Organization: Pico

Location: New York, NY

Website: https://www.pico.tools

Grant amount: $50,000

Project description: The Pico Nonprofit Fund will prototype financing of marketing initiatives for publishers and then connecting them to the audience data collected by Pico to try to model what would deliver the highest ROI for similar audiences (with the goal of also de-risking future financings).

Why we’re supporting this project: As publishers become more reliant on subscriptions and memberships to support themselves, it’s increasingly critical for them to successfully market themselves to readers and to make smart decisions about where to put their marketing dollars. We’re interested in learning whether Pico’s model can successfully increase subscriptions. We’re also excited to expand on this model of providing subsidized services to small newsrooms. We’ve experimented with this as part of the Community Listening and Engagement Fund and want to see how we can grow the model.