Having started as an alliance of 27 investigative news organizations in 2009, the Institute for Nonprofit News has since grown into a network of 500+ independent newsrooms that cover everything from hyperlocal topics to the most pressing global issues of our time. After more than 15 years, INN has reached a place where it is no longer enough for nonprofit newsrooms to exist, or even for more of them to exist, without a path towards a sustainable, long term future. In an age of declining trust and civic disengagement, we need strong newsrooms with deep, meaningful, genuine relationships to the communities they serve, and we need them to be around for the long haul.
We believe that shifting from growth of the field to strength of the field is the key to enabling the network to fulfill its promise of delivering essential news and information to communities across North America. As part of this shift, INN is prioritizing programs that will help our members pursue four key outcomes:
- INCREASED REVENUE: Acquisition and diversification of financial support from donors, sponsors and funders
- INCREASED REACH: Growth of direct audiences that are reached through channels newsrooms operate
- PUBLIC FUNDING: Inclusion in policies that generate public funding for nonprofit news organizations
- PUBLIC DEVOTION: Engagement with civic allies and members of the public not currently connected with nonprofit news
We think of these outcomes as interconnected pillars: if audience work can help members shift from a mostly redistribution model to a direct audience model, then public engagement can push people in their direction, revenue work can help them convert that attention into donor support, and public funding can supplement what direct fundraising and earned revenue can’t cover for mission-based newsrooms.
We live in fractured times, but INN sees nonprofit news as a force that can rebuild trust in media, ultimately connecting communities and revitalizing public life.
Revenue Goals
Acquiring and diversifying financial support is essential for any nonprofit business to be able to weather the ebbs and flows of a changing funding landscape over the long haul. When INN first launched NewsMatch ten years ago, the traditional nonprofit end-of-year fundraiser was a nascent concept to many nonprofit news organizations. Today, virtually every INN member runs an end-of-year fundraising campaign, whether they participate in NewsMatch or not. Now that we have set a common practice for the field, our sights are set on helping our members level up even further. If INN newsrooms can stand up end-of-year campaigns, then they also have the skills and know-how to expand those campaigns into year-round efforts that can target more specific communities of support. And if they’re consistently acquiring new donors through those campaigns, they also likely already have a pool of potential donors who can engage with the organization more deeply as mid-level donors, a current segment that is largely untapped at the current moment. INN will help them find them.
With this new strategic focus, INN is shifting away from theoretical training and towards designing and implementing programs that prioritize achieving results in real-time. Our solutions leverage the scale of the INN Network to enable newsrooms to operate in ways they could not on their own. We aim to help 80% of member organizations acquire new financial supporters or move existing supporters to higher giving levels by June 2028.
Audience Goals
Audience is the existential question of the moment, particularly in the age of artificial intelligence. Just as INN’s NewsMatch helped ingrain the end-of-year fundraising practice among our members, our focus on audience work aims to reorient an industry that was once built almost exclusively around redistribution to shift towards direct audience.
Providing free access to content has been a cornerstone of the nonprofit news movement since its inception. For years, redistributing content through a variety of third-party platforms and partnerships enabled millions of people to benefit from news as a public service. But an overreliance on redistribution has not only made it hard to measure impact for newsrooms that are often called to prove it for funding, but it’s made them increasingly susceptible to the changing whims of tech platforms and social media. The advent of AI summaries is only accelerating the recognition gap between readers/consumers and publishers.
For individual nonprofit news organizations, having direct lines of communication with the people who consume their news enables them to build relationships that are the cornerstone of impactful reporting and the very pipeline that leads to membership, donations and even sponsorships.
INN’s collaboration with members includes creating audience measurement standards and identifying what is needed to shift the field from a focus on redistribution to direct audience acquisition. We are also educating both newsroom leaders and funders on the importance of prioritizing audience work as mission-critical.
Examples of this work range from our DIY audience survey template to working groups participating in the Audience Studio to an annual event featuring leading experts and researchers at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.
Over the next two years, INN expects to work with at least 150 members to develop and test best practices and share these findings with the nonprofit news field to set a new standard.
Policy Goals
While we at INN have been talking about nonprofit news for over fifteen years, the field as a whole is still relatively young. And when it comes to public policy, our corner of the field is almost invisible. In light of federal funding cuts for public media, some state legislatures are developing innovative policies that seek to direct dollars to local media organizations. However, lacking familiarity with the nonprofit news model, many of these policy proposals inadvertently leave out small, digital-first nonprofit news organizations. INN’s policy work aims to ensure that nonprofit news is included in these policies.
Our efforts include identifying promising new state-level policies geared toward news—as well as existing policies around nonprofits and small businesses that might be extended to support INN members—and mobilizing INN leaders to participate in the public funding policy process. We are also monitoring policy at all levels of government that might threaten the business viability of nonprofit news organizations.
Our goal is to support the development of policies in at least three jurisdictions that attract funding for nonprofit news organizations.
Public Engagement Goals
While our audience goals are geared towards our members’ technical capacity to shift from redistribution to direct audience, our public engagement goals are the flip side of the same coin. Representing over 500 nonprofit newsrooms, INN is uniquely positioned to take on a public campaign on behalf of the network in order to drive public awareness, understanding, and affection for “nonprofit news” – a term that the general public is still largely unaware of.
Research shows that Americans’ attitudes toward “the media” has changed dramatically over the last two decades, with declining trust, partisan divides and social media all contributing to the public’s lack of interest in traditional news sources. Yet we know that people still value—and need—true, useful news and information in their day to day lives. INN’s public engagement work seeks to expand the community of institutions and individuals that are committed to nonprofit news as a public good.
To accomplish this, INN is developing an outreach campaign centering INN Network newsrooms as nonprofit organizations that serve and are supported by their communities.
We are also seeking to partner with civic organizations that can bolster community affinity, support our policy efforts, and/or help us drive non-traditional resources to our members.
We expect to host collaborative public events designed to meet people where they are in at least three geographies, thus sparking two-way conversations between member newsrooms and their communities.
Organizational Goals
INN is, first and foremost, a membership organization. Achieving our goals around revenue, audience, policy, and public engagement depends upon a cohesive and engaged network of member organizations committed to a tradition of deep collaboration. INN will continue to foster our community by serving as conveners to bring news leaders together with technologists and business strategists; connecting members to vetted service providers and negotiating discounts on critical services on our members’ behalf; conducting original research to identify trends in the field and the needs of segments within it; and of course, upholding and evolving our INN member standards.
As a trusted partner to so many of our members, INN is also committed to strengthening our own earned revenue strategies to ensure that we are here for our members for the long haul.
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