The Phil Turns ‘Phour:’ Reflections on Our Toddler

Cue the music: happy birthday to us. This week, we’re blowing out four candles on The Phil’s b-day cake, marking an anniversary with many slices of gratitude to go around. 

The timing feels particularly appropriate, coinciding for the most part with Giving Tuesday. After all, when we created The Phil, we saw it in many ways as a gift to Virginia’s nonprofit community, a community that was long on heroic stories and short on places to tell those stories. Back then, we envisioned The Phil as a free platform for celebrating the amazing work taking place among nonprofits, organizations that often toil far from the spotlight, focusing less on promoting themselves and more on serving their constituencies and making a difference in people’s lives.

We’re proud to say that The Phil has emerged as exactly that, and the stories that have populated its pages have helped to illuminate a range of nonprofits dedicated to providing a broad diversity of services to those in need – from nonprofits serving children and families, to organizations focused on women’s health, to arts groups working to lift the human spirit throughout the commonwealth, to everything in between.

Over the past year, regular readers of The Phil were inspired by stories that touched the heart. We learned of the tremendous impact that volunteer home visiting programs are having in lifting up families through an alliance of providers under the auspices of Early Impact Virginia. We reported on Culture Encounters’ wide-ranging panel discussion on the African diaspora. We traced the 75-year evolution of Camp Kum-Ba-Yah in Lynchburg and learned about the difference that R.E.A.L Girlz is making in the lives of girls of all ages.

And we interviewed such inspirational leaders as Laina Schneider, executive director of Live, Work, Eat, Grow; Amanda Robinson, founder of Gallery5; Brian MacNair, CEO of Kitchen of Purpose; and Jo Ann Hughes, acting president of Paint Pink, among others. Our monthly Phil-Ins features kept readers up to date on grant awards, conferences, fundraisers and community activities.

What a year it’s been.

The numbers behind the stories reflect The Phil’s growing popularity. In 2024, there were 20,000 unique visitors to the site, consuming close to 30,000 pages of content. Those figures represent a 14% increase in the number of readers and a 9% bump in the number of viewed pages from the previous year. Since the launch of The Phil, close to 50,000 readers have clicked on the site. And thanks in large part to our incredible interns, we’ve had 42 writers author more than 300 stories.

Being on the publishing side has been a bit of a bizarro world for PR people like ourselves. We’re still getting used to the fact that other public relations folks are pitching us, but we do our best to accommodate as many requests as possible, so keep those story ideas coming.

We are indebted, of course, to the talents of Hodges’ interns. While our three different semesters of interns are tasked with a variety of responsibilities while they are with us, they comprise first and foremost The Phil’s writing team. We’re grateful for the skill and dedication that they bring to this part of their job.

Here’s looking forward to 2025 and uncovering more of the heroic work taking place within Virginia’s nonprofit community.