Our first annual report reflects NLP’s considerable progress
This week, we're releasing our first annual report, covering fiscal year 2019 (July 2018-June 2019). It presents the results of the initial year of our ambitious four-year strategic plan. We believe that it reflects not only considerable progress in the past year, but great promise for the years ahead.
By Greg McCaffery and Alan C. Miller
We are gratified to note that we achieved or exceeded most of our goals for the first year across our programs, communications and finances and for our impact metrics with educators and students. In areas where we fell short, we are working to improve this year.
The first pillar of our plan calls for us to “increase both the use and the measurable student impact of NLP programs and resources.” Highlights included the following:
- We were told by educators that our Checkology® virtual classroom meets the metrics it is designed to teach and is better than other comparable educational platforms.
- We saw considerable growth in the percentage of students who were able to recognize the standards of quality journalism and the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment.
- We sold 36,214 student licenses for Checkology.
- We completed eight NewsLitCamps® that reached 405 educators from New York and Miami on the East Coast to Los Angeles on the West Coast (and several stops in between, including Charlotte, North Carolina; Lexington, Kentucky; and Houston).
- Teachers overwhelmingly rated NewsLitCamps as “good” or “excellent” and reported that they planned to use news literacy resources in their classrooms.
The second pillar calls for us to “expand NLP’s role as the pre-eminent, nonpartisan voice for teaching news literacy in the United States.” Highlights included the following:
- An article in Fast Company, published in August 2018, described NLP as “one of the most important educational tools for our time.”
- Our Twitter followers increased more than 37%, to 11,340.
- The number of people who “like” our Facebook page also grew more than 37%, to 12,043.
We will begin to implement the third pillar, which calls for us to “develop a national community of news literacy practitioners and advocates for systemic change,” in the current fiscal year.
The fourth pillar calls for us to “build the infrastructure and fiscal sustainability to realize this plan in the short term and our vision in the longer term.” Highlights included the following:
- Our expenses came in slightly under our $3.65 million budget.
- We exceeded our goal for contributed income with $4.535 million and our goal for multi-year gifts with $2.15 million.
- We received $109,150 in earned income, achieving our goal of earned income as 3% of our budget.
Cumulatively, this gives us a solid foundation upon which to build. We dramatically increased the size of our staff in the last year, giving us a talented and committed team to expand our reach and impact, and we’re off to a fast start in fiscal year 2020.
We couldn’t have achieved such progress without your assistance as partners, supporters and followers. Thank you for helping us give facts a fighting chance!
