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.
Ways to Help Ukraine, via Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute.
Resources for helping Maui, as well as other climate/natural disasters, via Center for Disaster Philanthropy.
Giving Tuesday tips to kick-off your year-end campaign via Bloomerang.
Global Investigative Jouranlism Conference and tips/resources from previous conferences via GIJN.
ARIJ Forum. ARIJ Forum is the largest annual event for independent media in the Arab world, focusing on honing the skills of journalists and fact-checkers in conducting investigative journalism and exploring new tools and the latest trends in the investigative media field.
Some useful and interesting resources to help us all prepare for whatever 2023 holds:
Emma Löfgren's article in The Fix with a month-by-month to-do list to making your
journalism more constructive and engaging;
Accountability Lab has pulled together a handy checklist of more than 100 ways to make
your organization more inclusive.
The increasing spamminess of my Twitter feed has prompted me to spend less time on
social media generally, but I've appreciated Communications Network's collaborative doc sharing how social change organizations across the sector are thinking about
Twitter, and GIJN's primer on Mastodon for journalists also offers some helpful
guidance.
Impact is a perennial topic of discussion and angst in the mission-driven journalism
space. I've appreciated The Bureau of Investigative Journalism's periodic convenings to compare notes and share strategies. The Markup published a look at their impact-
tracking process, as well as a template for other news organizations to adapt (and theirs
is adapted in turn from Resolve Philly's impact tracker).
International Symposium on Online Journalism in Austin
International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy
RightsCon — San Jose, Costa Rica and online
NLGJA National Convention (LGBTQ journalists) in Philadelphia
Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Gothenburg, Sweden
Comnet in Atlanta
SRCCON in Minneapolis
Global Philanthropy Forum in San Francisco
International Journalism Festival, Perugia, Italy
A guide to relief organizations and funds, background reading and more from TPW.
The state of Ukrainian journalism via The Fix, and ways to support Ukrainian journalists.
Council on Foundation’s tracker of philanthropy’s response.
Center for Disaster Philanthropy’s updates/guides to the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine.
Making Investigative Journalism Sustainable from Splice Media's "How to pitch donors in a pandemic."
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.