CIMA: How dozens of news outlets collectively raise money to support sustainability (CJS2022 Day 1)

8:19PM May 25, 2022

Speakers:

Stefanie Murray

Attendee

Yazmin Dominguez

Tracy Baim

Shawn Campbell

David Moran

Anna Deshawn

Keywords:

campaign

chicago

outlets

people

fundraiser

members

reader

donations

sema

fundraising

media

collaborations

tracy

year

donors

fund

money

yasmin

committee

decided

I was told to speak up to this mic, so I'm gonna. But yes, my name is Yazmin Dominguez. I'm the media purchase coordinator for the Chicago Reader. And this is color design. And I helped create the Chicago independent media alliance with the guidance of Tracy bay that is sitting at the end here. So I'm gonna give the panelists a minute to introduce themselves. And to talk a little bit about the horse that they're representing today.

Tracy Baim, co-publisher of the Chicago Reader and co-founders of Windy City Times. Thanks

for having us

here today. The Chicago Reader when Karen Hopkins and I took over in 2018, one of the things we realized is that if one of us has left the last media outlet standing, but that one's going to fall to we need to collaborate, survive, and especially on the revenue side. So we're going to talk a little bit today about that focus, we did get some grants for editorial coverage, but not in the same kind of deliberate way that solving for Chicago work. So it's very complementary to the work of sovereign poor Chicago.

And the shine pronouns anything respectful is great. I am the founder of d3 radio, we're an online radio station playing queer music and recording on queer news and high rotation. I'm also the co founder of the queue, which is going to be going to be the one and only curated destination for discovery of bipoc and cutie pop music and podcasts. So SEMA has been a big blessing to my outlet, where it's me and a few team members. So excited to talk about the crowdfunding campaign he did and how the fundraiser for Steam has really helped to support and sustain us during this time. So really happy to be here.

I'm Shawn Campbell. I'm the founder and general manager of trip radio, which is a volunteer driven, independent community radio station focused on music, arts and culture. And we've been fundraising since day one, to get our organization off the ground, we built the station from the ground up, and so many years of fundraising campaigns under my belt. I'm happy to be here and to be able to share some of the information that we've learned over the years. Hey, everyone,

Can everyone hear me? Okay? Cool. My name is David Moran. him. I'm the multimedia director and producer of SoapBox Productions Organizing, which is a multimedia entity that works with grassroot organizations throughout the city of Chicago highlighting, implementing, documenting. We joined SEMA really early on, and it was actually through a relationship with the reader. They're like, Oh, these there's groups that can give us money to do dope shit. Let's talk to him. And since then, we've kind of started learning. Unlike some people, I have zero background in fundraising, I know how to talk to people. And so that's like, this was a beautiful opportunity for us to continue to expand specifically thinking about where we were in 2020. And then kind of where we've been moving forward. So pleasure to be here. Thank you.

Yeah. And there's I want to give a reasons why I asked all these panelists to join me today. Well, first, the the annual campaign that can give specific amounts of how much you've raised and the second was all the idea of Tracy, this was all her child, her idea. And so we worked together very closely to implemented Anna Deshaun raise the most funds last year with a whopping $26,000. So we wanted to get inside, like, Oh, Anna, her marketing, how she pulled it off everything that she did. Sean Campbell was one of the head for people that led the fundraising committee, and I'll get it. I'll explain the committee in a second. But really, Shawn's expertise, I think is what pushed us through the four weeks long campaign and that she really offered a lot of fundraising guidance and techniques that really helped our members proceed the campaign as well. And then David has been involved with soapbox for SEMA since its inception, as well as involved in the 2020 fundraiser and the 2021. fundraiser, and has a very unique perspective on both of the campaigns. So I'm going to get into the slides for a second. So before I get into the meat and potatoes of the fundraiser, I would love to share with you all a little bit more about what SEMA is and what we don't like. Thank you so much. So we are pretty young. We started in 2019. And it is a project of the Chicago leader. And I want you to recall our mission statement that is a third bullet point. So we're a partnership of independent local community driven media entities coming together and sphere to collaboration, and especially in creating new revenue streams. versus more than editorial we are very old. Thank you. We're very dominant on fundraising and creating different ways to bring in new revenue into the ecosystem. Other things we do besides fundraising, I know that our fundraisers are kind of For us on the national map, it's how I met Stephanie. It's kind of brought us the product, FEMA to the national table. It's a media collaborations. But what are the things that we do? We found that by working together collectively, we can advocate for Chicago's hyperlocal media outlets on any state or national level media efforts. One of those examples is the Illinois journalism taskforce that's forming SEMA will have a seat at that table. We have our junk fundraisers, we host member to member trainings where for example, like Shawn's expertise on fundraising, she was able to train all other members on successful fundraising techniques. And we have it for other development types of programming as well. And we also build visibility campaigns. So we also know that eyeballs and clicks are as important as dollars to us. So we tried to create campaigns that bring more visibility, not only steal alliances, but of our 69 members. So they can click the next slide. Yeah, so we have a total of 69. members representing 81. media entities are all very different from each other. So from nonprofit newsrooms, to dynamic video productions, we have podcasts that are up, we cover all together, we cover a wider ride, oh, by the array of different groups of Chicago community members. And what does involvement look like? Firstly, Movember. You can participate in any sort of project, they're all opt in, opt out. And we we do have committees that we build within the alliance that help us make these overhead decisions. And Tracy, I would love you to talk a little bit about why yourself and Karen Hawkins decided to create.

