Programming Note: I have been asked by quite a few people about coverage of the LMS conferences going on this month. Due to tight schedules (one ending on a Friday, another starting on a Monday; and to be honest also the World Cup and British Open), I plan to release conference reports from D2L Fusion, Building Blackboard Together, and InstructureCon next week, after all three are complete.

Speaking of conferences . . . many nonprofit organizations around higher education run on convening. Associations and technology consortia bring the field together at annual conferences, and for many of them those events are not a side activity—they are among the largest revenue lines keeping the organization running.

Which is what made 2020 and 2021 such a threat. When conferences stopped, a core revenue engine stopped with them. We are now far enough past that to ask a fair question: how did these organizations fare, and how have they recovered?

Answering it is harder than it should be. These groups—associations, consortia, and more broadly policy organizations, think tanks, and foundations—all file public Form 990 returns if located in the US, but the filings are scattered and rarely lined up side by side. So this is a first pass at doing that comparison view. ProPublica makes these forms readily available, and I compiled the most recent filings for this group—generally tax year 2024 or 2025—supplemented with local IRS XML filings where available. The goal is not to reduce any organization to a few numbers, but to establish a common financial baseline and ask basic questions: What revenue comes in? How much goes out? How much cash is held? And how does executive pay track with scale?

Two organizations I have covered recently are worth considering with recent financials provided by ProPublica.

EDUCAUSE is a useful place to start, because its conference is central to its finances—registration and booth-rental income together run higher than what it collects in membership dues. Its revenue fell hard and bottomed in 2022, but it has climbed for three straight years since, with expenses comparatively steady and a 2025 surplus of roughly $2.8 million. It remains below its earlier-2010s peak, but the direction is unmistakably up.

The Online Learning Consortium (OLC) is the harder case. Its revenue did not decline as much as did Educause, even though it is even more conference-dependent—conference and workshop revenue is more than half its total. But that dependence did prove costly, as OLC entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy at the end of 2024, driven not primarily by debt or falling revenue but more by disputed penalties on pre-Covid hotel contracts whose room and catering minimums had become impossible to meet in a post-Covid conference market. Note that the 2024 filing shows a dramatic decrease in expenses, leading to surplus of $266 thousand, but that came after three years of losses in the $475 - $898 thousand range. OLC continues to operate post-bankruptcy, with one change being that the spring conference is now virtual. The fall conference remains in-person with virtual options. This was more of a reckoning.

Let’s look more broadly at nonprofit organizations to place the conference-heavy organizations in context. The expense chart below makes the differences in organizational models more visible.

One caveat before the chart. I grouped these into associations, technology consortia, and think tanks mostly to keep the visuals legible. Those groupings—and, honestly, which organizations appear here at all—reflect my choices as much as any natural structure in the field. So read the categories as scaffolding, not as a finding. What they do usefully show is relative scale and the fact that very different financial models sit side by side; I would not yet defend them as the right taxonomy.

Three patterns stand out. First, Arnold Ventures is in a category of its own: its latest filing shows roughly $194 million in grants, plus about $17 million in general expenses. That is the financial profile of a major grantmaker, not simply an operating policy organization. Second, most associations and technology consortia are primarily people-and-operations businesses: salaries and wages, followed by general expenses, account for most spending, while events, travel, and other operating costs are meaningful but smaller components. Third, the larger policy organizations, including AEI, CAP, and New America, operate at a different scale from many membership associations, with substantial staff-driven budgets but without anything approaching Arnold’s grantmaking volume.

Internet2 is also distinctive among the technology consortia because of its operating scale and large general-expense component. That is a useful reminder that this group is not financially homogeneous: a membership association, a shared-network operator, a policy think tank, and a grantmaking foundation may all influence higher education, but they do so through very different financial models.

It is not surprising that a large component of expenses for nonprofit organizations is based on salaries and compensation. And the question is not just about total salaries but looking at top executive pay compared to organization size (measured in revenue).

The relationship is real but loose. As you'd expect, leaders of larger organizations tend to be paid more, and the cloud drifts up and to the right, but not too tightly. At any given revenue level the spread in top pay is wide, and the biggest budget does not buy the biggest paycheck: Internet2 has the largest revenue in the group by a comfortable margin, yet its top compensation sits well below AEI's, the highest in the set. A few organizations land noticeably above the trend for their size, ACE most visibly, and a few below it. The color adds a second dimension: blue points ran an operating surplus in their latest filing and red an operating deficit, and the deficits are scattered across the size range rather than clustered among the highest or lowest payers.

Another view that might be useful is to consider both revenue and expenses for both Educause and OLC.

The waterfall chart below shows where the money actually comes from and where it goes. On the revenue side, the conference story is right there in the two tallest bars after memberships: registrations ($7.1M) and booth rentals ($4.6M) together bring in more than membership dues ($8.9M)—which is what it means to say the conference is central to the finances. The rest arrives in smaller streams (contributions, investment income, subscriptions, program services), giving Educause a reasonably diversified top line. On the expense side, the shape is typical of a people-and-operations business: salaries and wages ($12.6M) are more than half of total spending, with operations, general expenses, events, and a modest grants line making up the remainder. What's left after everything nets out is the roughly $2.8 million surplus—the bottom line of the recovery described above.

OLC's waterfall tells the same conference story in more concentrated form, and it carries a caution. One revenue bar dominates: conferences and workshops ($3.6M) is more than half the roughly $5.95 million total, with membership dues a distant second. There is far less diversification here than at Educause—when a single line is that large a share, a few bad conference years can be devastating. The expense side reflects the same model, with events and travel ($1.3M) a heavier component relative to size.

There are other association-based conferences, of course, and I don’t intend for this first view to be comprehensive in nature. But it might also be interesting to look at UPCEA. Where Educause spreads its conference income across registrations and booth rentals, UPCEA's single Conference line ($3.2M) is nearly half of its roughly $7.3 million in total revenue on its own—the most conference-concentrated organization of the three, and well ahead of membership dues ($1.7M), its next largest source. The rest of the top line is a long tail of smaller streams (consulting, contributions, webinars, sponsorship, program services). The expense side is the familiar people-and-operations shape—salaries and wages ($3.7M) lead, followed by events and travel ($1.5M), a proportionally heavy line that tracks the event-driven model. It nets to a healthy $767 thousand surplus, which is the fair coda to the recovery question: the most conference-dependent organization in the group came through 2020–21 and is now comfortably in the black.

There are more lessons to be learned from looking at nonprofit financial filings, and I plan to keep adding data, refining the expense categories, and building out these organization-level and over-time views. If there's an organization or a question you think belongs in the comparison, reply to this email and let me know.

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