Wren financial report: year five
Over the past year, Wren subscribers have contributed $5.6M to fight climate change. 78% of that went directly to our projects. In the past year alone, Wren users prevented or removed over 200,000 tonnes of CO₂ emissions! That’s like taking 50,000 gasoline-powered cars off the road for a year or switching 40,000 homes to renewable electricity. The other 22% of funds were reinvested to pay our team and grow our reach.
About 60% of our expenses were funded by subscriber contributions, and the remaining 40% came from investor capital reserves. We are lucky to be financed by investors who want us to grow our impact as fast as possible—their support has been instrumental in scaling Wren to help fight climate change. Here’s how our non-project expenses break down:
Team expenses
Aside from funding climate solutions, employee compensation was our biggest cost this year. We currently have eight full-time employees at Wren and have worked with a few outside agencies and contractors in the past year.
Here's how our payroll breaks down:
- Median pay for Wren employees: $119,999
- Average pay for Wren employees: $121,793
- The CEO is currently paid $80,000 per year. CEO pay ratio is 0.5
We think these are appropriate salaries—less than what they might be at a big tech company but still enough to live off based on each team member’s cost of living.
Marketing
We have decreased our spend on marketing over the past year. In general, we hope every dollar we spend on marketing produces at least 5× that amount for projects. As you might imagine, it’s not easy to consistently find marketing opportunities where we can get that sort of return. While we have seen incredible growth from paid advertising over the past few years, we’ve dialed it back over the past 12 months to stay efficient and ensure we don’t stray from our ambitious standards for marketing partnerships.
Other expenses
Our other costs are fairly straightforward “keeping the lights on” overhead expenses such as software and servers, lawyers and accountants who help us with paperwork, and other minor administrative costs.