12 Ways to Raise Money and Build Power from Your Communications Successes

Media and communications wins are rife with opportunity to raise more money to continue your organization’s stellar work and build the size and engagement of your constituency—and not just at year’s end.

Indeed, the best development work is joined at the hip with the best program work and the best media work.

When you integrate all three, you maximize the potential of your whole organization.  Thinking through the full work plan will allow your development staff to consider when and how to reach out to your stakeholders; it will enable your communications staff to consider your message and the story of your impact; and it will allow your program staff to more effectively use the media as a tool to advance policy aims.

If your program ideas don't inspire your donors to give, they are much less likely to succeed. If your development team isn't using every media success to reach back out to donors, you're leaving money on the table. And if your communications staff is simply tasked with pitching stories or sending out a press release, then they are much less equipped to frame the story your organization is trying to tell. Involve them in the planning from the get-go to make sure that you are maximizing possible news hooks and engaging exactly the right journalists in advance.

HERE ARE 12 WAYS TO MAKE THE MOST OF YOUR COMMUNICATIONS SUCCESSES

1. Use your media moment in real time, as much as possible

The team at ReThink Media has been extensively involved in spokesperson training for voting rights advocates. When a Governor advanced legislation to suppress voting rights, advocates on the ground encouraged progressive legislators to work with us to sharpen their media skills and strengthen their message cohesion. On 24 hours’ notice, we developed a specialized workshop, including on-camera interview training, in English and Spanish, and did additional workshops with the Black and Hispanic legislative caucuses.

This allowed us to tell our own donors, in real time, that our team had been recommended, that the team was delivering the training, that we were able to quickly create unique resources, and that we were able to do it on a bilingual basis.

But it also allowed us to share some inside strategy, which included prioritizing in-state ethnic media—and then when those media hits started to pop in the ethnic media outlets themselves, we were positioned to not just share strategy, but highlight our ability to deliver.

And finally, when high-level national media hits moved forward, we were able to identify the specific impacts.

The key here is that we were sharing the entire story, virtually in real time, with our funders—allowing them to experience and own some of the moment and avoiding any temptation to leave the storytelling to some subsequent grant report where it may or may not have had the same impact.

2. Create a buzz

While our first tip involved capitalizing on an external media opportunity, the second tip is to carefully plan how to capitalize on well-executed, proactive media strategies to create a buzz about your organization and generate coverage of your work and your spokespeople.

The image here illustrates the excellent work of the Costs of War Project over several successive report releases and reflects their cumulative media impact.

Costs of War, with our help, used each report release to bootstrap on the prior one and to steadily build their profile and their impact. And, as their impact grows, they are increasingly making themselves a story in their own right.

Learn what steps to take to generate buzz around a report release.

This helps organizations like Costs of War increase their power—and delivers them a huge opportunity to maximize fundraising. If I'm a funding partner looking at this chart, my takeaway is that I'm looking at a strong investment.

In another example, in early 2021, the Brennan Center produced an outstanding report on the number of anti-voter bills being pursued at the state legislative level. While this may seem like a well-known story now, it wasn’t then, and their report received an enormous amount of attention and essentially defined a national narrative.

3. Talk about impacts, not hits

One of the things we routinely tell people is that “getting media coverage” is not a goal. It is not your organization’s mission. In strategic communications, we aim to use the media as a tool to advance a policy objective. The real goal is the impact.

For example, Congress appropriated funds to compensate the families of people who lost loved ones in mis-targeted drone strikes or who died simply because they were nearby those strikes. When it came to light that literally none of that money had been spent, we brought that to the attention of journalists at targeted outlets and with the lawmakers who had pushed for that funding. The impact was immediate public pressure on the Pentagon to start dispensing those funds. In other words, if those families are indeed compensated, as they should be, it will be a direct result of that media work.

In another example, advocates with North Carolina Voters for Clean Elections placed an op-ed in an insider political and policy publication pointing out that the corporate lobbying group ALEC had functionally drafted a bill aimed at hiding political donations—despite the fact that voters overwhelmingly favor transparency. When it was published, they literally put a copy in the hands of every Democratic State Senator, forcing the issue and giving the governor the basis to veto the bill. Again, a targeted media output leading directly to a concrete policy impact.

