Date: July 28, 2015

DC Gardens is a nonprofit campaign using photos and social media to promote public gardens in the Washington, D.C. area, and gardening by its residents. We’re in search of a corporate sponsor to enable us to continue our work.

The Washington, D.C. area is blessed with public gardens that are not only beautiful and free to visit but have important educational programs, too. Sadly, they’re largely unknown and lack the funds to get the word out.

Similarly, DC-area residents have little knowledge of the many local opportunities to learn to garden and connect with the gardening and greening communities.

What We Do

To entice people to visit the region’s 14 “Destination Gardens” featured on our website, DC Gardens collects and distributes images of each garden by month, with the goal of making visitors aware that DC is a year-round garden town.

To do this we use donated photos and digital media, including a monthly e-newsletter “Insider’s Guide to Visiting DC Gardens” for subscribers and the general, travel and garden media; downloadable photos of DC gardens on Flickr; and regular updates to Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook and Tumblr.

To promote gardening by residents, we’ve compiled complete and up-to-date “Local Info” on our website: youth and community gardens, garden clubs, native plant societies, garden media outlets, where to volunteer, and where to learn to garden or find plants and garden design help.

Benefits

For the gardens: more visitors, increased participation in classes and other events, and more support from the public.

For residents: more time spent in the gardens, in nature, enjoying the many proven benefits of doing so.

For the community: increased connection among residents in person and online to the local gardening and greening community, resulting in a growing number of home gardens, community gardens, and public beautification projects.

For the environment: more residents taking up gardening at home, resulting in increased biodiversity, stormwater uptake, provision for pollinators, and locally grown food.

For local businesses: more visitor-nights in DC and more customers for landscapers, designers and sellers of plants.

How the Funds Will Be Used

By using donated photos and digital media, we keep our expenses very low. We’ve raised $5,000 through crowd-funding and received pledges of support from the gardens that can contribute, but need $10,000 more to fully fund our first full year of operation. Our most significant cost will be to hire a part-time social media expert (Washington Gardener Magazine editor Kathy Jentz) to promote the gardens via social media, at major local events, and by writing articles for local publications.

Corporate Sponsor and DC Gardens

As our corporate sponsor, you will be acknowledged on every page of the website and widely in all other media exposure of DC Gardens.

Thank you for taking the time to consider our request and don’t hesitate to contact me for more information.

Susan Harris,
Director and Photo Editor