Wren financial report: year three

Over the past 12 months, Wren brought in $2.33M to fund projects that reduce or remove CO2 emissions.

Eighty percent of that went directly to our projects. In total, Wren users prevented or removed 120,000 tons of CO2 emissions! That's like taking 25,000 cars off the road for a year or switching 15,000 homes to renewable electricity.

The other 20% of funds were reinvested to pay our team and grow our reach. Specifically:

• $97,789 went to transaction fees
• $369,065 went to covering expenses. Still, we have had a net loss over the past 12 months as we expected while we’re rapidly accelerating our impact.

Our expenses

We've spent $1.7M in the past 12 months. Here's what we spent it on:

Compensation + team expenses

Paying people for the work they do for Wren is one of our biggest costs. We currently have seven 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: $112,993
• Average pay for Wren employees: $120,470
• The CEO is paid $80,000 per year. CEO pay ratio is 0.7

We think these are appropriate salaries, much less than what they might be at a big tech company but still plenty to live off of based off our team members’ cost of living. We're doing this because we really want to stop climate change, not because we want to make a bunch of money!

Marketing

This past year, we have invested heavily in marketing. We spent just over $1M 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 has a huge ROI for us and allows us to grow our impact exponentially.

Thanks to this marketing spend, we have more than tripled our impact over the past year and are on track 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.

Other expenses

The rest of our expenses are fairly straightforward “keeping the lights on” overhead expenses: we need to pay for servers and key software, we have lawyers and accountants who help us with key paperwork, etc.

Looking ahead

We currently have $4.4M of funds available. This is a healthy cash position for us, a great spot to be in given the broad economic uncertainties at play in the world today. Most of this will continue to go into salary and marketing as we continue to grow.

Over the next year, we expect to keep growing our team and our impact. Read more in our recent fundraising announcement!