Individual Giving 

Individual Giving Overview

Here you'll find steps to follow when planning a crowdfunding campaign.

Rules of Thumb

1. In order to receive donations, individuals/foundations/corporations need to know that your newsroom accepts donations. Telling this story takes time.

2. If you don’t ask for donations, you won't get them. 

3. Donors are like shareholders, they are investing in your newsroom; treat them like partners in your success story. 

4. Most funders want to invest in the success of the beat (i.e. environment, mental health, local government accountability, education, health care, and so on); focus on the impact of community knowledge and engagement around the beat and the funding will follow. 

5. Your most likely donor is the person who just made a gift, they're already invested in your work. When you cultivate them and share updates on how their funding has helped you achieve past successes they will continue to fund your work. 

Email Addresses 

Your crowdfunding campaign is an artful repurposing of the emails you already have (newsletters, current subscribers). We call these your stakeholders, the people who are already familiar with your work and care about your newsroom in some form or another. 

A successful campaign is an appeal to turn those emails into donors. 

Match funding

Match campaigns are a proven tool to increase donor participation and increase your campaign total. 

Don’t forget that we are your match. You can frame the Report For America grant as a match. "Report for America has agreed to match every dollar we raise up to XX, and we need your help to support this new journalist!" 

You can also engage a local major donor or your local community foundation to see if they would be willing to also match funds for your campaign. 

Simple message

The most successful crowdfunding campaigns have kept the message clear and straightforward.

In a recent study of why donors gave to RFA newsrooms, the top four motivations behind their donations were: a desire to support local newsrooms, local information, democracy, and truth. These are all themes to highlight in your campaign. Additionally, you may want to touch on some of the following points:

• This national program targets improving the quality and quantity of local news. The crisis in LOCAL journalism has become a crisis for our democracy. 

• Now four years old, Report for America will deploy 300 talented, service-oriented journalists to report on under-covered topics such as health, education, immigration, climate, and justice. Our corps members improve communities and hold powerful institutions accountable.

• We are catalyzing a movement of public service journalism that strengthens democracy by improving the quality and quantity of local news. 

• More than $10 million in local and national philanthropy has been generated for this.

Banner/Newsletter

Whatever campaign you’ve created for your emails, tie them into other aspects of your work, e.g., banner, social media, website, newsletter. Hit hard, hit often. Hit it on all platforms. Email alone is okay but try and integrate it into other aspects of your organization to increase your exposure and the number of times potential donors see your message. Make it feel like an event! You are excited to ask people to support your corps member. This is an opportunity for readers to engage in civic duty / local journalism in this novel way. Additionally, many newsrooms also do a series of op-eds explaining this, starting with the editor and ending with the corps member.

Photos

Our most successful local news campaigns have featured photos of the corps members in the newsroom and reporting in the field. Photos of the impact of the story (corps member at work, the effect of story, local iconic site) that engages and connects donors to your campaign. 

Graphics

Please be sure to add Report For America Logos to your material. You can also use the ready-made Corps member Customizable Graphics to create your material. These can be found in the Resources tab.

Newsroom-specific crowdfunding link

Each newsroom has a newsroom-specific link for a crowdfunding campaign and a donation site set up for your specific newsroom. To see the list of newsrooms using these campaigns visit this page and click on one of the newsrooms.  

Time limit / urgency

Make your campaign time-limited and, if possible, tied to a match is an excellent way to increase participation. Time-limited campaigns can be run two different ways:

• Email a week for five weeks or an intensive 48 hr. campaign. Set a timeframe for your campaign.  Saying, “We have 48 hours left to meet our match of $XXX. Will you help support local news?” is an effective donation tool. 

• Plug it regularly but 2-3 times a year, launch a campaign that is targeted, focused. It can run one email a week for five weeks or an intense 5-day campaign. It can be tied to a special event (e.g., the anniversary of the newsroom) or a community celebration, or you can launch it at a time that makes sense. It’s good to make sure that one of these is an end of the year campaign scheduled (e.g. Nov-to end of the year).