For most of the day, I’ve been thinking about the remarks I’m going to make at the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism’s excellent 10th anniversary fundraiser “Roast the News” this Saturday (click here to buy tickets!). So I figured I might as well make my bullet points into an editorial. Because I’ve covered aspects of the ideas I’ll be discussing this weekend in my writing from time to time, but I’ve never put them together in one article until now.
The main issue at hand is the conceit in nonprofit journalism circles that the way for nonprofit news organizations to achieve fiscal independence over time is to raise roughly 70% of our annual budgets from smaller individual donations and around 30% from generally larger institutional grants.
However, with BINJ celebrating the increasingly rare milestone for a journalism outfit of being in operation for more than a decade, my partners and I can say with certainty that this formula is exactly backwards.
Because most people are no longer willing to pay for news. They expect to get it for free. And most people are struggling economically, making it even less likely that they can donate money to organizations like ours in support of the journalism we produce all year every year even if we manage to convince them to do so.
Which makes getting smaller individual donations—say $10 to $1,000 per person per year—from the sizable number of people necessary to equal 70% of our tiny budget (which has hovered around merely a quarter million dollars a year for years) extremely hard. In a good year, BINJ might just manage to bring in 30% of our budget from individual donations. In a bad year, not even that much.
The rest of our budget, then, obviously needs to come from large institutional and individual donations.
Problem is, there are very few grants for journalism in the US relative to the scale of the swift-growing need for funding it—even with some recent attempts to increase the amount of money on offer to our industry—and identifying wealthy individuals willing to donate larger sums to nonprofit news organizations is more difficult than trying to find needles in a great number of imaginary haystacks.
Meaning that BINJ often misses our annual budget targets after pulling in what few larger donations we can scrape up. Forcing us to live hand to mouth. And putting our continued survival into question every year since our founding in 2015. This year being no different than any other in that regard.
As the American economy continues to get worse, it’s only a matter of time until we can’t make ends meet any more—even with our extremely modest 3.25 person staff and spartan budget bereft of any frills of any kind (like, you know, benefits to plump out our small and inoffensive salaries).
What BINJ needs to survive this growing economic storm is friends who can make direct and personal connections for us with institutional donors and individual “high donors.”
That is, organizations that think journalism is beneficial to their mission and rich people who think journalism is important for our democracy.
As a news project with a broadly left-wing editorial line, it’s been clear to us since our inception who these prospective big donors should be: left-leaning labor unions, foundations, religious denominations, and nonprofit groups … plus wealthy progressives.
But while we have gotten a couple of dozen major donations overall and while most of them have indeed come from a handful of progressive individuals and one institution that could be viewed as left-leaning, we have barely received enough funds to make it to this point. More than once, we have actually been forced to work without sufficient funds while waiting weeks or even months for eagerly awaited donations to come in.
And perhaps that’s why we have survived—because we’re committed enough to providing journalism in the public interest to keep going when we’re totally broke. To simply refuse to go under. Yet we know that kind of mendicant strategy won’t work forever.
So we are appealing to you, readers who we hope will consider yourselves to be our friends, to help us make the kinds of connections with left-leaning institutions and individuals that we need to raise the money that will help us keep going for years to come.
Of course, we are grateful for donations of any size that anyone is willing to give us. But if we can increase BINJ’s budget to over $300,000 per year consistently, it would be a game-changer.
Because we’d finally be able to hire the additional business staffers we need to up our fundraising and marketing games enough to ensure that we no longer need to live hand to mouth.
Allowing us to put out more news that you all can use than ever before. And keep it coming.
Please mull all this over. And if you know higher-ups in Massachusetts-based labor unions, foundations, religious denominations, or nonprofits on the political left or progressive individuals with means and a strong interest in journalism, then we’d love it if you drop us a line at info@binj.news. Thanks.
This editorial was produced for BINJ.News, the independent weekly magazine of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, and is syndicated by BINJ’s MassWire news service.
