What’s the most audacious vision of success you have for your organization? We invite our clients to brainstorm what the most optimistic vision of the future looks like – and then work backwards from there to talk about the activities we need to implement to realize this vision, the resources we need to do so, and the benchmarks and impact we measure.
How do you help your donors know your organization better? We’ll work to inventory connections and relationships that can help access the donors you want and develop a strategy of polite persistence to put them on a pathway to support.
Who are the best prospects for supporting your work? With an understanding of your programs and priorities, we can help identify prospective donors and provide the intelligence you need to prepare your approach.
What’s working well in your development operation, and what could be working better? Our consulting shop will strategically help you inventory your current donor relationships, past approaches (successful and unsuccessful), programs, and messaging to target your best opportunities for expanding your donors, increasing gifts, or defining fundraising opportunities around projects/programs.
How succinctly and successfully can you articulate what you do and why it matters? From evaluating and tweaking existing language to crafting mission statement and case for support language from scratch, we can help your messaging resonate with the donors you want to gain and keep.
Is the board helping or holding you back? Whether you’re a startup, longstanding institution, or organization in transition, orienting board members to the ways they can help secure the resources you need, and demystifying the fundraising process, can help foster more productive board engagement.
Making Investigative Journalism Sustainable from Splice Media's "How to pitch donors in a pandemic."
Even without hopping on planes it has felt like a busy conference season. Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism is taking their annual forum virtual for the first time this year – registration is free and offers the opportunity to connect with journalists and media professionals from across the Middle East and around the world and explore topics from COVID-10’s impact on the region to press freedom and information access to making media businesses more sustainable (including a proposal-writing workshop from yours truly).
In September, Splice Beta offered a virtual buffet of smart tips and strategies for media startups in Asia that media organizations anywhere and at any stage of growth might find worthwhile – you can browse their archive and synopses here. I had a great time talking shop with my GIJN colleague Caroline Langston Jarboe and we got some great questions from participants. The Splice team also offers an extremely smart and helpful primer on how to organize your virtual event/conference in a way that preserves a feeling of community and inclusion.
Even among mission-driven nonprofit newsrooms founded to disrupt the status quo and diversify the voices and stories represented in media, there is extensive room for improvement, INN’s recent report demonstrates. They’ve also produced a helpful roundup of resources for advancing conversations about diversity and dismantling racism in newsrooms and organizations, with contributions from folks from the Ford Foundation, Center for Cooperative Media, The 19th*, and others. This fall’s call to action and report from a consortium of journalism funders highlights the need to invest more in leadership and communities of color and center decision-making in these communities.
I’ve appreciated the work Community-Centric Fundraising is doing to reorient fundraising conversations around the good of the entire community and as transformational rather than transactional. The always astute Vu Le, one of CCF’s leaders, has called worthwhile attention to some of the nonprofit field’s problematic paradoxes and opportunities to shift the conversation to how we can best advance social and economic justice rather than just raise the most money.
And Women of Color in Fundraising and Philanthropy is a wonderful new resource for recruiting and networking that has helped showcase the voices and achievements of the diverse women in this field.
Journalists around the world are seeing a rise in social media-disseminated disinformation and online harassment, but also increased trust and engagement from their audiences, according to this ICFJ-Tow Center report.
Mississippi Today’s Mary Margaret White outlines what it takes for a news organization to commit to deep community engagement and relationship-building in this piece authored for the Listening Post Collective.
Foreign correspondents’ take on what it’s like to cover the US offers a welcome dose of perspective post-Election Day.
Highlights and tips for the global giving day scheduled for May 5th by GivingTuesday.org.
A collaborative list of tips and resources from journalism industry leaders for nonprofit newsrooms.
INN's COVID19 Resource page has handy shortcuts to fund opportunities, training, tech support, legal resources and more for nonprofit news organizations.
GIJN offers resources, tips and tools with a more global lens, including a series of COVID19-focused webinars (join me for Thursday, April 16th discussion on strategies for financial survival).
This series examines media entrepreneurship around the world in the current climate with some practical strategies for business planning and financial management.
Media Impact Funders has curated a helpful collection of resources for assessing impact in the COVID19 context.
The Chronicle is updating its coronavirus-related content daily, including disaster and financial planning for organizations.
ComNet has an exceptionally helpful Comms Triage Kit for telling your story and communicating with your constituents and your donors.
This consulting firm has a national reach with offices in Oakland, CA to NYC. M+R shares savvy strategies for media outreach and advocacy.
Vu-Le ("voo-lay") created Nonprofit AF to provide a no-nonsense (and humorous) take on where philanthropy should go from here.
The Nonprofit Alliance helps interpret the CARES Act provisions relevant to nonprofits, as does NonProfit Quarterly.
NYCON offers a wide range of resources and guidance ranging from practical tips for managing remote work to policy.
Growing your major gifts program — or getting one started in the first place — can feel like an overwhelming responsibility. The philanthropic landscape is extremely competitive, and the prospect of identifying and soliciting prospective donors can seem cumbersome and intimidating.
While the non-profit journalism landscape has flourished, opening up new revenue streams and business models to support mission-driven news, many organizations continue to rely on major gifts from foundations, high net-worth individuals, governments and multilateral organizations for the large investments they need to start up, Read the full primer for prospecting and cultivating donors.
It's always worth reminding yourself that "nonprofit is a tax status, not a business model," as the trope goes. Breaking outside the nonprofit press silo sometimes yields some helpful ideas and food for thought:
The Met, Anywhere: Online Resources (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Camus on the Coronavirus (New York Times)