And finally, following the White Nationalist violence in Charlottesville, the people at the Arab American Institute, among others, identified some major holes in hate crime reporting and worked with legislators to move a bill to close those loopholes. They placed this op-ed in The Washington Post, putting the issue in the national spotlight and ramping up the pressure. When the bill passed this year, you can draw a straight line from this media pressure to that policy victory.

These are the types of stories that supporters very rightly want to hear—stories of impact. And in each case, the media was used as a major tool in achieving those impacts.

4. Share your strategy

Media coverage often creates the opportunity to bring your donors “behind the scenes” and share your strategy in a manner that you might not want to do publicly.

In one example, we worked to discretely drive a specific strategic story that ultimately resulted in a high-level piece in the Washington Post. After the piece came out, we couldn’t have been more pleased when the Secretary of State held up the article during a Senate hearing, using it to emphasize a point. Under the circumstances, the backstory might have been more likely to undercut the moment if shared publicly, but it allowed us to give a unique insiders’ perspective to core supporters.

In another example, some outstanding research partners identified that the language associated with a bill in Congress might actually be detrimental to moving the bill forward. Their insights and the research findings that backed them up led the sponsors of the bill to literally rename the legislation in keeping with the best practices identified. Here again, the researchers were probably better off keeping that backstory confidential, but it created an incredible opportunity for them to share their impact and their strategy with their supporters in a unique manner that put those donors “on the inside” of what was transpiring behind the scenes.

5. Use your donors to recruit donors

One of top eight reasons that people donate to a cause is because of their social contacts. Another is personal satisfaction.

Media hits provide a unique opportunity to bridge those two and to proactively engage your donors in fundraising from their friends and social networks.

Let’s look at all three.

First of all, lots of people are intimidated by fundraising and many would have a hard time fully explaining the work of an organization that they support. That creates a barrier to engaging them and their networks. On the other hand, a good media hit—and a well-timed effort—can get you over both. Media hits and high-profile coverage can be a really valuable hook and a context for your ask. They provide validation and they implicitly imply impact. This can be especially valuable when you are recruiting new donors who aren't as familiar with your organization.

We know that many of you already know about things like Facebook fundraisers, but for those that don’t, they are an excellent way to both raise money and build your list. Media hit tells at least some of the story for the member, and they make it really easy for a donor to write something like “I really support this organization and I want to share an example of their fantastic work and ask if I can count on you to join me in my fundraiser to support them.”

It’s a small ask to ask some of your donors to reach out to their own personal networks with a request like that. Some will and some won’t, but it’s not a big request and it takes a lot of the risk and pressure out of the equation for them.

We routinely make contributions to organizations simply because our movement friends recommend them. Their word counts because we trust and respect them. That’s the social network part. But if we ask people to support a group that we support, and they do, then we’re also just magnifying the personal satisfaction part.

In the case with this image, each Veteran’s Day we use our own networks to support groups serving veterans damaged by war because we don’t think politicians really care about the consequences of sending people to war.

Our recommendation is to structure your campaign as much as you can. All Board members, staff, and members should be asked to help build the campaign as a concerted effort. Have all participants set concrete goals for their own fundraising and donor recruitment and set a collective goal as well. Have a plan in place to proactively affirm everyone's participation, be sure you report back on your success, and applaud people for making their goals.

(PS: We exceeded the fundraising goals we set for both the amount raised and the number of new donors recruited.)

6. Set paid (and earned) media goals

Paid media and communications campaigns are a fantastic hook to raise more money and get more exposure to your organization and the issues.

And there are a lot of different strategies. The most straightforward is simply to price the costs of varying paid media placements and then set goals for fundraising to make them happen. For example, you can say, if we raise $X we can place this ad in whatever targeted location makes the most sense for your campaign. Or you can approach it more on a matching basis, to the effect of “we have funding in hand to run this ad in the targeted location makes the most sense for your campaign, but if we can raise $X, we can run it in 3 more places.” In our past work, for example, we ran ads throughout the DC Metro, but added three more cities to the campaign through an email fundraiser.

