Wren financial report: year four

Over the past year, Wren subscribers have contributed $4.2M to fight climate change.

80% of that went directly to our projects. In the past year, Wren users prevented or removed over 200,000 tons of CO₂ emissions! That’s like taking 45,000 cars off the road for a year or switching 39,000 homes to renewable electricity.

The other 20% of funds were reinvested to pay our team and grow our reach. We are lucky to be financed by investors who want us to grow our impact as fast as possible, and this year we tapped into the reserve of capital they’ve provided to accelerate our growth.

Below you’ll see how our non-project expenses break down. About 25% of these expenses were funded by subscriber contributions, and the remaining 75% from investor capital.

Compensation + team expenses

Aside from funding climate solutions, compensating our employees for the work they do at Wren was our biggest cost this year. We currently have nine employees on payroll, and have worked with several outside agencies and contractors in the past year.

Here's how our payroll breaks down:

• Median pay for Wren employees: $116,912
• Average pay for Wren employees: $125,228
• The CEO is paid $80,000 per year. CEO pay ratio is 0.68

We think these are appropriate salaries—less than what they might be at a big tech company but still plenty to live off based on each team member’s cost of living.

Marketing

This past year, we’ve once again invested heavily in marketing. We spent just over $1.5M on marketing initiatives ranging from YouTube and podcast sponsorships, to Facebook ads, to creating illustrations and graphics. Although this may seem like a lot, it actually results in more sustainable growth for our membership base and allows us to accelerate our impact.

Thanks to this marketing spend, we have nearly doubled our impact over the past year and aim to keep accelerating. We are very disciplined when it comes to our marketing spend, and make sure to only invest where we think we will see results. We thoroughly assess each marketing opportunity to determine whether it could result in $5 of attributable project funding for every $1 spent, and if it could achieve this within a 12 month period. Attributable project funding means that a person subscribed to Wren because of that particular piece of marketing.

In a way, marketing is one of the most important things we can spend money on since it effectively multiplies our impact by resulting in project funding that far outweighs its cost.

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.