It’s the Time of Year to Ask for… Money

Some rules of the road for small-dollar fundraising

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

It’s that season again, time for eggnog, office parties, traveling to be with family—and individual charitable contributions. I don’t drink, don’t go to an office anymore and have happily already begun to see kids and grandkids, so this week I want to discuss smaller online gifts, and the increasingly important role they can and do play for news organizations.

Why small-dollar gifts matter

If a news organization has a large readership, smaller gifts can add up to serious money, although it may take some years before a newsroom reaches this point. (For ProPublica, where I worked, it took eight years, although we didn’t then focus on it closely, and might have been able to accelerate the timing somewhat if we had.) I was fascinated recently to see Associated Press beginning to solicit small gifts.

Before critical mass is reached, achieving a significant number of donations, even if not financially material to a newsroom’s budget, makes an important statement to larger funders, and can provide important affirmation to a hard-working staff as well. The potential for this revenue stream is yet another reason why organically growing one or more newsletters, and a robust email list, should be an early priority for almost any news effort these days.

small gifts can pile up

Why right now?

It’s a bit mysterious why this is such a key time of year for online charitable giving, especially when, since the Trump tax law of 2017, only 10% of taxpayers itemize their deductions and thus stand to gain on taxes from making contributions. (Previously the number was 30%.) But in the sixth tax season since the change in law, it’s pretty clear that the tradition of generosity ingrained before that runs deeper than tax-oriented calculations. ‘Tis still the season.

Giving Tuesday, which came this year on November 28, may be derided in some quarters for the avalanche of email, but there’s no question that it has worked beyond the dreams of its creators. After 12 years, it may be one of the key reasons donations remain concentrated at year-end. It has enabled fundraisers to start seasonal campaigns earlier than they used to, and, for many nonprofits, has become the second largest giving day of the year. (Kudos to my brilliant former ProPublica colleague Jill Shepherd for cleverly coining the offshoot, “Giving News Day.”) New Year’s Eve remains the number one day for online giving; you may be planning on partying, but millions of others will be sitting at their computers, credit cards in hand.

a fundraiser’s New Year’s Eve

Some rules for the road

Major gift fundraising is mostly an art form, but the small-dollar realm has huge elements of science. For those who are new to it, there is lots to learn, about response rates, how to craft effective messages, segmenting audiences and more.

Here are a few of what I think are some key learnings:

• Matches matter. The reason you see all those matching gift appeals? They work. I have argued for the reform of NewsMatch, but there’s no question it has helped a lot of newsrooms. If a newsroom isn’t eligible, or if it is and is likely to exceed the NewsMatch cap, it’s worth lining up a donor who can be counted on to cast their contribution as a proffered match against a sum the newsroom is confident it can raise.

• You are not the audience. In the news business, we abhor repeating ourselves. After all, if we’ve said it before, it’s not news. But in fact, that’s not quite right. The joke about a news organization running a story long after a competitor because “it’s news to us” is an old one, but it has an important germ: News is news when the audience registers it for the first time. On the news side, this frequently happens at the outset (but not nearly as often as we imagine); on the marketing side, the process is most often more delayed. That’s why the test of how many appeals is too many is not when those doing the asking get bored, but when response rates start to fade. This comes much later than you might guess. And it’s also why tried and true messages, such as the most productive from last year, can frequently bear repeating. (The Wall Street Journal used the same subscriber solicitation letter from 1975 until 2003.)

• This is a long game. Ideally, you want monthly recurring gifts, and should always encourage them. But even with folks who prefer otherwise, you should aim for repeat giving. Messaging, including online donate pages and workflows, need to keep that in mind.

• With the long game in mind, desperation (“contributions are down everywhere!” or “we are in danger of failing!”) is rarely the best argument, no matter how pressing the need. It can work in the short term, but not repeatedly. Rather than desperation, focus on aspiration: what value is being provided? What good can be done, or evil thwarted?

• Every season is fundraising season. Larger newsrooms will have staff devoted to small-dollar fundraising, and should be running campaigns periodically all year long. Results demonstrate that far from detracting from year-end tallies, these efforts appear to condition respondents in a way that enhances giving at this time of year, while also producing more modest but still meaningful hauls along the way. Even in smaller operations, and even without NewsMatch, perhaps one campaign per season of the year will make sense. For all newsrooms, the precise timing can be usefully adjusted to follow a relatively big story when that’s possible.

With all that, I hope you will join me, if you have not already, in donating to deserving newsrooms before the year rings to a close. In the early 1960’s, comedian Vaughn Meader’s “First Family” album urged people to “vote for the Kennedy of your choice.” I am similarly agnostic. The important thing is to register your support.