Guest Essay

Lenfest News Philanthropy Summit: The ‘four Rs’ of fundraising

By Tom Davidson

July 23, 2025

This essay is part of a series of reflections from the 2025 Lenfest News Philanthropy Summit sharing insights, lessons learned, and key takeaways from the conference, which was hosted in partnership with Press Forward. Access additional Summit resources here. 

Magic can happen when you get the right people in the same room. 

The Lenfest News Philanthropy Summit in Philly reminded me of that. It was the first time I’d ever been at a conference focused on fundraising for news. (At most events, fundraising is merely One More Track tacked onto discussions about storytelling, product needs, and capital-J journalism). 

What I heard in conversations with peers around the tables and hallways was this: Most of our stakeholders don’t understand that “fundraising” is more than just a revenue line.  

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I heard comments like “My CEO (or board) thinks one person should be able to do it all.” Or: “I’m struggling to run our membership program and chase after foundations.” Even: “I’m new to this and just want to run the journalism. Whaddaya mean I have to think about different categories of money?” 

I sympathize: That was me a dozen years ago when I first dove into nonprofit fundraising. 

Hence this simple framework that I use to teach my students about the nonprofit world, and which emerged from the collective wisdom of many development mentors over those dozen years: Think of fundraising for a nonprofit news org as four separate businesses with different success factors —  each of which can be neatly summed up by the letter “R.” 

Let’s start with the bedrock of most fundraising programs: Membership — the small-dollar donations from a broad base of people. It entails building audience at scale; creating loyalty among some of those audience members; then asking them for money. The easy way to remember that process? Think about reach. (Yes, audience quality matters; mere click-crack content won’t work. But, in general, the bigger your audience, the more money you can raise from membership.) 

Building a big membership base has another benefit: Some of those small-dollar donors have the capacity to give you a lot more as major donors. The trick is figuring out who those people are — and, more importantly, why they love your organization. The best way to learn that? Talk to them. Ask what they like about your work, and how they think it impacts their lives and the community. In other words, nurture a relationship.

INN: How Bay City News raised major donor revenue in a time of hardship INN: How Bay City News raised major donor revenue in a time of hardship

Note that those major donors can be individuals; family foundations; or even donor-advised funds managed by a community foundation. The key tell: An individual makes the donation decision based on their personal likes, even whims. That’s different from our next category: 
 

Institutional foundations have a different decision-making process. These tend to be driven by the foundation’s strategic goals — how they want to change the world. In other words, you need to show your organization’s relevance to the foundation’s work. It’s not enough to produce good journalism — you must connect the dots between your journalism and the foundation’s strategic goals to, say, improve early childhood education, or clean up the environment.

The basics of foundations The basics of foundations

Finally, there’s earned revenue — a broad category of sponsorships, underwriting, live events and other projects that mirror our for-profit peers’ focus on advertising and marketing services. Yes, the feel-good message of “You’re supporting the community through non-profit news” has some value in pitching these programs. But, ultimately, your paying customers here need to see results — a positive impact on their business.

Corporate giving strategies + workbook Corporate giving strategies + workbook

So: Membership is about reach. Major donor programs are about relationships. Institutional giving requires relevance. Earned revenue means results. 

Yes, this framework is overly simplistic. 

No, it doesn’t capture the nuances of X, Y, and Z. It’s simply an effort to capture the ideas at a high level. 

It’s not detailed enough to run the day-to-day operations of your business, but this framework can be a useful way to, say, convince a board chair that the same person can’t effectively run a growing membership program and manage the relationships with a couple dozen major donors and institutional philanthropies. Or, if you’re a lifelong journalist suddenly thrust into the role of nonprofit entrepreneur, maybe this model can help you think about the skills and resources you need to have on your team. 

Tom Davidson is the Bellisario professor of practice in media innovation at Penn State University. He was a longtime reporter turned media executive at Tribune Co., PBS and Gannett, and led the team of product developers, fundraisers and station leaders that built the streaming service PBS Passport.