Hello and welcome to your annual report chock-full of numbers and images that represent those numbers! Since 2016 we’ve been providing this information to our beloved A+ members. We did it in 2017 and then I did it in 2018 and then, believe it or not, I did it again — in 2019. Now, it’s 2020, a year that so far has been not especially great, but you know what, at least we’re all this together.
We’d like to politely request that you do not share any of these graphics outside of A+ and instead enjoy them only here on this page right now with us as a family! Okay? Great perfect!
Most Popular Content of 2019
Who Wrote What
Well, it finally happened: Heather officially beat me, after so many years of us being neck-to-neck!! However, both of us wrote more posts in total than we did last year (Iast year I came in at 165 and Heather at 148). There’s also a bigger difference in number of posts written between the perpetual top 2 and the remainder of the list — last year the #3 spot went to Laneia with 124, followed by Carolyn with 102 and Carmen with 81.
Money Money Money
Income & Expenses
2018 was a really bad year for money but 2019 was better! We finally began earning advertising income — last year it was 8% of our total revenue and this year it doubled. The tricky thing about ad income, though, is that there’s no guarantee we’ll ever see another dollar of ad money, and I like to budget for the worst case scenario — for how much money we’ll have to spend if there’s no more ad money. But during our Fundraiser we decided to commit to a more ambitious budget and to figuring out how to raise that money no matter what, because scraping by just wasn’t working anymore.
Last year and the year before that, our goal was to add another full-time staff member and this year we finally did it! We also raised salaries for full-timers, added 401(k)s, and raised rates for our writers and Subject Editors. All in all, this is a 50% increase in our monthly budget, so you can look forward to a lot more fundraising and A+ member drives this year than ever before, especially as we adjust to a bigger budget AND no A-Camp revenue in 2020.
Merchandise
We had a slower year for merchandise before because we were so busy with all our other initiatives, but we still debuted a lot of new fun things, including the very famous Bette for Mayor 2020 merch, which you can still buy, even though she lost, because that’s the spirit of it, is a triumph over adversity.
You People
Thanks for being a part of all this!
