A letter to INN Members: The multiplier effect
It’s November — fundraising season — which means that all of us are focused on the same question: how do we generate the support to sustain our work into next year and beyond? More to the point: how do we describe our value to those we serve and those who sustain us? So we want to take a little time to share how INN approaches this, for and with you.
At INN, we think of our value as “the multiplier effect.” The majority of the money that INN raises goes to members, not INN, and the money we use supports a team of experts whose job is to help you grow revenue and audience, attract and retain diverse talent, save money on operations and more. As I wrote when we received the recent Knight Foundation grant to support your work, our pledge is to turn every dollar we receive into many more for our members. We are only successful when you are successful.
Here’s how it works.
First, NewsMatch: A record 320 of you are part of this year’s campaign. Since 2017, INN Network newsrooms have been able to leverage $17 million in philanthropic support to raise $202 million themselves through NewsMatch, attracting new donors and sponsors along the way.
This year, the INN development team and philanthropic sponsors have raised $5.75 million for NewsMatch 2022. We’re into the second year of ramping up the partner fund strategy that is pulling more non-journalism funders into the news space and helping expand NewsMatch opportunities to newsrooms with over $1 million in revenue.
That’s a long game and we have a lot of allies in it — including the big journalism funders at the head of the line. Peer organizations are doing a lot to drive systemic funding of small news organizations. We’re piquing interest among new funders, although I’ll be the first to say it’s not enough. So we continue to focus much of INN’s development resources on “non-journalism” funder recruitment to both NewsMatch and the field. We also will continue helping funders find your organizations, through meetings, briefings and publishing findyournews.org, connecting funders with newsrooms by state, city, topic, or the types of communities they serve, such as rural or urban or communities of color.
A few other collective and direct funding initiatives for INN members:
In the last few years, INN has generated net new, direct funding to more than 75 member newsrooms for their collaborative reporting. This started when members asked for INN’s help organizing editorial partnerships, and it’s evolving into INN’s holistic collaboration model, which runs from fundraising through shared distribution and impact tracking. Participating members use INN as a matchmaker to connect small news outlets with each other and to major funders. Because the model is bottom-up, we can work with you to make sure the money is worthwhile — setting fundraising targets that generate positive contributions to your sustainability and journalism impact.
Watch for more on this front, as INN has added two great people this year to work on collaborative fundraising:
Stephanie Schenkel brings public media fundraising chops to INN members as our network philanthropy director — meaning she’s your development resource entirely. She doesn’t fundraise for INN. Stephanie is an on-call coach for your fundraising. She manages the major gifts fundraising workshop program and can provide you with a rich library of development resources.
Moumita Chakrabourty, INN’s institutional giving director, fundraises for member collaborations and NewsMatch as well as INN, with the bulk of her time dedicated to generating funding for members. We’ll have more exciting news this fall on funds INN has raised for members of the Rural News Network. There’s much more we can do together in this space, too.
Other funding for members flows from INN programming throughout the year.
On the talent and leadership front, Sara Shahriari is in high drive now with partners and universities, securing more than $500,000 that will flow to members to pay for salaries of 2023 fellows and interns. This funding continues to grow through initiatives to bring more diversity to the field and recruit top new investigative talent into nonprofit newsrooms. Sara also oversees the Emerging Leaders Councils, where participants receive grants of up to $5,000 to executive project plans they developed in the program. The INN Index provided grants to members who report across multiple years to upgrade their data collection systems and staffing, and similar implementation grants will go to members testing new market and audience measurement options.
We know that these programs alone don’t bring an organization to sustainability. What INN and NewsMatch funding are intended to do is provide the leverage, the catalysts to help you build a stable and enduring news organization.
There are two other bottom-line aspects of INN’s core work: centrally hiring shared experts who work for you and negotiating shared services that save costs.
This year, you gained the expertise of Sam Cholke, your resident audience development expert. Sam does training — you all sold out his first workshop at ONA. He also is a hands-on adviser and audience development resource for dozens of members that aren’t yet big enough to have their own audience specialist. Additionally, Sam works to help members distribute their news and brands on digital platforms. Watch for more early next year on a fellowship that will enable us to offer even more hands-on audience development assistance.
Shared services address the cost side of your ledgers. Until this year, Jordan Smith was negotiating shared services for an association of lawyers; now he’s working for you. He just pushed out the compensation survey, which is our most-requested service and leads to thousands of dollars in savings for individual members. Now Jordan is deep into researching and vetting outsourced IT support, another of your top requests. We also aim to save members time by doing the grunt work to vet a lot of vendors. In 2023, watch for more shared recruiting and hiring resources. This work is guided by you, so if you haven’t completed the member needs survey yet, please tell us now: what do you need?
This leaves out another whole wing of INN work — providing the capacity-building and training to help social entrepreneurs launch newsrooms and journalists learn to run successful nonprofit businesses. Many of you first came to INN through a Startup Session. Once a nonprofit is up and running, it can be challenging to directly connect the dots from the cost of an INN program to your specific impact over time, but we do hold ourselves accountable, ensuring that our programs are useful enough that you will invest your time in them and tracking trends through the Index.
As important as all this talk of funding and services is, it shouldn’t overshadow the ultimate aim of INN, which is to advance the public benefit of your journalism. INN formed as a reporting consortium and still works as one. In later letters, we’ll delve more into efforts to amplify your impact.
But the infrastructure supporting journalism and finding revenue to uphold your work is certainly the central challenge of our time as journalists. I hope this gives some sense of how INN is organized. Every day, our team focuses on making the pie bigger for nonprofit journalism so the communities you serve have the news they need.
Have an idea of how else we can do that? What helps you? Shoot me a line. I’d love to hear from you.
Sue
