Global Investigative Journalism Network (https://archive.gijn.org/tag/fundraising/page/2/)
Dear Friends of GIJN,
As this difficult year comes to a close, we want to take a couple minutes to ask for your support. GIJN’s core mission is to strengthen and spread investigative journalism around the world.
It’s hard enough to make journalism pay, but hardest of all for investigative journalism. Making Investigative Journalism Sustainable: Best Business Practices, GIJN’s new video series, features 10 leading journalists and experts from around the world who provide key tips how to fund investigative reporting organizations.
As part of GIJN’s new series, Making Investigative Journalism Sustainable: Best Business Practices, we are featuring a set of key tips from 10 leading journalists and experts from around the world who are either working to build viable organizations around investigative journalism or work as experts to support these enterprises. Here is Bridget Gallagher, Founder, Gallagher Group LLC (US)
See videos from all 10 experts here.
The proliferation of nonprofit newsrooms is one of the more promising developments in an industry wracked by a crumbling financial base and sweeping technological change. Since 2000, dozens of nonprofit media groups have sprouted, not only across America but worldwide. Many are deeply committed to investigative and accountability journalism, working to fill a void left by a mainstream media that either can’t or won’t do its job as social watchdogs. In April, the Knight Foundation published the third installment in a series of reports since 2011 tracking the progress of nonprofit news sites as they strive for a sustainable financial base. There are lessons here for media nonprofits worldwide.
Robyn Vinter, founder of a UK-based investigative news website for working-class millennials and people outside the “London bubble,” says she made a conscious choice not to try and make a “big profit” from it. “We’re not trying to be millionaires,” says Vinter.“We’re trying to do investigative journalism, and you can’t really do both, I don’t think.”
One of the bright spots in investigative journalism over the past decade has been the rapid spread of nonprofits dedicated to supporting in-depth journalism around the world. A 2012 survey by the Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) identified 106 investigative journalism nonprofits in nearly 50 countries – with more than half of them founded in the past five years.
When it comes to small and medium organizations I have seen a consistent chronic under investment in fundraising and a consistent lack of understanding of the work. It’s not just about small and medium nonprofits learning key methods and techniques of larger institutions. It’s about changing the culture around fundraising, especially individual major giving. Small and medium nonprofits all rush the same foundation doors year after year. Foundation fundraising is easier to understand and doesn’t involve talking to individuals about their own money. Individual major gifts work is risky, harder to understand and involves talking to individuals about their money. So year after year these same nonprofits stay small.
One of the most common things you hear people say when you tell them what you do for a living is “Oh, I hate fundraising! I could NEVER do that for living!” Nice. Yes, there are all kinds of fun responses we can think of. But what it tells us over and over again is that fundraising is widely perceived as something dirty, ethically challenged, or at least uncomfortable. People think that talking to someone about their own money is akin to talking to them about sex, politics, or religion. It’s not.
Your nonprofit board of directors can be a dynamic catalyst to bring in new major donations. People who are passionate about what your institution does and have a lifetime of connections can make the difference between “basic survival” fundraising or breaking out into the green fields of major gifts fundraising. Here are three ways to help your board shed their fears of fundraising and find their unique role in this aspect.
For non-profit media routinely engaged in fundraising, developing a stream of individual gift-giving is important. Here’s good advice on how to build and market a “gift ladder” — a series of donation levels that goes from quite to modest to major grants.