The list goes on, but many donors like tangibility of these really clear concrete outcomes.

Depending on your organization, you might get edgier and aim to provoke a response that yields a lot more coverage. For instance, a small organization once raised a modest amount of money to place a controversial ad critiquing Trump. When their ad was rejected, they smartly leveraged that into a story in the Financial Times and elsewhere that likely increased their impact a thousand-fold. That’s an easy story to share with donors and it’s hard for them not to see the huge return on the modest investment.

We generally advise against “sign on statements” as ads, however, because they rarely have news value (progressives support progressive stuff isn’t a story), their targeting is often diffuse, and both the money and the impact are gone in a day.

 

7. Launch a rapid response media fund

We chose to highlight this story, “Voting hours in parts of Georgia extended after technical errors create long lines,” for a few reasons. First off, it's Election Day, and the story posted at 8:59 p.m.

This is obviously a breaking news story. Georgia was a hotly contested election, so it's also a major national story. The question, though, is whether the activists on the ground could handle the workload that comes with hundreds of incoming media requests?

To the degree that you can ever prepare for scenarios like this, asking donors to support a rapid response media fund months in advance can allow you to have the money in-hand to have extra staff or consultants on standby, ready to go both in response to a crisis but also to take advantage of an unforeseen opportunity to put your organization at the center of a breaking story.

In another example, when a White Supremacist attacked a Sikh Gurdwara, killing several people, our friends at the Sikh Coalition were able to immediately fly staff to Wisconsin to handle on-the-ground media relations. Rapid response funding makes these types of things possible.

Some foundations get this too. Our partners at the Proteus Fund funded us to handle rapid response for the Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity following the Orlando Pulse Nightclub shooting because they knew that the volume of media interest would be overwhelming.

Requesting rapid response funding conveys to your donors that you are thinking ahead and doing smart media work. You can place the funds in reserve and promise to return them in the event that you face no crises, but most likely, they'll allow you to keep the funding.

8. Use data to tell your story

While we mentioned the importance of not just talking about media hits but about impacts, there are times when your media hits reveal a powerful story of impact in their own right.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) uses our media monitoring tools to track its local coverage by state. This is just one of the graphics that they can use to track and illustrate that coverage.

This map is of more than 5,000 media hits in just under six months. The map alone peaks one’s interest.

The first thing one thinks is, “WOW! That is a lot of coverage.” It is also a story of their incredible reach outside of just national coverage, with more than 5,000 media hits across the county.

Then, one wonders, “What is in play in Texas and in Florida?” If I am a donor in California or Oregon, I'd want to know what their campaigns are in the Northwest.

Here’s is another example from our own work. In early 2017, Media Matters released a report on broadcast news guests for the duration of the first Muslim ban showing that a majority of experts and speakers brought onto shows at MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News were not, in fact, representative of Muslim communities.

With the support of our funding partners, we set out to change that with a multi-year effort to train local Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, Sikh, and South Asian (AMEMSA) leaders across the country. To date, we’ve trained hundreds of local spokespeople, and, in tracking all of their coverage, we saw large gains in their media mentions and voiceshare over the course of a single year.

In both this example and in the chart that we shared earlier illustrating the huge increase in media coverage of the Costs of War Project, the bottom line is DATA. If you don't have a baseline, you can't have realistic goals, and you can't measure or demonstrate your impact and progress.

9. Start a legacy fund

In the course of the time that we have been doing this work, the media has evolved enormously and media outlets have come and gone. The demographics of the country have also shifted dramatically. In 2020, Millennials became the largest living adult generation in the US, and by 2024, they will be the largest segment of the electorate (if they continue to vote).

Ask your funders and donors to sponsor media work aimed at building your membership with new and emerging audiences. Make the case that if your organization is to continue to be a powerful movement relevant to our children and their children and adapt to the fights of the future, you need to broaden and diversify your membership. Share your baseline, the honest statistics of your current membership (e.g., age, gender, race, income, and geographic location). 

