While COVID battered newsrooms, our campaign helped bring in $578K for Colorado journalism. Here’s what we learned.

2020 was a disorienting year, to say the least. A growing movement for racial justice and a chaotic presidential election in the middle of a global pandemic produced a once-in-a-generation stress test of our nation’s institutions, not to mention the mental health of individuals.

Mostly isolated at home, Coloradans more than ever needed access to trustworthy sources of information about their communities — and web-traffic analytics showed they were turning to local media in droves.

“We’re in an interesting situation with regard to news,” Colorado’s governor, Jared Polis, said during a press conference in mid-April. “There’s a lot more consumption of it … but less revenue, because the advertisers are going away.”

Pandemic-related business shutdowns immediately choked off advertising to local outlets across the state. By late March, some news organizations were laying off journalists, moving to online only, or simply folding altogether. News managers were seeing revenues slashed by half in what seemed like a heartbeat.

At year’s end, Colorado Media Project offered the annual #newsCOneeds matching challenge to help local newsrooms raise much-needed support for their vital public-service journalism — and also, this year, to help raise collective morale. To run the campaign, CMP — a grant-funded, community-led initiative formed in 2018 to help innovate and strengthen the local news ecosystem in our state — joined forces with the newly formed Colorado News Collaborative (COLab), a nonprofit media resource hub and ideas lab, and News Revenue Hub, a national leader in helping newsrooms plan and run effective fundraising campaigns.

Because of the devastation facing local newsrooms, we decided to super-size CMP’s 2020 #newsCOneeds matching challenge — what was effectively our own state-based version of the national #NewsMatch campaign, the grassroots initiative seeded by Democracy Fund, Knight Foundation, and others to grow individual support for nonprofit news outlets.

Each year since 2018, Colorado Media Project has offered $5,000 matching grants to Colorado newsrooms in coordination #NewsMatch, which in 2020 broke a record by netting $47 million for nonprofit newsrooms around the country.

Colorado’s matching challenge is unique in the nation, however, in that any locally owned, locally operated Colorado news organization that is regularly publishing nonpartisan local news may apply — regardless of business model or distribution method. We think this is important, because so many of our local newsrooms are struggling to stay afloat, and many are seeking new ways to rally community support to sustain their operations into the future.

The 2020 #newsCOneeds matching challenge began with a goal of raising $250,000 among the 25 selected Colorado outlets in a single month. Participating news organizations included small, locally-owned rural and urban newspapers, local public radio stations, statewide digital outlets, nonprofit newsrooms, a public benefit corporation, a big city alt-weekly, a one-person startup, and more.

In the end, the effort raised more than $578,000 for newsrooms across Colorado in a single month.

What was even better was hearing what the money meant to those local journalists — who had been officially deemed “essential” workers by our governor in the early days of COVID-19.

Newsroom leaders told us the revenue helped them pay for more news gathering, hire freelancers and interns, update websites, purchase necessary equipment, retain subscribers who could no longer afford to pay during the pandemic, keep journalists reporting on COVID-19 in their communities, and cover operating costs — for months in some cases.

Beyond a financial boost in a challenging year, these local newsroom leaders also said they learned valuable lessons from the campaign. We wanted to share them here, in hopes their lessons — and perhaps even a statewide campaign like Colorado’s — might be replicable elsewhere.

A persuasive, unified message, campaign collateral, website and hashtag ‘made the case’ for local news — across platforms and business models.

Plenty of newsrooms that participated in our 2020 #newsCOneeds campaign weren’t used to asking their readers for money, and they appreciated the experience of working together in a peer cohort alongside veteran fundraisers who crafted messages and shared ideas they could tailor to their audiences.

“The most important thing we learned was not to be afraid to ask for donations, and to explain why this year especially we have needed donations — because our ad revenue was down 90 percent,” said Jan Wondra, managing editor of the for-profit Ark Valley Voice, who raised enough to qualify for a match for her for-profit online news site that serves a rural part of central Colorado.

While each newsroom was encouraged to direct all of their marketing efforts to their own donation pages, a campaign website (thisisnewsconeeds.com) provided a unifying message — and even raised some donations, which were equally split among the participants. Newsrooms — even those not participating in the matching challenge — also used a common hashtag (#newsCOneeds) to spotlight some of the amazing journalism produced by local newsrooms in 2020.

In Nederland, Colorado, another news outlet not used to asking for money, found readers were willing to support it — if asked.

The Mountain Ear, a hyperlocal for-profit newspaper with a weekly circulation of 1,200 that serves as a news source in roughly 15 rural communities, raised about $5,200 during the campaign, earning it an additional $5,000. That was a needed boost, given the paper had lost 20 percent of its advertising in a single week when business closures from the pandemic hit.

