How the Matching Campaign Helped Boost New Mexico News Fundraising
The NM Local News Fund helped 16 newsrooms raise more than $225,000 last December
What a difference a year makes. In 2021, we launched our very first Matching Campaign to help New Mexico local newsrooms have successful year-end fundraising campaigns. Then last year, we had even more newsrooms participating, and collectively they raised nearly double the amount from last year.
So how does the Matching Campaign work? Any New Mexico local newsroom — nonprofit or for-profit — can apply to join our campaign. And the newsrooms that participate in our Local News Accelerator program are automatically eligible to join the Matching Campaign.
We provide a basic training on fundraising ahead of the campaign, and provide some design materials (created by News Revenue Hub for us in 2021) for ads and social media. The campaign ran from Giving Tuesday (November 29) through December 31, and for every donation, membership or subscription they sell, we match that up to $5,000 per newsroom. Being able to tout a match (“for every dollar you give, that will be matched by the Local News Fund”) makes it a great selling point to donors.
Here’s an overview of how we did this year compared to last year:
- 16 newsrooms around the state participated vs. 9 last year.
- Those newsrooms raised more than $225,000 in aggregate, including our matches, compared to $120,000 last year.
- 8 of the newsrooms participating this year are for-profit organizations, and many were running their very first fundraising campaign.
- The Local News Fund increased our match to $5,000 per newsroom from $3,000 per newsroom last year.
Overall, it was heartening to see so many newsrooms of different sizes and formats in so many places succeed. Seeing a small newsroom raise a couple thousand dollars is just as exciting as seeing a larger public media station raise tens of thousands.
Here are some key takeaways from this year’s campaign:
- Make the case for a thriving local news.
Not everyone understands just how dire the situation is for local news outlets in many rural towns. And when there is a lack of local news, there’s typically a rise in local corruption and less civic engagement. So it helps to explain in a fundraising campaign just how important the community’s support for local news is to preserving democracy.
One great example was at The Independent in Edgewood, NM. When the owner decided to close the paper, the folks at Ctrl+P Publishing stepped in to save the paper. They quickly decided to join our Matching Campaign to raise funds to retire some debt. Ctrl+P Publishing owner Pat Davis told us the campaign was a huge success, with readers of other papers pitching in thousands of dollars — all on the idea that local journalism was worth saving.
“With Local News Fund’s matching funds, we’ll pay off the printing debt and have some cash left to launch a new digital subscriber acquisition to provide a new revenue source to this legacy paper,” he said. “This was a big boost just when we needed it.”
At KSFR public radio in Santa Fe, the Matching Campaign helped them raise more than $38,000, the most out of our participating publishers. How did they do it? Their listeners understood how important local news is, according to Tazbah McCullah, general manager of KSFR.
“When our listeners and donors know that their donations multiply with matching or challenge monies that point to preserving a valuable service, we see beneficial results,” she said. “The Local News Fund match has provided that incentive for us and other news outlets that has helped demonstrate that the public still supports a free and vibrant press.”
2. In-person events can make a big difference.
It’s difficult to say just how much the pandemic has hurt local news publishers over the past few years. There’s been a loss of ad revenues, loss of local business, and loss of human connection. That’s starting to change, as we’ve started to live with COVID-19, and in-person events are hugely helpful for fundraisers.
A case in point is Las Cruces community radio station KTAL, which had two in-person events last year, including a summer open house and one in December. KTAL general manager Nan Rubin told me that their fundraising goal for the Matching Campaign was $5,000 but they ended up more than doubling that amount.
“At our December holiday open house, we received several large checks in person,” Rubin said. “These donations were unexpected. At our Fifth Anniversary open house party last summer, we also received a number of very generous donations. Consequently, we plan to hold at least two open house events during 2023. Our listeners love them and fill our donation jar!”
3. Target one special cause with your fundraiser.
When it comes to fundraisers, it often helps to narrow down the cause beyond just “support our news organization.” That’s especially true with for-profit news outlets that have never had fundraisers before — and that are viewed as commercial enterprises.
Chris Baker, publisher of the Taos News weekly newspaper, said he struggled with the fundraiser at first because they had never asked their audience to donate before, and because there are already 220+ nonprofits in the Taos area and he didn’t want to compete with them.
The solution? The paper focused the fundraising campaign on its “Newspapers in Education” program that provides newspapers to classrooms so kids can learn about local current events.
“Everyone was behind [the campaign] and loved supporting it,” Baker told me. “It was easy to promote since who doesn’t want to help our youth by learning more about our community through newspapers? This was an excellent campaign and helped bring awareness to our Newspapers in Education program! The funds we receive through this campaign will help us defray the cost of printing and delivery and expand our reach to distribute to more classrooms throughout Taos.”
4. Focus on your most loyal readers and supporters.
While we definitely had some newbies in the Matching Campaign, we also had some veterans of fundraising with our public media stations and nonprofit news outlets leading the way. And with that experience comes new strategies. For instance, Searchlight New Mexico, which had upgraded its fundraising technology through News Revenue Hub in 2021, was able to use a summer fundraising campaign to help identify loyal supporters.
Building that list up made it easier to target those supporters in the December campaign, according to Searchlight’s executive director and editor Sara Solovitch.
“We ran our campaign similar to last year’s with messages from a reporter, our executive director, a Board member and other staff,” she said. “We also chose to send fewer messages and focused our efforts on appeals to our most ardent readers and supporters, which convert at a higher rate. I think each of these things contributed to our ability to hold up in the current [tough economic] climate.”
It was great to see such a diverse mix of news organizations participating in our Matching Campaign this year, and using knowledge from previous campaigns to help sharpen their strategies. We look forward to working with them again in the year-end campaign later in December.
Mark Glaser is the Director of Business and Program Development for the New Mexico Local News Fund. He is also an Associate at Dot Connector Studio and supports the Knight Foundation with communications work. He was the founder and executive director of MediaShift.org. You can reach him at mark@nmlocalnews.org
