Plant growing in donations stock photo from lovelyday12/Shutterstock.

Thanks to support from individuals, foundations, corporations, and more this year, we’ve been able to double our staff, expand our media operations, and strengthen our financial position. Thank you to everyone who helped make this possible!

Our organization has, basically, two halves. One half manages our media and community engagement, and the other half works directly on policy. The media and community team produces the content you read every day, and engages our community off-line through social and panel events and more.

This year, we added George Jordan to our editorial team. George edits the site part-time, which enables our Managing Editor to do important things like take vacations, and spends the rest of his time as a correspondent covering transportation equity and the transformation of Tysons. Our other two new paid writing beats, covering transportation in Virginia and Maryland, are staffed by two great freelance correspondents, Wyatt Gordon and Alex Holt.

Our most recent staff addition is Kate Jentoft-Herr, who is overseeing our volunteer engagement and helping with some organizational administration. She’ll also be helping Jane Green, who manages our Neighborhood membership program, sponsored events, advertising, and more. Jane’s having a second baby this January (super exciting!) and Kate will be filling in for her for a few months.

The other part of the organization is our policy team, which is primarily focused on convening stakeholders, thinking about policy, and advocating for a better Washington region. Over the last 12 months, we’ve brought on Caitlin Rogger, who is managing our transportation policy work; Ron Thompson, who focuses on transportation equity; and Alex Baca, who is handling our housing policy.

This year is also bittersweet because we are also saying good-bye to our Managing Editor, Julie Strupp. We look forward to hiring a new managing editor who can fill this role, and put their own mark on our publication.

GGWash continues to be the region’s leading source of solutions-oriented, community-driven news about the built environment. We are proud to have increased our regional coverage by adding paid writers coving Baltimore and Richmond. We continue to bring a lense of equity and sustainability to every article. We’re particularly proud of the growth that we’ve seen in 2019, including an 11% increase in pageviews and a 30% increase in unique visitors.

What it takes to create the content you love, and how we pay for it

Above all, staff time remains the blog’s biggest expense, with about 80% of the publication’s budget going to compensate our editors, fellows, and correspondents. Additionally we have the costs of hosting our server, maintaining our website, managing our ad placements, tracking neighborhood membership, paying rent and other administrative necessities, and the occasional direct costs of hosting an event.

Jane in particular has been working over the last year and a half to build up revenues dedicated to the publication. Currently, our main sources of funding are through the Neighborhood, sponsored events and advertising. Along with the correspondent underwriting (much of which goes to fund the correspondents themselves,), our 2020 budget has us 83% self-sufficient with these sources. (Of course, we want it to be 100%!)

This ratio of revenue to expenses is projected to stay about the same from our 2019 actuals to our 2020 budget, as we expanded our revenue but also added expenses by having George and our correspondents for a full year rather than just a part, as in 2019.

Thanks to the generosity of readers like you, we’ve received $56,300 in annual contributions since the GGWash Neighborhood program started in October 2018 and we are now receiving $3,000 per month from our sustaining Neighbors. So far this year, we’ve seen a 30% increase in reader donations and we are immensely grateful for your support!

In addition to individual support, revenue from advertising and event sponsorship has also been critical to our media operations. This year we’ve received $33,785 through our site advertising program and $32,550 from our events program. The site advertising has exceeded our expectations, while event revenue is below our budget goal. Next year we hope to grow our advertising capacity, while we will be recalibrating our corporate sponsorship program to better meet our organizational goals. A complete list of our 2019 advertisers and corporate sponsors can be found at the bottom of this article.

To reach 100% self-sufficiency for our publication, we still need to grow our revenue from readers, advertisers, and sponsors by $61,000. Will you help us get a head start by making an end-of-year gift to GGWash? Every annual or monthly gift helps support the content you love. If your organization would like to explore advertising and sponsorship opportunities, please reach out to Jane Green.

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Thank you to all of our 2019 sponsors and advertisers:

Advertisers

Foundation and corporate supporters

$50,000+

$10,000-$49,999

$2,500-$9,999

$1,000-$2,499

See this page for more about how we do, and don’t, work with businesses.

Continue the conversation about urbanism in the Washington region and support GGWash’s news and advocacy when you join the GGWash Neighborhood!

Tagged: about ggwash

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.