After seven months of COVID-19, how healthy is GGWash, financially?

The coronavirus and associated economic recession have wreaked havoc on our communities’ health, our emotional well-being, many people’s household finances, and also many nonprofits. Greater Greater Washington isn’t about to have to close its doors, but in keeping with our practice of financial transparency, we wanted to give you an update of where things are — and how you can help.

While Greater Greater Washington is best known for our publication, as an organization, we work in several different areas to advance our vision of an inclusive, diverse Washington region where everyone can choose to live in walkable communities. We track finances for each program area independently to the extent possible.

For the publication program area, expenses include our editorial staff, any freelance articles, and running our server, while the revenues include our membership program, the GGWash Neighborhood, as well as advertising, event revenue, and sponsorships (which are all way down in this era). We also track our coalition and advocacy work on transportation and housing as separate program areas; our revenues for that work come from foundations and coalition members, and our spending supports staff. You can read more about our full budget here.

A major goal for GGWash is to help the publication itself reach self-sufficiency. In some years our policy work has helped fund the publication, which is fine, but we’d like to build a sustainable business of bringing you information and helping people be more civically engaged. To get there, we need to build up our membership program, the GGWash Neighborhood.

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How close to self-sufficiency are we?

Last year, we reached 83% self-sufficient, and were working toward a goal of 100% this year. The first few months of the year went quite well, but in March, obviously, a lot changed, as it did for everyone, and like for most of us, not for the better.

Revenue we were expecting from events and advertising, in particular, have dropped. Also, our funder supporting Maryland and Virginia correspondents dropped out, as did our primary funder for our Urbanist Journalism Fellowship (Thanks to support from some of you, we were able to continue having a few Baltimore and Richmond articles for the rest of 2020). In addition to funding payments to people to write articles that you all have found valuable, these programs covered a share of the editing and site administration cost associated with those articles, which means we have to make up that funding somehow.

At this point, we’re at about 60% of our budgeted revenue for this year for the publication, with one quarter to go. On the other hand, we have lower expenses than budgeted because while we had two editorial staff members (Julie Strupp and George Jordan) for most of last year and planned to still have two this year after Julie departed, George has been doing the herculean task of running the blog on his own. This reduced our costs, but is not sustainable.

We’ve now brought on Libby Solomon as our new Writer/Editor. In terms of other cost saving measures, we’ve vacated our home of several years at 1440 G St NW, decided not to rehire when Jane Green moved on in late spring, and (on the policy side) we also eliminated an open position we hadn’t yet hired for at the time the coronavirus hit.

On net, we’re on track to be 87% self-sufficient for 2020, which isn’t ideal, but workable. Other grants in our policy programs have also supported part of our publication activities, but many of those grants have ended this year and aren’t continuing, because of the economic situation. Therefore, we can’t expect this next year, and need to continue growing the publication’s revenue streams to ensure self-sufficiency.

	Expenses	Revenue	% self-sufficient
2019 (actual)	$283,498	$235,778	83%
2020 (forecast)	$307,440	$267,730	87%
2021 (forecast)	$284,214	$212,710	75%

As this table shows, even if our sponsors all renew next year (which isn’t guaranteed), we’re nevertheless on course at the moment to be just 75% self-sufficient. If the GGWash we know and love is going to continue, we need to significantly increase dedicated funding for the publication, and you can help!

So far, 371 monthly recurring members of our Neighborhood support us with $3,497 each month. Can you be part of getting this to $5,000 a month? Thank you!