To continue the momentum from the Summit and help fundraising professionals from across the field implement best practices, here are five key takeaways from the Lenfest News Philanthropy Summit:

Creating a meaningful value proposition

 

A solid value proposition that tells your newsroom’s story and inspires giving is at the core of any successful fundraising campaign. Journalists may have mastered the art of storytelling about their communities, but organizations often struggle to tell the story about our own organizations.

“Journalism is about ethical storytelling that is the civic glue of a community,” said Ellen Hiatt, the executive director of the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association. “You are already doing this, that’s what’s so powerful — but connecting that to how you fundraise is the next step.”

A growing body of research has shown that conceptual words like “democracy” don’t mean as much to readers as we often think. Andrew Finlayson, executive vice president of digital and AI strategies at SmithGeiger, urged newsrooms to think deeply about what they represent to their audiences — not just what they produce — and to integrate values like independence, helpfulness, authenticity, and accountability into both coverage and donor messaging.

For Patrick Boehler’s work at Gazzetta, this looks like framing an organization’s work around “service,” which reorients journalism around its function in people’s lives, including opening conversations, asking questions that are relevant to community members, connecting people, and distributing useful information.

Making asks that make sense

 

While so much of fundraising requires appealing to your audiences and their interests, Mallory Mitchell, co-founder of Aligned Strategy Group, said it’s important to start the fundraising process by looking within: Money is an emotionally charged topic, and your personal feelings about it can block you from raising what you need.

A common way this manifests in newsrooms is a fear of being too bold and making asks too often during fundraising campaigns. But for VTDigger, its 140% membership growth over the past 5 years is due, in part, to increasing the frequency of its asks during campaigns.

“When I first joined VTDigger, we would send three emails a week, maybe, during membership drives, and now we do daily emails during our membership drives,” said Director of Membership & Engagement Libbie Sparadeo. “We added a lot of different call-to-action vehicles … in addition to email and direct mail, we now have calls to action as newsletter toppers and also website prompts and pop ups.”

Data can be used to segment fundraising emails, including statistics on engagement behavior (such as email open time or article topics), donation size and frequency, and content preferences, according to Tradeoffs Director of Marketing and Audience Kathryn Dugal.

“It’s really great when someone donates to you and they tell you explicitly what they love, but they don’t have to explicitly tell you, because they’re telling you with their eyeballs, with their clicks, and with the things they’re engaging with — and also the things that they’re not engaging with,” Dugal said.

Kimberly Griffin, founding publisher and chief revenue officer of Mississippi Free Press, said organizations can tailor their ask by simply listening carefully to what language donors use to describe their passions or interests and then framing their work using similar keywords.

Engaging the newsroom for fundraising

 

Many fundraisers have found success through incorporating editorial staff in their work while still maintaining clear boundaries between journalists and donors, but doing so requires building trust.

When New York Times Vice President of Philanthropic Partnerships Marcia Parker worked at CalMatters, staff were regularly briefed on the organization’s finances. Sarah Walton, chief philanthropy officer at The Baltimore Banner, said the fundraising team regularly hosts Q&As for the editorial staff to help reporters understand the role of fundraising.

“They wanted to know more,” Walton said. “They want us to be sustainable, and they know they have a role in doing so.”

Parker, along with Sparadeo at VTDigger and Ron Van Ormer, managing director at The Ithaca Voice, have all found success with running campaigns that are addressed from editors or reporters. Walton brings in reporters for fundraising events to talk about their work, and Kimberly Spencer, director of the Colorado Media Project, recommended asking reporters to collect stories on the impact of their work that can be relayed to donors.

Leveraging events for fundraising

 

Events can help drive revenue — whether through paid tickets or sponsorships — or can be used to provide additional value for members or donors. But how to incorporate events into your fundraising work will differ from newsroom to newsroom, and it’s important to evaluate what the best use of your time and resources will be, as events can be expensive and time-consuming to produce.

Josh Barousse, co-founder & executive director of San José Spotlight, said public events have become a key part of its value proposition: “Our community looks to us to be the convenor of community dialogue.”

Others, like Griffin of Mississippi Free Press or Parker of The New York Times, said depending on what your donors are interested in, events can be used as a way to engage with key donors or VIP members more deeply rather than for casual readers.

Building meaningful, long-term donor engagement

 

Relationships aren’t built overnight — they require consistent time and effort. But putting in that effort can move your organization away from one-time asks and small dollar gifts toward larger, multi-year investments.

“Slow and steady is the way you’re supposed to go,” Spencer said. “If you’re going on a first date, you don’t pull out an engagement ring. Same goes for donors.”

In their keynote, Spencer and Griffin shared tips for deepening donor cultivation.

The most basic first step is mastering the art of saying thank you — to everyone. Griffin calls every single donor to personally say thank you, regardless of the size of their gift. Just because someone is a small dollar donor doesn’t mean they don’t have the capacity to give more, and by calling to personally express gratitude, you open the conversation for the individual to learn more about the organization and become more deeply engaged.

Navigating prospect lists can be daunting, especially for small or single-person fundraising operations. Spencer’s advice to get started: Identify five people from your prospect list — whether it be from wealth screenings, board connections, or other well-known philanthropists in the community — who have the capacity to give more and map out a cultivation roadmap for the next six months. Not everyone will be receptive, and the process will involve several meetings with the sole purpose of getting to know the prospect and their values, not for making an ask right away.

But as you invest time and resources into relationship-building, you’ll find it may not just lead to monetary gains: Donors who believe strongly in your work often become community advocates for your organization.

“At the end of the day, we are the middlemen,” Griffin said. “I look at my job as I’m trying to help the donor have the impact they want to have on the world. I am the conduit for that.”

Lenfest will be sharing more takeaways from the Lenfest News Philanthropy Summit in the coming weeks. Join the Lenfest News Philanthropy Network’s mailing listfor more on the Summit and for additional resources on news fundraising. 

Crossposted from the Lenfest Institute.