Karen and I both have been in Chicago media meet for 38 years, Karen for over 20 and have seen collaborations come and go. Usually, there's like your career lifespan and without resources, they collapse, because you need a staff person, at least one to get it going. And Yasmin has been an absolute, find a dream. And I think Seema would have collapsed that we had the wrong hire. So Yasmin has kept this together. But we knew that it needs to be resourced. I also felt like peer to peer was the way to go. Because we've seen academic institutions try this, we've seen nearly large corporate entities try this and it fails because it's not peer to peer at the community level. So this was very deliberately a community based media Chicago based, not national corporate media. There are times for those collaborations. This particular one, we felt need to do peer to peer, a lot of our projects, we wanted to make sure we're funded meaning when we got to different census grants, it was to pay members to write stories. So collaboratives are great, but if if nobody's getting paid for their time, so for example, committee members this year will be paid a stipend for their time, because their time is their treasure. And then we've also done some joint advertising campaigns. I think the biggest exciting thing revenue wise that we hope to happen over the next couple of years, is mimicked after the Community Media Program at City University of New York, we've been collaborating with them for a couple years to learn about how they were able to shift government advertising into over 200, community media outlets in New York City. It is so far along that they've got it ingrained into law in New York City. So we kind of saw those things and possibilities for Chicago because of the great collaboration. But the gap we saw was the revenue side in the big way. So that's that's where we were at in deciding that, you know, the Chicago Reader had enough of a hurdle ahead of it. But if we didn't lift the whole ecosystem to get more research, or researchers overall into every kind of outlet, the reader would fail as well. So the final thing I'll say is we're trying to push for a pool journalism fun in Chicago, 40 plus of our members, and a couple non members sign on to a pooled fun letter to the foundation world. To say that it's great that we're looking at these large, large outlets to fund like the merger with sometimes it'd be easy, but we don't want to lopsided ecosystem, we want to make sure we bring up the rest of the ecosystem. And a pooled fund is one of those ways to post at a community foundation, where a lot of smaller outlets, one person out with startups as well as 100 year plus legacy outlets that are small, have a chance to get those resources to our most of our members do not have development directors, or all the kinds of even a sales director to attract to small media is hard. So if we do it collaboratively, we can bring more overall for everybody. And the funders are also more aware

of that. Okay,

So now that we gave a little bit of a synopsis of CIMA and what we do, we're gonna switch over to what this conversation is supposed to be about. So how that how hyperlocal media outlets collectively came together to fundraise dollars. So before we get into like the meat and potatoes and the details of that I want to share some takeaways with you all. So the first year we did our joint fundraiser was in 2020. It was a direct response to the COVID 19 pandemic. The Chicago Reader was saying seeing big financial losses, and then we decided that we're going to survey our members because we cannot be the only ones that are in this, this trouble. And so sure enough, we found that all of us were taking huge financial losses literally from months within a three month period, and that we decided to create this fundraiser. It was a one month long fundraiser, we raised an average of 116,000, total 60,000 in matching, and 101,000 in public donations, exactly 972 donors 43 outlets, and this one in the same we had 43 outlets in the 2021 fundraiser. Our slogan was journalism for the people by the people. We have the hashtag save Chicago media, and probably the biggest takeaway that we got was that two thirds of our donors decided to donate to. And something that I want to make clear is that there were three ways a donor could donate to the campaign, they could donate, say, like $20, to the Chicago Reader, so they have one donation to one outlet, or the kid donate to multiple outlets at different amounts. So we could do 20, readers 20, so bucks, 20, Church 23 radio all in one transaction, or they could split their donation, say $100 is evenly through all 40 outlets. So there was three ways people could donate. So two thirds of those 972 donors decided to split their donation evenly amongst all 43 outlets. So that was our biggest takeaway that we took. And I don't know if either any of you would like to talk about how your experience was in that first year of that campaign, and what takeaways you all have.

