At a time of cuts and consolidation in the news media industry, a special program continues to support hundreds of nonprofit news outlets to not only stay in business but to grow. Last month, the Institute for Nonprofit News released the NewsMatch at 10 Impact Report, which outlines how INN’s NewsMatch has powered the nonprofit news movement since 2016; the program has helped independent news organizations increase their fundraising savvy and grow individual donor revenue.
For news outlets participating in the program between 2021-2025, the average number of annual donors shot up, with the portion of donors making gifts above $1,000 more than doubling. In that same cohort, the outlets’ average number of staff has grown by 25 percent.
INN’s NewsMatch combines matching dollars, fundraising training and resources with a shared digital toolkit, helping participating newsrooms attract donations from their audiences and earn matching gifts from a pooled fund that INN assembles from multiple funders.
A decade in, we explored how three nonprofit newsrooms that have participated in NewsMatch since its inception have leveraged the NewsMatch dollars, training, resources and the national campaign to charge their long-term sustainability.
Center for Michigan: Localized information for a large state
In 2017, when the nonprofit Center for Michigan launched the year-end NewsMatch fundraising campaign for its statewide news outlet Bridge Michigan, fewer than 1,000 people contributed. Last year, Bridge Michigan and its sister publication Bridge Detroit engaged 5,500 donors between November and December – raising nearly half a million dollars.
“The version of Center for Michigan that you see now with the revenue and operations team that’s pretty robust for an organization of our size, that’s not something that existed back in ‘16 and ‘17,” said Laurén Abdel-Razzaq, executive editor of Bridge Detroit, which launched in 2020 to provide local information. “That [function] was growing, and really where it hit its stride was because during the pandemic, Bridge Michigan came out with the most comprehensive and updated COVID outbreak map, and that led to so many subscribers and web views.”
Sally Freels, Center for Michigan’s director of membership and individual giving, explains that the Center was able to harness the audiences who came for essential information and “parlay that into donations.” This shifted the organization’s budget from a reliance on founding gifts and seed funding to a greater role for individual fundraising.
She notes that Michigan is a very large state: they could drive from Detroit to New York City in about the time it takes them to reach the edge of the Upper Peninsula, which is predominantly rural. Bridge Michigan has added a regional editor just to oversee coverage of northern and western Michigan.
Over the years, the NewsMatch campaign and matching funds have given the organization more flexibility to engage with communities across the state, Freels said.
“We aren’t, thankfully, an organization that is going to be ‘make or break’ by NewsMatch, right? It is an amazing extra for us that allows us to just go a little bit deeper,” said Freels. “We can be a little bit more personalized, more into the community, to have time to do that work, which is only helping us expand our major gift fundraising. So being places, visiting people in their cities, going to community events…. we’ve been able to expand our work with a deeper reach.”
Voice of OC: Watchdog coverage of Orange County
Voice of OC was founded in 2009 to serve one California county with a budget that has long hovered in the mid-six figures.
Amanda Santana did not have a fundraising background when she became Voice of OC’s director of marketing and development in 2022, so she took advantage of INN’s year-round offerings, including participating in the Major Gifts Cohort, Office Hours with Network Philanthropy Director Stephanie Schenkel and free wealth screenings of donors – in addition to NewsMatch.
“The small dollar donors are kind of like the silent heroes of fundraising,” said Santana. “The real campaign is made up by people who donate between $25 and $100 one time. People who are committing to between $5 and $25 a month as a new recurring donor. And that’s really laid the foundation for us.”
Over the past five years, Voice of OC has secured 15 local matches during NewsMatch. These primarily come from what Santana considers mid-level donors – a cohort of about 70 donors that consistently give $1,000 or more.
Since participating in NewsMatch, the outlet has been able to raise between a quarter and a half of its revenue from donations made in just the last two months of the year. While that’s helpful, Santana wanted to take “the lessons of NewsMatch” and apply them through the first half of the year. She has launched pop-up fundraising days around Student Press Freedom Day, World Press Freedom Day and Sunshine Week.
“So now we’re having a more balanced budget across the year.”
This year-round approach will now be supported by INN, which announced that starting in 2027 NewsMatch will pilot Catalyst Campaigns, offering $20,000 in matching grants to select newsrooms to support innovative ideas for donor matching and challenge campaigns throughout the year.
The Connecticut Mirror: Public policy reporting that wins prizes
When Bruce Putterman took the role of publisher in 2017, The Connecticut Mirror’s budget was just under $1 million and supported 8 full-time journalists and staffers focused on the state’s policy and politics. By the time the outlet won a 2026 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, it had quadrupled its annual revenue, more than tripled the dollars raised from individuals in year-end giving and more than tripled its staff.
“So for someone who’s reading CT Mirror, NewsMatch now is part of their life cycle with us.”
Clare Dignan, Chief Growth Officer, The Connecticut Mirror
Participating in the inaugural NewsMatch in 2016 was “the first real concerted, proactive effort to raise small dollar donations,” Putterman said. It changed the way the investigative news organization related to readers by making them think through what CT Mirror’s value proposition was and tweaking it every year.
“It wasn’t just helpful for the email appeals,” Putterman said. “It was just in general helpful thinking through how we talk to people in other modalities: you know, telephone calls, in-person meetings, events.”
A grant from the American Journalism Project in 2020 allowed CT Mirror to expand its business side, and today the organization’s staff include a director of engagement, an events and marketing manager, and a membership support specialist. Chief Growth Officer Clare Dignan leads fundraising.
“One of the evolutions we’ve had with our small dollar fundraising is that we’ve brought it much closer together with the audience work, and we really think about both things simultaneously as an entire experience with CT Mirror,” said Dignan. “So for someone who’s reading CT Mirror, NewsMatch now is part of their life cycle with us. And every year, it’s part of a reader’s education around what CT Mirror is: we’re a non-profit, we fundraise and we rely on those individuals.”
NewsMatch At-a-Glance
Nonprofit newsrooms apply to become members of the Institute for Nonprofit News based on their ability to meet INN’s standards for editorial independence, original news reporting, financial transparency and other factors determined by INN’s board of directors.
Through NewsMatch, the INN team provides members with fundraising training, resources and access to matching gifts that empower news organizations to build relationships with the audiences they serve – and increase revenue from individual donations and major gifts.
In total, newsrooms participating in INN’s NewsMatch have leveraged $45 million in funding to help raise nearly 10 times that amount from their audiences while inspiring more than 600,000 people to donate to a nonprofit newsroom for the first time.
Learn more at inn.org/newsmatch