Money from the #newsCOneeds campaign, which came from inside and outside the paper’s circulation area including $500 from a supporter in New Mexico, allowed the Mountain Ear to renew subscriptions for anyone who said they couldn’t pay during the pandemic. That wound up being more than 100 people, said publisher Barbara Hardt. The money also allowed the paper to continue printing, and to catch up on payroll.

“I think the most important thing I learned is that people in the community are willing to support the paper and willing to support what we’re doing — and how important it is to everyone else to have that news out there for them,” Hardt told us.

Some outlets who were used to raising money appreciated skills the campaign taught them about donor retention and communicating with new and returning contributors.

“I think we intuitively knew this is what we should be doing, but this gave us a good framework,” said editor Dana Coffield of The Colorado Sun, whose three-year-old digital public-benefit corporation that specializes in in-depth daily journalism brought in about $40,000 from 515 people during the campaign.

Stacking challenge grants from national and local donors can super-charge individual donations.

Aspen Journalism, a 10-year-old member of the Institute for Nonprofit News that produces in-depth reporting and investigative journalism with a budget of about $420,000, raised more than $33,000 during the December 2020 #newsCOneeds campaign.

The newsroom’s director, Brent Gardner-Smith, told us his outlet combined matching grants available to INN members through the national #NewsMatch campaign, which began on Nov. 1, with the #newsCOneeds campaign, which began a month later.

“In fact, we shaped our donor levels, and our challenge language, around it,” he said. His outlet described #NewsMatch donors as “National Donors,” and #newsCOneeds donors as “Colorado Donors.”

“Our intent was to inform our local donors that their donations were being matched by donors at both the state and national level, which we perceive to be a powerful message for local donors,” he said. “And we also wanted to let our Colorado Donors and National Donors know that their donations were being matched at the local level.”

Aspen is a pretty wealthy area. The donor pool is deep.

But the #newsCOneeds initiative also benefited outlets in parts of the state where many residents are not as financially well off.

KSUT public radio serves the largely rural Four Corners region of southwestern Colorado and includes a Tribal Radio signal that serves the Ute Mountain Ute and Southern Ute tribes, among others. In December during the 2020 #newsCOneeds campaign, the station brought in more than $69,500 in donations from about 400 contributors, 34 of whom gave for the first time.

The station was able to make its $5,000 match, and more, on a single day — Colorado Gives Day, an annual statewide event powered by the Community First Foundation that attracts donations to a galaxy of participating nonprofits. In 2020, the giving day took place on Dec. 8, within about the first week of the #newsCOneeds campaign.

“The amount raised through Colorado Gives Day in support of the #newsCOneeds match was also a tripling of what we’ve raised in past years,” said KSUT director Tami Graham. “Offering the challenge match, tied with Colorado Gives Day, was tremendously successful.”

Being part of a statewide campaign and learning cohort buoyed spirits.

Shay Castle, who runs a one-woman site and newsletter called BoulderBeat, almost didn’t apply for the #newsCOneeds program because she really doesn’t like to ask for money. The program provided a crash course in how to do so. But beyond that, it offered a sense of networked support, through a cohort model supported by the Colorado News Collaborative, or COLab.

“More than the money, it was such a boost to know that so many people believe so strongly in what I’m doing,” she said. “This is a hard job; running my own business on top of being a journalist. Especially after the busy election season, I can start to feel depleted. This kept me going. I would never have run a campaign myself. I didn’t know how, and I hate asking for money.”

BoulderBeat wound up raising $36,000 in 2020 — and about $15,000 of that came during the #newsCOneeds campaign. She was able to convert more than a dozen non-paying subscribers into paying readers.

“If all of my subscribers actually paid me, I’d make $150,000 (a year),” she said.

Being able to leverage matching donations and fundraise as part of a larger cohort was something other participants also told us was gold.

For months, project managers prepped participants at each newsroom by helping draft email campaigns and fundraising pitches, create visual graphics, and harness social media to build engagement around the December fundraising drive. COLab even provided landing pages, powered by News Revenue Hub, so that newsrooms without a way to collect contributions could do so with a seamless user experience. On scheduled Zoom calls, participants could workshop ideas, support each other, and talk about challenges and how they overcame them.

“The idea sharing that took place during the Zoom cohort calls was extremely helpful,” said Jerd Smith, digital content editor for Fresh Water News. The independent news initiative of Water Education Colorado wound up raising around $14,500 during the campaign, making up about one fifth of its fundraising haul for the year.

Smith added: “Being able to hear how other news rooms encountered similar challenges and hearing their lessons-learned was great.”

If you’d like to learn more about the #newsCOneeds campaign, or are a funder interested in sponsoring a state-level campaign for local journalism — please reach out!

Melissa Milios Davis is Director of the Colorado Media Project and program officer for Informed Communities at the Gates Family Foundation.