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Today is Greater Greater Washington’s 6th birthday! Do you want to see Greater Greater Washington continue to grow and thrive for many more years? If so, please help us find a new Associate Editor, and help us pay him or her by becoming a supporter!

Yes, we are kicking off our first-ever reader drive. If you find Greater Greater Washington a valuable resource and/or enjoy the community we have created here, please help it become sustainable by contributing whatever you can afford or think is a fair value for what Greater Greater Washington means to you.

Our articles come from many volunteer contributors (46 over the last 3 months), who write about their areas of knowledge and interest and about their communities. That lets us post Breakfast Links and 3-5 good articles every day, but it is only possible with the labor of an editor helping contributors refine and perfect their work.

Last spring, Dan Reed came on board part time to fill this role, and he did a terrific job. Fortunately for Dan, but unfortunately for us, he has now gotten a full-time planning job, which means we need to find the next Dan Reed.

In addition, we need to pay the next Dan Reed. We were able to pay Dan with some of my own money and some funding from the Coalition for Smarter Growth, but these won’t be enough for the long term. We therefore need the blog community’s help to afford a great editor.

Become a supporter

You can help keep independent, thoughtful, policy-oriented reporting and analysis healthy by supporting us.

In the future, we’d like to also start organizing special events, maybe with an interesting speaker, for our supporters. To organize those we need staff, so stay tuned for more as we develop this program. Meanwhile, we hope you agree that just having Greater Greater Washington become sustainable is worthy enough in itself.

Please give us a 6th birthday present and support us! If you have more questions, we have some answers below.

Why don’t you just put ads on the site?

In the future, we might also start putting up some ads or exploring other ways to monetize the blog. However, we really, really don’t want to go down the route many sites have taken of cluttering everything up with annoying ads. We also don’t want to be making article decisions based on what’ll generate the most clicks rather than what is actually important.

The more you can contribute, the less pressure there will be to pursue ads. Not only does that mean a cleaner site, but it also means less time worrying about ads and more time getting better posts!

What if we raise more than we need for the Associate Editor?

No money will go into my pocket. If we raise more than we need for the part-time Associate Editor, the first thing we can do is have the Associate Editor work more hours or even be full time. We also would love to have someone who works on reaching out to communities and about issues that we don’t cover as well today.

I’ll post about some of those ideas in the near future, but meanwhile, you can be sure there’s a very long list of things we can do if we could afford to.

Why can’t I make a tax-deductible donation instead?

Two reasons. First, to be able to accept tax-deductible donations, the IRS has to certify you as an official 501(c)(3)-type nonprofit with a charitable, religious, educational, or other eligible purpose. That takes, among other things, a bunch of time and money to establish and gain all of the approvals. It’s actually quite expensive and time-consuming. And we don’t have enough staff time (yet) to do it without taking away from editing and publishing articles for all of you.

Also, we make endorsements, as media organizations traditionally do, but 501(c)(3) tax-deductible nonprofits absolutely cannot do this. When I’ve talked to readers and contributors, a lot of you have said you value this element of our coverage and don’t want to sacrifice it.

We could set up an affiliated (c)(3) that can use tax-deductible donations for certain eligible activities. We might do this in the future, but that would probably happen if we could launch, and get funding for, a substantial new initiative that the (c)(3) could take on.

You didn’t answer my question!

If you have any other questions, contact us at info@ggwash.org and we’ll do our best to get back to you quickly. We’ll post some of the questions and answers that are relevant to a wider audience in an upcoming post.

More than enough information? Support us now!

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.