New resource helps match nonprofit media with funders

Credit: Katt Yukawa on Unsplash

Whether you are looking for new ways to finance your work or kickstart a project, there are funders out there who want to support journalism.

But discovering and evaluating these sources takes a lot of time, effort and (wo)manpower, all of which are often in short supply.

Luckily, strategic coach and founder of Evenly Distributed agency Adam Thomas did part of the legwork for you. During his career, especially when he worked at the European Journalism Centre, he developed a spreadsheet to optimise his sales and fundraising efforts, which he now made public.

"I spent a lot of time studying personal productivity systems, and also the habits of talented salespeople, and realised I could apply many of their approaches to systematise fundraising and - hopefully - get a better return on the time I was investing in it," he told Journalism.co.uk.

The number of nonprofit newsrooms is growing and so is the amount of funding available, but the demand by far outstrips supply. The UK's move to make journalism a charitable activity is only going to increase the competition for philanthropic funding, which is already scarcer than in other countries like the US.

Read more: Four tips for journalists applying for foundation grants

So, Thomas’s "fundraising engine" helps journalists and media organisations prioritise funders, regularly evaluate the best prospects, discover new leads and gather data about 80+ funders in the journalism space.

"For some, that will be where the real value is,” added Thomas, who previously established the Journalism Funders Forum in Europe, and secured funding from 20+ foundations for his organisations and others.

Fundraising HQ is not financed by third parties, as it was developed for Thomas’s own work. When not parenting, he works part-time as a coach and consultant for nonprofits, and he invested the profits from that work into developing the concept and improving the spreadsheet.

He also offers a €99 course that helps people adapt the spreadsheet for their needs and create a bespoke fundraising engine for their open organisation and projects. He hopes this will generate enough revenue to continue keeping the funder intelligence up-to-date.

To help journalists interact with the tool, Thomas also built a customised ChatGPT that browses the spreadsheet and sifts through the data. It is an experiment, he says, but it works better than anticipated as the data is well structured.

"As with any GPT work, crafting good prompts is the key - the more information and constraints people give it, the better the results. But it’s certainly not supposed to replace a proper fundraising engine (or fundraiser!)," he adds.

If you want to dive more deeply into into frameworks and productivity systems, you can also sign up for Thomas’s weekly newsletter Theory of Change, and follow his YouTube channel that looks to help people build, fund, and grow an organisation of purpose.

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