How This Nationwide Matching Gift Campaign Galvanizes Support for Nonprofit News Outlets

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In a recent chat, outgoing Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) President and CEO Sue Cross said that when she assumed the role in 2015, most newsrooms were started by journalists with minimal nonprofit management experience. Now, in a testament to surging interest in local news, she’s fielding calls from aspiring news entrepreneurs who have little experience in either traditional media or in the nonprofit sector.

This influx of news media hopefuls is clearly a boon for the INN’s network of approximately 425 members and the broader the news ecosystem. But it also reinforces the importance of giving burgeoning newsroom leaders the skills to attract, engage and retain local donors.

This is why INN members participate in NewsMatch, the largest collaborative fundraising campaign to support nonprofit news in the U.S. The program’s core component is an end-of-year matching gift campaign that runs from November 1 to December 31, during which outlets receive matching support from partner funders, as well as from donors and organizations in their communities. Newsrooms can also access a host of complementary services to make the case for nonprofit journalism throughout the year.

“We engage our participating newsrooms in a variety of hands-on trainings, like webinars and coaching, that focus on everything from digital fundraising to best practices in audience development to identifying and securing major donors,” said Meta Stange, who joined INN as the NewsMatch program manager last year. “Our goal is to build long-term sustainability by giving newsrooms tools that they need to do this on their own.”

Since 2017, newsrooms have received a total of $271 million through the program. Partner funders have contributed $25 million and the balance, $246 million, came from individuals and additional local matches from community foundations, local businesses and other sources. As the 2023 campaign kicks off this week, and as overall giving for nonprofit news surges, I figured it would be an opportune time to take a closer look at the program.

A quick history

The Knight Foundation, a giant in institutional philanthropic support for journalism, launched NewsMatch in 2016 with $1.5 million to help 57 nonprofit newsrooms generate additional donations during their end-of-the-year fundraising campaigns.

“It was in response to an influx of donations that nonprofit newsrooms were seeing after the 2016 election,” Stange said. “The idea was to build this groundswell of support for independent media outlets to combat concerns about fake news and misinformation, and after that initial year, the number of funders grew and it became a true collaborative learning environment.”

From the beginning, the San Diego-based News Revenue Hub — a nonprofit that aims to help news organizations on the path to financial sustainability — has designed toolkits for the campaign and provided coaching to newsrooms. Its support has grown over the years to help newsrooms build frequent campaigning into their yearlong reader revenue strategies.

In 2017, the Miami Foundation became the fiscal sponsor for NewsMatch and engaged a contract project manager to lead the program. INN, which was founded in 2009 to provide support services to its members and promote public-service and investigative journalism, began managing NewsMatch with the hire of a full-time program manager in 2020.

Levers of support

To date, NewsMatch has received contributions from more than 30 partner funders via the Fund for Nonprofit News, an open collaborative fund at the Miami Foundation. The foundation oversees the fiscal administration of NewsMatch funds as well as its application and reporting processes.

In 2023, 15 funding partners supported the program, including the Democracy Fund and the Inasmuch, Independence Public Media and Jonathan Logan Family foundations. NewsMatch also receives in-kind support from the New York Times. Regional and local funders, such as community foundations, also make matching gifts.

NewsMatch galvanizes support for newsrooms through the following methods: national pooled matching funds, which are awarded to news organizations with operating budgets below $1 million; partner matching funds for newsrooms — regardless of size — that focus on specific topics or communities; local matches, which newsrooms solicit independently to boost their matching funds; bonuses awarded to newsrooms that hit specific performance metrics; and individual donations that may be doubled or tripled by the NewsMatch pool matching funders.

At the conclusion of each year’s campaign, outlets are encouraged to participate in the INN Index Survey, which provides a comprehensive look at the nonprofit news ecosystem.

Every cent a newsroom receives through NewsMatch is unrestricted. “For many small startups, this is the only access to unrestricted funding that they can get,” said Stange, who, prior to joining INN, worked at Detroit’s NPR station and oversaw NewsMatch campaigns. “I think that that's very important because it’s a measure of trust in our newsrooms that they know how to best utilize their funds.”

Getting more funders on board

Of course, no-strings-attached funding doesn’t magically appear in outlets’ checking accounts. To procure support, participating newsrooms tap into a campaign toolkit produced in partnership with the News Revenue Hub that includes exportable email and ad templates, social copy and other resources. Stange told me the toolkit’s messaging helps to “amplify the field as a whole and educates individual donors about why they should be supporting them.” 

This outreach extends to funders that haven’t traditionally supported nonprofit journalism. “There’s been a donor education component in terms of getting these large-scale national philanthropies on board, but also regional philanthropies, local funders and individual donors,” Stange said. These efforts have paid impressive dividends for a program in which 70% of participating outlets serve their local communities. In 2017, the campaign had 16 local match funders. By 2022’s campaign, that figure had increased to 795, underscoring how place-based funders’ commitment to restoring local news is driving support across the ecosystem.

The field is also benefiting from funders interested in bankrolling coverage on specific topics. NewsMatch’s partner matching funds award matches to newsrooms that meet specific criteria like topical focus as well as geographic region or audiences served. Last year, 10 regional and national funders bankrolled NewsMatch’s pooled match fund for specific topics and communities to the tune of $1.7 million, including the Knight, Heising-Simons, Hewlett and Walton Family foundations. In 2023, the program is soliciting support for partner funds that align with priorities like climate change/the environment, education, rural newsrooms and inclusion/equity.

“This is one of the ways that we’re appealing to subject-focused funders,” Stange said. “We’re saying, ‘Here's an opportunity for you to just fund environmental journalism or education-related journalism,’ and it creates an opportunity for them to explore what it means to support nonprofit news.” 

“Meeting newsrooms where they are”

The 2022 campaign started off with $4.6 million in matching dollars from partner funders, including the Joyce Foundation, which contributed $50,000 to 10 newsrooms. 

On September 26, Hugh Dellios, the Joyce Foundation’s senior program officer for journalism, joined Stange for a Zoom briefing to walk through NewsMatch. “We do have a journalism program, we do direct grantmaking to journalists, but INN and the Miami Foundation make NewsMatch really easy for us,” Dellios said. “They do all the vetting of the small nonprofit newsrooms to make sure that they are doing good journalism.” Dellios also appreciates how Joyce’s investment “is compounded not only through the match campaign, but through the community of learning where these small, entrepreneurial, innovative newsrooms can learn and work toward a day when they’re more sustainable and more independent.”

When the 2022 campaign concluded, the 303 participating newsrooms had raised more than $5.5 million in additional matching gifts from local funders, including community foundations, small businesses and local philanthropists. (NewsMatch considers “local philanthropists” to be funders that set up a match, rather than making a one-off individual donation.) This was the first time in NewsMatch’s history that outlets secured more matching funds from local funders and organizations ($5.5 million) than from national and regional grantmakers ($4.6 million).

Newsrooms also raised $38.2 million from over 230,000 individuals, many of whom were first-time donors. Adding up all these funding sources, including main match funds, partner funds and goal-based bonuses, the average matching funds size was just under $18,000 per newsroom.  

All of which brings us to 2023’s campaign, which kicks off on November 1. A whopping 353 newsrooms applied to participate, which constitutes 85% of all eligible INN members, and nearly three-quarters of them have operating expenses under $1 million annually. Stange told me she’s approaching the campaign with a deep appreciation for the INN’s vibrant and nuanced member network. “Just like there's not a one-size-fits-all solution for museums, you can’t pull something off the shelf and apply it to every newsroom and expect it to work,” she said. “Supporting a diverse and holistic local news ecosystem means meeting newsrooms where they are.”