March 28, 2025

The nationwide NewsMatch program, now heading into its 10th year, has greatly increased nonprofit news organizations’ ability to attract donors and diversify funding — during a prolonged period of contraction and instability in the news industry. The 381 nonprofit outlets participating in the year-end 2024 NewsMatch campaign secured more than $55 million in individual donations from their audiences — an 18% increase compared to 2023, and the highest in program history. 

NewsMatch is a collaborative effort: The Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) raises money to seed a pooled fund for matching gifts (held at The Miami Foundation), and participating organizations fundraise with their audiences in November and December to become eligible for those gifts. Participants also receive fundraising training, tools and services through INN and its partner News Revenue Hub. Over nine NewsMatch campaign cycles, INN and the outlets in its network have raised more than $400 million, attracting donations from nearly half a million first-time donors and, increasingly, persuading major donors, regional and community foundations and businesses to add news to their giving portfolios. 

That’s a significant culture shift from NewsMatch’s launch by Knight Foundation in 2016, when program evaluators noted that some nonprofit news organizations had not been asking their audiences to donate at all. Today, the impact of INN’s NewsMatch in changing the practices of nonprofit newsrooms is evident. Three-quarters of NewsMatch participants in 2024 reported conducting multiple fundraising campaigns during the calendar year, and 6 in 10 secured their own year-end local matches from major donors, community foundations and local businesses. INN expanded the pool of NewsMatch funders from one in 2016 to 21 last year.

NewsMatch is much more than just the matching dollars. INN has increased training, too. Last year, NewsMatch hosted more than 170 individual coaching sessions and 15 webinars and small-group calls to support more than 250 newsrooms in developing and enhancing their fundraising strategies. Throughout the year, INN members leverage member benefits like donor wealth screenings and office hours with experts to build out their fundraising programs.

INN’s Executive Director and CEO Karen Rundlet calls NewsMatch “a conversation between newsrooms and their communities.”

“When a neighbor, a reader, a PTA president, a block captain, a concerned voter donates $10, $25, $100 to NewsMatch participants, it’s evidence that the community is investing in accurate and trusted information and reporting,” says Rundlet. “It’s the audience saying, ‘It matters that this exists, and I’m supporting it with my money.” 

Looking ahead, Rundlet says INN’s NewsMatch will continue innovating and fundraising in 2025, noting recent experiments with pop-up newsroom fundraising campaigns during the year and INN’s goal of doubling the $5 million in funder commitments for NewsMatch 2025 to $10 million

News organizations that have participated in INN’s NewsMatch for years say it has changed how they conduct fundraising.

“It’s hard to overstate the impact of NewsMatch. When VTDigger was smaller, it gave us our first matches and helped our membership program develop and expand,” says Libbie Sparadeo, director of membership and engagement for the statewide VTDigger, which was founded in 2009 and joined INN two years later. “As a larger sustaining organization now, we have less access to funding from foundations that want to invest in startups, but we still need to fundraise more than ever. NewsMatch has grown and shifted with us.”

One way INN’s NewsMatch has shifted is by supporting newsrooms with services, content and coaching that helps them cultivate major donors and seek matching gifts from local philanthropic individuals, businesses and family-run foundations.

Peter Gignac of Asheville, North Carolina is one of the more than 1,000 supporters who stepped up to provide additional match funds to a participating newsroom, Asheville Watchdog, during NewsMatch this year. Gignac, 80, and his wife are long-time Asheville residents who founded and ran three furniture stores, then started purchasing commercial properties, and became full-time investors when they sold their business about a decade ago. 

“We appreciated the fact that Asheville Watchdog was willing to tackle issues that our local newspaper ignored either intentionally or through lack of interest,” Gignac says, noting that the local newspaper had “eliminated” many of its journalists. “When the Watchdog exposed a fraud against poor people, mostly minorities, I was determined to be a financial supporter.”

Gignac credits Asheville Watchdog with launching an investigation that exposed threats to the quality of care at the local nonprofit hospital after it was purchased by a large, for-profit system.

“I ask everyone interested in knowing what is really transpiring in their community to support journalists like we have here at Asheville Watchdog,” Gignac says.

As NewsMatch has mobilized individuals to support the news they need, it has also activated foundations to support news for the communities they serve.

“The Barr Foundation had been one of those funders thinking, ‘We’re really not journalism funders,’” says Stefan Lanfer, communications director at the Barr Foundation in Boston, which makes grants in New England and gave to INN’s NewsMatch for the first time in 2024. “At the same time, we were growing increasingly concerned about the state of local news and impressed by how important strong local news can be to the communities we care about.”

Lanfer explained that the foundation wasn’t about to start up a new grantmaking program or hire new staff, so it needed a partner with “deep, trusting relationships in local newsrooms across our region, who understood their needs and opportunities, and who could get them the resources and supports they needed to step up their work and impact.”

Barr’s first contribution to INN’s NewsMatch was leveraged as matching gifts of between $2,000 to $20,000 to the 42 participating New England newsrooms, which collectively raised $3.9 million.

“NewsMatch was exactly the partner we hoped to find,” Lanfer says.

About INN’s NewsMatch

NewsMatch is a collaborative fundraising movement designed to attract and diversify nonprofit news supporters. The program engages small-dollar contributors, major donors, local foundations, and small businesses in the nonprofit news field by leveraging the power of matching campaigns and advancing newsroom skills to generate individual giving. All participating newsrooms are members of the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) Network.

In 2024, a record number of 21 funders supported NewsMatch: Barr Foundation, DAFGiving 360, Democracy Fund, Heising-Simons Foundation, Henry-Luce Foundation, Independence Public Media Foundation, Inasmuch Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, Joyce Foundation, Kaphan Foundation, Loud Hound, Maida Lynn, McKnight Foundation, Solidarity Giving, Tow Foundation, Walton Family Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Wyncote Foundation. In-kind support was provided by The New York Times. The collaborative fund is held by The Miami Foundation, and campaign support is provided by News Revenue Hub.