Paying for the CAE

Samuel Heathcote, Executive Director of the NANA Foundation, joins host Amara Obiledu to talk about the Foundation's CAE exam-fee scholarship program — the 2024 cohort of 18 scholars, how applications work, and what the Foundation does and doesn't fund, since it's a separate 501(c)(3) from NANA itself.

• Samuel Heathcote — Executive Director, NANA Foundation. Runs the Foundation's CAE scholarship program and institutional grants.

• 00:00 Intro

• 01:20 The NANA Foundation, and how it's different from NANA itself

• 06:45 Why the CAE exam fee is a real barrier for some members

• 12:10 The 2024 cohort: 18 scholars

• 17:50 What the application actually asks for

• 23:00 What the Foundation does not fund

• 28:10 Applications open every January

Host: Samuel, a lot of members conflate the Foundation with NANA itself. Start by drawing that line clearly.

Samuel Heathcote: They're related but legally separate. NANA is the 501(c)(6) membership association — dues, advocacy, the Summit. The NANA Foundation is a separate 501(c)(3), which lets us do things NANA itself can't do as cleanly, mainly accept tax-deductible charitable gifts and run scholarship and grant programs on that basis. We're a small operation, four staff, and our two main functions are the CAE scholarship program and institutional grants to member associations for specific projects.

Host: Why does the CAE exam fee need a scholarship program at all? It's not an enormous sum for most professionals.

Samuel Heathcote: It's not enormous relative to, say, a mortgage payment, but for the population we're actually trying to reach — staff at small associations, people early in their careers, professionals at organizations too small to have a training budget line — it's a real barrier. NANA doesn't administer the CAE exam itself; that's the credentialing program's role, running its own spring and winter testing windows. What we do is remove one specific obstacle for members who want to sit for it and can't easily absorb the fee.

Host: Tell me about the first cohort. 18 scholars in 2024.

Samuel Heathcote: Eighteen members, selected from a competitive application pool, each of whom had the exam fee covered plus access to a CAE prep course through Theo's learning program. We tracked the cohort through the testing windows that year, and I'm proud of how many of them sat for the exam on schedule rather than deferring, which is itself a common failure point when someone's paying out of pocket and the fee creates hesitation about committing to a testing date.

Host: What does the application actually ask for?

Samuel Heathcote: We ask for a short statement on why the credential matters for the applicant's specific role, a supervisor or executive director's letter of support confirming the organization values the credential, and basic information about the applicant's current compensation and their organization's size, since we weight the review toward members at smaller associations without an existing training budget. We keep the application itself short on purpose — I don't want the paperwork to become its own barrier on top of the fee we're trying to remove.

Host: What doesn't the Foundation fund, that people sometimes assume it does?

Samuel Heathcote: Travel costs to the Summit or other events, for one — that's a common misconception. We also don't fund general operating support for member associations; the institutional grants we do make are tied to specific projects, usually something like a governance training initiative or a research partnership, not a blank check to an organization's general budget. And to be direct about something that comes up occasionally: the Foundation doesn't have any role in actually administering or grading the CAE exam. That's entirely outside our scope and NANA's.

Host: When do applications open, and what's the timeline after that?

Samuel Heathcote: Every January, and we run a review committee through February and March so scholars know their status well before the May CAE testing window, giving them a real runway to prepare rather than a last-minute scramble. Anyone planning to sit for the December window instead has more flexibility, but I'd still encourage applying in January rather than waiting, since the review timeline is the same either way.

Host: Is the program growing? Will next year's cohort be larger than 18?

Samuel Heathcote: That depends on fundraising more directly than any other part of the Foundation's work, since scholarships are funded by donor gifts, not by NANA's operating budget. I'd like to grow the cohort every year, and I think the case for doing so is strong given how competitive this year's applicant pool already was. Whether we can is a question I answer honestly depending on what comes in through our annual appeal, not something I want to promise ahead of the numbers.

Host: Last question. What's the thing you most want a member who's never applied to understand about this program?

Samuel Heathcote: That it's not charity in the sense some people assume, where accepting it implies you couldn't have gotten there on your own. It's an investment the sector is making in itself, through the Foundation, in exactly the kind of professional the credential is designed to recognize. I'd rather more qualified people apply and some not receive it this cycle than have people talk themselves out of applying at all.

Host: Samuel, thank you for laying out exactly how this works.

Samuel Heathcote: Thank you for having me. If this episode gets even a handful more people to apply in January, it was worth doing.

Host: Before we wrap, one more thing. You mentioned the Foundation weights its review toward members at smaller associations without an existing training budget. Does that ever create a hard call between two similarly compelling applicants?

Samuel Heathcote: Constantly, and it's the part of this job I find hardest, honestly. Eighteen scholarships against a genuinely strong applicant pool means turning down people whose case was entirely legitimate, simply because the pool that year was deeper than our funding. I try to be transparent with applicants who aren't selected about the fact that it reflects the competitiveness of that year's pool rather than any deficiency in their own application, because I don't want a good candidate to read a rejection as a verdict on whether they deserve the credential.

Host: Do you ever reach back out to strong applicants who weren't selected, if a scholarship opens up later in the cycle?

Samuel Heathcote: When it happens, yes, though it's not common. Every so often a selected scholar has a change in circumstances and can't use the award that cycle, and in those cases we do go back to the ranked applicant pool rather than let the funding go unused. I'd rather that scholarship reach a second strong candidate than sit idle because the original recipient's plans changed.

Host: Last thing, genuinely. Do you track outcomes across the cohort once the fee is covered, or is it hard to follow up after that point?

Samuel Heathcote: We do track it, as closely as we reasonably can. We ask scholars to let us know their result after their testing window, partly for our own reporting to donors, and partly because a strong pass rate in the cohort is the clearest evidence we have that the scholarship money is actually landing on candidates who were ready, not just candidates who needed the fee covered. The 2024 cohort's results, once they're all in, will be the first real data point we have on that, and I'm watching for it closely.

Host: Does the Foundation publish that pass-rate data publicly once you have it, or does it stay internal to your reporting?

Samuel Heathcote: We share it with donors directly, and I'd like to start including a version of it in our annual report to members as well, once we have more than one cohort's worth of data to make the trend meaningful. A single year's number can be noisy in either direction. I'd rather wait for a real pattern than publish a headline figure off one cohort and have it mean less than it appears to.

Host: Samuel, thank you again.

Samuel Heathcote: Thank you.