Prémisses d'un nouveau modèle de consommation responsable

ANNEXE VII : INTERVIEW DE JANE VON TRAPP, DIRECTRICE DE LA COMMUNICATION ET DU
DEVELOPPEMENT ET ELIZA HULEATT, CHARGEE DU DEVELOPPEMENT DE L’ECOLE
FRANCO-AMERICAINE DE NEW YORK (EN ANGLAIS) - 4 JUIN 2010
Since when did you realize that the financial crisis would be an issue to deal with in the
communication strategy of FASNY?
Fig. 59 - Photo de
Jane Von Trapp
Jane Von Trapp : We were aware as it pretends to FASNY that we will
possibly run into a dropping enrollment at the School probably at the end of
the summer of 2008. It was becoming very clear that what was happening in
the US, with the banks, with the world, was going to hit us eventually. And
because half of the School are expats that it would probably impact us in a
big way but we didn’t know how badly. So, we started to talk about the
largest fundraiser of the year that we have, which is the Gala, should we
even have a gala, an annual diner. What happens in a situation like this is
should we adopt the same thing that we will normally do every year or should we change our
strategy because of it. And because the way people feeling were about it, we had some events
early in the School year where people just didn’t come. And people made us feel that it was
inappropriate in some ways to be holding these events because of the bad times and so many
people were feeling. In the Board also people lost their job, people were very shaky and
thought that they might be loosing their job or at least that they are going to change
drastically. Everybody was uncertain and I think the uncertainty was even more impactful
than when thing became real and when the reality hit we knew exactly what’s going on. The
other thing that was very uncertain was how long it was going to last and would we be going
on for years, trying to recover as nation or as a School, would it be something that will
Passover within the year’s time and uncertainty was huge. So we pretty much decided to go
ahead and do thing as we were going to do them when it came to events but when it came to
the way we do appeals or thing like that we change our message and our communication
message became more centered on “We feel your pain and so we want to commiserate with
you but when you’re setting your priorities” and that basically what we learn from our
colleagues and other schools and from the newspaper that philanthropy was going
drastically impacted but what was happing, people were reprioritizing who they are going to
gave money to because in the US everybody has this feeling of philanthropy as their causes if
they can afford to give they have their causes to who they are going to and our message
became “Thank you so much for making FASNY your priority and we recognize that you
need to make choices”. And the way it impact to the School was huge. The Board had
budgeted for far more children to be in the School than they were in the long term for that
year. And because the Board does this budget in the fall before for the following school year,
so if you’re doing that almost 6 months before how can you predict what’s going to happen 6
months ahead of time. So when we budgeted for 830 kids, which is basically flat from the
year before and we handed up with 770, somewhere in that neighborhood, we had a huge
financial deficit and what we normally put in our reserve to cover surprises like that, ¾ of it
was spent in order to open up the doors this year and be able to provide the same labels of
program and service. It also impacted faculty salaries in that the School traditionally giving
somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 or 4 % of raise every year and the raise went down to
2.5 % so the School still want to let people know that they were valued and they did a great
job and deserved some bonus money but in fact they can not give them the money at the same
rate that they did in the past. We didn’t change our identity, we really change our message.
We did heard back from people; people were very skeptical especially the Board member:
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