We’re 78% of the way to our annual reader goal, and other budget info

We’re in the middle of our fall member drive for the GGWash Neighborhood. (Have you joined?) I wanted to take a moment to explain where we are with our budget so far.

This year, Greater Greater Washington expects to have total expenses of about $598,000. This breaks down into a number of sources as shown above. Earned Income is our advertising on the site and events, both tickets and sponsorships. Coalitions includes our work on DC Sustainable Transportation.

Meanwhile, the expenses break down over a number of program areas:

Here, General Rev[enue] is our general fundraising, like from our board, general gifts, and so forth. Meanwhile, Media Rev[enue] is our category that is, essentially, the business side of the publication — the Neighborhood membership program, ads, events, etc.

The Blog category includes editing and also paying the paid writers we have added recently, such as our Urbanist Journalism Fellows and our correspondents. Community includes our digital campaigns, while the blue slice that doesn’t have a label is Politics, our work on election coverage and endorsements.

Transportation and Housing are our policy program areas, mainly funded by foundations and coalitions, where we work to convene and advocate around policies.

I’ve been looking at the budget in terms of these categories, because we want to help the program areas be as close to self-sufficient as possible, raising revenue that direclty relates to their costs. For the blog side, that means we want Media Revenue and Blog to have funding sources that cover their costs. We’re not there yet, but we’re getting closer.

Here is a chart by month of how much we’ve brought in on various revenue lines which tie into blog operations: membership, giving by our board (which we actually categorize as General Revenue, but I showed here for comparison), advertising, events, and the correspondents (funded by foundations and corporate support).

These show aggregate year-to-date totals, so they always will be increasing. The membership support rose quickly during our spring member drive and then has been on a steady slope thanks to our monthly donors’ regular contributions.

That looks pretty good. How does it compare to our budget?

Here, the green boxes show how much we’ve gotten up to the end of August (September month end close data will be available a little later in October). Peach boxes show what’s left to reach the budget.

With membership, we’re 78% of the way there. If we can reach our goal of 50 new memberships, and an 80% renewal rate for expiring members, we’ll be on course to meet this goal. We actually have to do better and make up for a bigger shortfall in events, where we overestimated how many sponsored events we could do. Next year, we’ll budget much lower for that, but will need to increase membership or other sources to make up for it.

Overall, we’re 71% of the way to meeting the budget, plus September just completed (which won’t majorly change any of these) and three months to go. That’s not bad, but we need your help to join the Neighborhood to get there.

And, the costs around the three programs that go with these revenue sources — Blog, Media Rev, and General Rev — come out to an expense of about $285,000. Next year, that’s likely to increase since our correspondents were just here for part of the year (but our correspondent revenue will increase as well). We’ll be needing about $338,000 for those program areas in 2020.

So, please join the Neighborhood at whatever level you can, especially as a monthly donor if you are able. That helps us build a solid, ongoing base to continue to pay our editors, our fellows and correspondents, keep the server running, and more.

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