Session Host: Liz Willen
Reporter: Kate Myers
Takeaways/key insights
- Seek people who want to fund operations, not projects
- Address the history that journalism has of being extractive. Journalism
- What anchors exist in a community to connect with? Public media station, community college, etc?
- Partnerships: organizations ae going to the same funders. Should we look at organizing to go together? Mergers? Other partnerships?
- Opportunities for merging, fractional support, shared services – but fraught in other ways.
- “I’ve had it with foundations that won’t tell us how to talk to them!”
Additional thoughts, questions, and notes:
- WHY: How do we keep nonprofit news organizations going?
- How are we finding funding for non-local nonprofits (Like Hechinger Report)
- What are the sources of sustainability for nonprofits?
- Funders ask: what will you do when we stop funding you?
- One (non-nonprofit) org that is sustainable – Bloomberg. The terminals are a related business that is a huge value and unique differentiator. What is that for nonprofit news?
- Sustainability can be linked to who owns the narrative – specifically, can community members own their own stories?
- There are challenges both for well funded and funding-seeking organizations – just different challenges
- Nonprofits are not broken – operating as designed. And they are designed poorly.
- Let’s redefine sustainability-we need to change the story around how we won’t need funding and instead talk about how that funding is a key part of the operational model. It isn’t just funding to do new projects (that we then have to figure out how to pay for).
- Cannot think big without money
- Burnout and equity: we are at a place where sustainability means paying people what they are owed and keeping them paid.
- Discomfort: access to information should be a fundamental right. How does that intersect with paywalls? How are we building structures that distribute information?
- Martiza: “We don’t want any more walls”
- There is a big gap between english language media and spanish
- Those making the funding decisions do not understand our community
- Sustainability is not just about money. Need practical models and advice
- Distinction:
- There are some nonprofit journalistic outlets that do not have funding from their core business
- And some that can build a business that drives money to reinvest
- Discuss: are there hybrid models? For-profit partnerships?
- Nonprofits are built to fail. We need money to fund innovation, but that money is useless once we get it since we have to PLAN FOR and FUNDRAISE FOR IT ahead of time.
- Risk: A sole reliance on philanthropy is a single point of failure like a sole reliance on advertising was.
- Question: how is the subscription model part of the bigger plan for the Banner? Why is it working?
- Principles: Relentlessly interesting, radically helpful
- Did it again? Would likely frame it more as membership model
- Membership works when you understand why YOUR people see you as different. How they join you to help you do what you do in the world.
- Another opportunity: government collaboration? Funding for information came during COVID times.
- Why does someone come back to your site? What causes a person to engage and continue to engage with the content?
- Flip it around: not content but community firsT
- Listening is a full time job, but no one is paying for it. Funding comes when people push you for output/publishing and scale.
- We don’t demand for-profit companies fund their own growth. Initial investment and capital gives them a (often long) window of time to experiment and prove the mode.
- This is a CAPITAL PROBLEM.
- Privilege: some organizations have this money at the beginning, and it shows.
- Reminder: Find money that is at the intersections of what you do. For instance from the banner, money that is fighting for/against public health, crime, guns – funding from hospitals in Baltimore. Find alternative funders.
- Is it an emergency that journalism is disappearing in the community? How are we convincing non-traditional funders that this is a problem?
- Flip it around: why does someone care about journalism? Make a case for us as connective tissue for the community
- Note: nonprofits are not always civic minded. It is still just a tax status.
- Convincing community foundations: what do you care about, and how do we as journalism organizations solve that.
- Many organizations in our space know how to get this community funding. Why is the information hoarded among a few or a small network?
- What is there ISN’T money in a community? What then?
- News organizations have harmed communities so why should communities want journalists to tell their stories? Versus owning their own narrative?
- There is somuch good content out there, how do we collaborate instead of compete and repeat?
- Great Salt Lake Collaborative: Experimental model: 2 years of funding for a new collaborative, then they raise their own money. The new funder is funding them because it aligns with what the funder needs, and no one member of the collab could have been able to get that funding.
- When we help startups start, don’t for them to go nonprofit (or forprofit). This assumption that one way is better than the other is a disservice.
- Saying “Fund Journalism” is like saying “Fund Science” – too broad and undefined.
- Journalism is not an end in itself.
- Can foundations connect organizations to rich individuals?
- Can we then educate new funders with different expectations (E, those who might not assume journalistic independence
- Use the skills of journalism (storytelling!) to raise money.
- Are there organizations out there that matchmake grants – connecting donors to aligned organizations in need?
- Challenge: how are we not reinventing the wheel? Need to systematize the learnings and share across more of the industry.
- We don’t systematically track impact
- YET the tools exist (why don’t we all know them?)
- Sometimes initial successes are low hanging fruit and we should use those to build traction.