A look at GGWash’s 2023 budget forecast – and how you can help

Budgets, despite their power to make eyes glaze over, tell an important story: Where are we now? What do we care about? Where do we want to go?

I’m going to share that story here – both where we’ve been in 2022 and looking ahead to what’s next.

GGWash had a good year. Over the course of 2022, we not only covered our costs but, with your help, we were able to tuck a bit of funding away for a rainy day. In doing so, we largely restored the savings we’d needed to tap into when we ran a deficit during the darkest days of the pandemic. This is wonderful news for our long-term stability. We also expanded staff benefits, grew our policy team, and created new paid internships and writing opportunities. We increased our programming and events across the region, and had a blast meeting hundreds of you in-person and reaching 2.5 million online (if you haven’t already, you’ll definitely want to read more about all that amazing work).

Now, we’re excited to look ahead.

Last week, the GGWash board of directors approved our budget for 2023. I’m pleased to share that we’re forecasting a balanced budget: and we’re able to make that forecast because of your generosity (thank you!). Below, I walk through those revenue projections in more detail.

Our hope for 2023, however, is not only that we’ll maintain a balanced budget, but that we’ll raise more revenue than forecast. Because this pro-growth organization is ready to, you guessed it, grow. And that, too, is where you come in.

How GGWash is funded

Next year, we expect to bring in just shy of $1 million, from a variety of different sources. GGWash is fortunate to have a fairly diverse funding base for an organization of our size, including grants, earned income, and individual gifts. These are our projected revenue sources:

2023 Projected Revenue

• $589,000: Foundation Grants
• $153,794: Coalition Management
• $160,449: Individual Support
• $75,000: Corporate Sponsorship
• $10,000: Advertising

Total Projected Revenue: $988,243

Like many nonprofits, we depend heavily on grant revenue. The bulk of our grant funding supports our policy work across DC, Maryland, and Virginia. We also have grants supporting some exciting research projects at the intersection of transportation, racial justice, and public health – and enabling us to provide some upcoming trainings and assistance for newly elected Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners. Thankfully, about 80% of our grant funding is already committed and based on our fundraising successes this past year, I’m confident we’ll be able to raise the remainder in the coming months.

Other revenues we anticipate in 2023 include the fee we receive for managing DC Sustainable Transportation, a coalition of BIDs and advocacy groups ($153,794); corporate sponsors, almost entirely in support of our fundraising events ($75,000); and advertising ($10,000).

Our editorial and engagement work depend heavily on individual contributions. When you donate to GGWash, you are playing a direct role in making sure we can keep publishing meaningful content on land use, housing, and transportation. Out of the $160,449 we’re budgeting in individual gifts next year, about $72,000 (45%) have already been pledged in the form of our recurring gifts. Let’s be clear about just how important that pledge is: knowing that 603 people have scheduled automatic monthly and annual contributions is what makes it possible for us to plan for the future, full stop.

We need to raise an additional $88,449 from individual donors in order to ensure our editorial and engagement work is fully funded. If you haven’t already, please join us as a recurring donor or make a one-time year-end gift to help us reach that goal.

How GGWash spends its funding

Once that revenue comes in the door, what do we do with it? Well, in the most straightforward terms: we use it to support people, programs, and keep the lights on.

76% ($754,007) of our funding supports our personnel, mainly covering salaries, benefits, and payroll taxes. Next year, we’re counting on a team of up to eight permanent staff and several paid interns. The remaining 24% ($228,176) of our funding covers non-personnel expenses, including program activities like events and training, operations costs like rent and accounting, and fundraising costs. In other words: the GGWash team is at the heart of everything we do, and our budget reflects that.

But how does that translate into the actual work? In 2023, this is how we expect to spend our budget, based on work area:

Projected Expenses in 2023 by Areas of Work:

• Policy: $436,265
• Administration: $225,294
• Editorial: $123,245
• Engagement: $114,078
• Fundraising: $89,361

TOTAL: $988,243

As the numbers above reflect, our policy team is our largest team, with four full-time staff, which reflects the dedicated grant funding that supports its work. Our policy work next year includes a range of activities, including advising local and state elected and agency officials on policy reforms, managing DC Sustainable Transportation and the DC Transportation Equity Network, and leading the research efforts and ANC trainings mentioned above. We’ll also take on political and lobbying work, recognizing that the sort of change we seek to see is only possible within a supportive political context.

Editorial and engagement each have one full-time staff person, rounded out with the help of a wonderful group of contractors and part-time interns; we have big dreams about growing these work areas. Next year, we’ll continue to publish meaningful, sometimes spicy, and regularly pun-laden opinion, policy, and news & analysis pieces, and keep cultivating paid writing opportunities for an increasingly diverse cohort of writers. We’ll continue and expand Intersections, our free webinar series that connects you to both the fundamentals and new research into housing, transportation, and land use. And, fear not, in-person meet-ups will continue on an at least monthly basis across the region.

Administration and fundraising is about keeping the lights on, but also numerous other essential needs. This includes financial management and bookkeeping, communications, office rent, computers and software, insurance, human resources, phones, and legal help. It also includes time spent on planning, professional development, board meetings, and bringing in funding to enable our growth. Although some charity rating websites like to suggest there’s an ideal ratio of admin-to-program expenses in the “optimized” nonprofit, that isn’t reality. Administration and fundraising typically decrease as a share of budget as organizations grow larger, which is what I expect to happen for GGWash as well. But these expenses are real, and often hard to build into grants – yet another way in which unrestricted gifts from individuals are the key ingredient that helps nonprofits like us to keep on running.

Dreaming big, looking ahead

What I’ve detailed above for 2023 is, in some ways, the bare minimum of what we’re hoping to do. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a lot of amazing, important work, and it’ll keep us busy!

But as an organization, there’s so much more we’d like to do, and we know we’ll need to grow to make it happen. In the coming years, we’d like to expand our policy team, especially to include more capacity to work on housing and transportation in Maryland and Virginia. We’ll need additional full-time support to expand our engagement and educational programming across the region. We’d love to have a multi-person in-house editorial team. And we’re missing some key overarching roles, like communications, operations, and development staff that nourish growing nonprofits.

It’s going to take time to get there. But with your help, I know – as GGWash gets ready to enter its 15th year – this story will only keep getting better. Thank you, thank you, thank you for joining us in the vision of a Washington region where housing is abundant and affordable, it’s easy and safe to get around without a car, and land use decisions center racial, economic, and environmental justice.