel free to blame us when they’re asking people for donations. “My school’s administration made me ask you” is a fine thing to say — because it’s the asking itself that matters.
Some of you will remember POCA Tech’s successful fundraising campaign in late 2022 to early 2023, when we managed to raise over $37,000 to cover the expenses related to our re-accreditation. We didn’t do anything fancy; we didn’t put on any galas or silent auctions or anything that would require more work from our small staff — we just asked for donations. That effort was led by a student, Tiffany of Cohort 8. This is how she described her experience:
When I started the POCA Tech program, I was terrified of being a business owner, I couldn’t imagine it. The main thing that changed that for me was leading the fundraising campaign. I thought, what if just for this one thing I stopped doubting myself and didn’t leave any room for questioning my ability to make this happen? I went all in. And I learned that if I change my mindset I can do anything. I opened my heart to myself and what I’m capable of. POCA Tech increased my risk tolerance, but also I learned to do more give and take — to be human and level with other people about needing their support. Now I feel like I could open my own business even though it would be scary.
Ever since working with Tiffany on that campaign, I’ve been hoping to find a way to replicate that kind of learning curve with more students. I hope this assignment of “we all ask 1000 people for $25” is it.
So this is me asking you -- if you’re getting anything out of this newsletter, or you’re encouraged in any way by POCA Tech’s efforts to re-imagine acupuncture education, will you donate $25?
Here’s the link to donate and the QR code:
Please help me get to my goal of 30 donors! :)
The link will give you a choice between making a one time donation or a recurring donation. We’re specifically asking for one time donations of $25, but if you want to make a recurring donation, we’d be delighted — and we’ll send you a tote bag and also every month, a thank-you note by email with updates about the school. We’re especially grateful for our monthly Sustainers — they’ve kept us going for years and they allow us to keep our tuition lower than any other school.
Each donation is an encouragement to our students that there’s support out there for them to take the risks of investing themselves into the world of small business. And if $25 doesn’t work, we appreciate donations of any amount! It all adds up! Every single donation helps us to collectively imagine 1,000 supporters.
Also, every donation helps us demonstrate to our accreditors that we can stay afloat on our shoestring budget. They’re always skeptical because so far, we’re the only ones trying to keep tuition this low (and there’s no way around it, we have to care what they think). We’re the only school that leans on our community this way.
Starting next week and through the end of the year, I’ll be providing updates on how we’re doing with progress towards our 1000 donations/$25,000 goal. We’re doing this assignment together in public so if we fail, we’ll be failing together in public. That’s one of the real, unavoidable risks of small business. But also I want to be clear: the conventional business model for acupuncture education is failing and nobody seems to be doing anything to address it (apart from symbolic gestures). If POCA Tech doesn’t figure out a different way, it’s possible that nobody will. So as hard as it is to ask for support from 1,000 people, the alternative is a lot worse! If we want affordable acupuncture and affordable acupuncture education, we have to make it happen — but we can’t make it happen without you.