Our people-powered news needs more people
Hey There,
Eric Falquero here, one of The 51st co-founders and resident numbers guy. I ran partnerships for the WAMU/DCist local newsroom and was one of the 17 workers abruptly fired in February. Before that, I helped lead the Street Sense newsroom for a decade. Building The 51st has been radically different from anywhere else I’ve worked, partially because we’re committed to transparency around how we use our resources and what our finances look like.
In that spirit, I want to share with you where we’re at financially and how we’re hoping to sustain this work and eventually grow. This is kinda a long one, so buckle up!
We’ve come a long way thanks to a lot of local people, but we need to reach 2,000 paying members by December 31 (only 535 more!) to be funded through the middle of next year.
Our team began crowdfunding for this effort in July and saw a truly moving response from the community, raising more than $276,000 – well past our $250,000 goal. We said then that if we reached our goal, we’d add a team member (Christina joined us this fall!), hire freelancers from the community (10 of them so far!), and have enough money to operate through the end of the year (it’s upon us!).
Thanks to those initial backers and our 1,400+ paying members, we have enough money to continue operating at our current capacity through the end of March! But we need YOUR help to extend that timeline. It would take about 24 new members joining each day for the rest of the month to reach our goal.
Why 2,000 members? That level of recurring support will cover everything through the middle of 2025 at our current capacity. This will give us time to finish conversations we’ve started with some foundations and major donors, all while continuing to grow our membership as more people discover us.
“Current capacity” means continuing to publish weekly, keeping all of our founders working part-time and juggling other things to do so, and roughly the same number of freelance contributor opportunities we’ve commissioned for the past couple of newsletters.
If we far exceed this year’s goal of 2,000 paying members, we’ll do more – sooner. Here’s an explicit, rounded look at the membership milestones that would allow us to scale responsibly:
- 2,000 members 🎯 Guarantees our current capacity through the middle of 2025. (We’re just trying to get here by the end of 2024!)
- 5,000 members 🤩 Increases the number of newsletters and stories we publish each month and guarantee our current capacity through all of 2025
- 7,000 members 🎉 Supercharges our community engagement by contracting two part-time “community connector” outreach workers – a program we're already beginning to pilot. (More on that in your inbox soon!) This will also guarantee we host at least two community-driven events annually.
- 9,000 members 🚀 More than double our output by making all remaining directors employees, doubling our freelance budget, and hiring at least one additional reporter.
This is not an exhaustive list, and priorities could be reordered as we progress. But these are all near-term goals, which we’ll only pursue when we know we can do so sustainably. Can you help us get there?
And for anyone who prefers to think in dollars instead of members: Right now we're trying to raise at least $50,000 to get us to the middle of 2025, and hoping for $100,000. Next year it will take a $750,000 annual budget to substantially increase the amount of stories we deliver to you and to solidify our initial community engagement dreams.
The rest of this article is going to get into more detail of how we’re operating and what our finances look like, because we value transparency and want to stay accountable to you. We expect to hold ourselves to the same standards of accountability that our work demands from local leaders.
Many hands truly make light work. The average gift to our crowdfunding campaign – excluding one giant $50K outlier – was $64. And the average monthly contribution among our members is just over $12. We LOVE to see it. Reliable information and trustworthy community news shouldn’t be dependent on billionaires.
Right now The 51st is almost 100% member-funded. We’re so proud, and grateful, to be able to say that. We literally couldn’t do this without you. And we are constantly considering how to be the best stewards of that money.
In 2024, we’ve stayed under budget for every category of spending. And boy has there been spending. Did you know we need three separate types of insurance to operate a nonprofit media company committed to regular community engagement IRL? Or that we’ll have to pay thousands for an audit after our first tax filing? Neither did we!
While we want our primary source of revenue to be the local readers we are accountable to – we also see it as our duty to build on this solid foundation you have given us by adding pieces to that revenue pie. Any funding we receive from other sources will lower the number of members we need to accomplish our goals.
Growing our audience is the biggest challenge: starting from zero, we’ve already grown to 6,800 newsletter subscribers. (For context, DCist’s list was around 70,000 when it was shut down 🥲.)
If the rate of subscribers who become paying members holds at around 20%, it will take 45,000 total subscribers to achieve the 9,000 members needed to make The 51st a “full-time” endeavor. That’s 6.5 times our current readership! But you can help.
Whether you’re already a paying member (thank you, thank you, thank you!), or you can’t afford to give – we need everyone who wants more local news coverage in D.C. to spread the word – tell your friends, fam, and work bestie. Tell your ANC rep. Tell everyone in your favorite niche community!
I’ve been working in local nonprofit news serving the District for 15 years. It’s how I grew to understand and love this place we call home. At the end of the day, I hope The 51st empowers individuals, fosters solidarity, and reflects all the beautiful contributions so many people make to our city.
With a ton of gratitude and appreciation,
Eric