And ask your most committed and loyal donors to invest in reaching and building your constituency for generations to come and be prepared to report back with concrete data on your progress.

10. Create sponsorship or partner levels

If we could only have given you one tip today that we have learned from past fundraising successes in the advocacy space, it would be this one.

Here are six examples of different sponsor levels—each drawn from many of the tips we have shared today. Steal from them liberally. Amend them to fit your organization’s communications needs and your donors’ passions.

1. Tools and Technology Partner

Ask your donors and funding partners who are keen on technology to enable your organization to wield cutting-edge tools to do your best communications and organizing work.

2. Rapid Response Sponsor

You could also call this a crisis or opportunity fund that your organization can put to use at its discretion.

3. Paid or Earned Media Sponsor

Ask your donors who love a good strategy to adopt a paid or earned media campaign. They can adopt a set of ads to target specific officials or representatives or to reach a set number of swing states or congressional districts.

4. Legacy Fund SPONSOR

Ask your donors to invest in the long-term, in reaching and engaging new constituencies to ensure your organization remains relevant to new generations.

5. Telling Our Story Sponsor  

Ask your communications-savvy members to invest in the development of graphic and video content and online promotions that reach new audiences and drive engagement.

6. BUILDING AND SUSTAINING OUR TEAM SPONSOR 

This is the most important and the most significant investment, and will help build a diverse and talented team, and invest in their ongoing professional development.

The most important part of each of these sponsor levels is the story of the impact behind them. Drawing on all of these tips, create a one–pager for each sponsor level, telling the back story of your strategy for each. What will funding in each of these areas allow your organization to accomplish? What are your goals and expected outcomes? Include several “show, don’t tell” examples or testimonials to bring them to life.

11. Start a communications capital campaign

Most organizations and funders think of a capital campaign as raising money for acquiring or renovating a building. However, by definition, it is an intense effort on the part of a nonprofit organization to raise a significant amount of money in a specified period of time.

At our last organization, we decided to take that a step further and to use it as a capital campaign to build our communications infrastructure and to build power.

We used all of the sponsor levels listed above to create a very detailed budget of exactly the tools and the staffing we would need, right down to their job descriptions, salaries, and benefits.  

And we took it to individual, in-person visits, with each of our major donors, with each of the sponsor levels laid out.

And we asked them to make a 3-year commitment—in addition to committing to continue their annual giving—to make that happen.

12. Plan for the predictable

While our rapid response tip was about planning for the unexpected, our last tip is to plan for the predictable.

It is undeniable that across the progressive spectrum, we fell far short in planning for the predictable in 2016, and we made sure that in 2020, all of the organizations we worked with would be prepared—no matter the outcome.

But in 2016, one organization, in particular, stood out as having prepared for the possibility of a Trump presidency: the ACLU. To their great credit, the ACLU was one of few organizations that had a plan for a Trump victory.

Developing your organization's communications strategy in advance and based on varying scenarios is a critical opportunity on multiple levels, many of which we have touched on.  You can engage your stakeholders in your strategy, and you can get well ahead of the message and the narrative you want to drive. In this case, the ACLU also raised millions of dollars because they were prepared to tap into the anger and existential despair that millions of people were feeling.

It can go the other way too. When President Bill Clinton was elected, dozens of organizations suffered huge funding and staffing losses because their donors thought that the problems of the Reagan and Bush Administrations had magically been solved. Organizations that were prepared to shift their narrative in that scenario grew and survived while others didn't.

Thinking ahead will allow you to define what success looks like for your organization. Share your strategy with your most loyal donors and funders. Make a case for why and how you will throttle forward to keep driving your agenda, no matter the electoral outcome.

 

What other ideas do you have to raise more money from your communications successes? Tweet to us @rethink_media and let us know!

 

Note: In addition to co-founding ReThink Media, Lynn Fahselt and Peter Ferenbach have used innovative strategies to collectively fundraise millions of dollars for nonprofit organizations.