I mean, I can go, it was, it was mind blowing to me, because I'm a very small outlet, it's me and so been core team members. And we needed money. It's very simple thing, it cost a lot of money, radio station, were online hosting, publishing, you know, all the things. And I was surrounded by a collective group of folks who had the same need, and who were just as invested in seeing us all, you know, when, essentially, and I was really inspired by the community aspect of it all, which starts with Tracy, for everyone that knows, Tracy, it starts with her and Karen, but there wasn't this competitive thing. You know, it was like we were talking in the Slack channels like, did you get 43 cents, I got 43 cents to $50, across 40, some outlets, like 43. Messages, excited about that. 43 said, you know, there was something happening, that we knew that something special was happening. And so it was just really amazing for me to see it all come together, from the meetings to the marketing. Like I know, we're gonna talk about it later. But the market is incredibly important as to how this all work together. And it was just really inspired.

Yeah, and I think one of the things that we really saw is, everybody knew what the situation was, there was a clear message, there was clear urgency, and people care about your outlet, it makes a difference in people's lives. And so it's important to tell that story, and people do respond. And I think initially, maybe there was some concern, because everything was so uncertain that people would be hesitant to spend money. But I think what we found were poke up before, like, I really want to help. And so in that first year of the campaign, I think there was a lot of that urgency.

Yeah, and I think the the only thing I would add is so for, for us at that time, relatively new nonprofit, because we were like, debating for a while. And so coming into the nonprofit game looking at like, these are grants, like holy shit. And so when we figured out like these things were taking place for us it was trusting and knowing the entities are also part of it. So like Black Lives shy, we had a relationship with city Bureau Ergo radio. So some of the entities that were like, forming together, we're like, okay, we know that we know we have them. And so there was a level of trust that even kind of started moving forward in that 2020 fundraiser, and has turned up I know I've had are so pleased to have the opportunity to work in relationships with a lot of these entities outside of those like SEMA thing, right? But SEMA clearly is the starting branch to all of it, which I think is a wonderful opportunity that I don't know if we would have had any other way. You know,

Let me explain a little bit because we have nonprofit and for profit. So here's how it worked in both years, and this year, it's going to be in the fall because the reader had a little bit of a delay this year. In the fall, several foundations put in money. The Crossroads Fund, which is a local grassroots funder hosted the matching dollars, so the reader did not the donations. Last year, were able to figure it out even more than donations went right to people's identities, bank accounts, they were not tax deductible. We were very clear that if you as an individual gift is not tax deductible, because we couldn't, we couldn't promise that because most of our members are for profit. We're very low profit, but they're for profit. So acceptable, the matching money then went to when you got a direct donation. And so the Crossroads fund then administered those as grants even to the for profit outlets. And they have agreed to do that again this year. So this year, so first year, I think we had around 60,000 in matching and second year 70,000. I was terrified the second year would go would be a bomb. I kept saying, Yeah, that was during the height of the early years of COVID. We may not get the donations, but we actually bought matched was there we actually raised about 10,000. More in the second year.

Yeah. So we can take it to the next slide.

Okay, and going off with Tracy just said, Yes, both Tracey. and I were very, like nervous, scared to do this campaign, because there was so much urgency behind the 2020 like people were, you know, donating to different types of organizations, not just media, but you know, to help the ecosystem in all kinds of ways. So this year was different, the pandemic was still going on. Like it was still going on, we were still feeling the economic brunt. So we decided to do it again. And we were we had the goal to raise more money. So we were being very humble, I knew there was a chance we could not we wouldn't reach those goals, because we thought people wouldn't give. We were wrong, people gave more. So this in this fundraiser we an average of 172,795 or so we had more in matching funds with 77,500, and a little less than public donations. So we had 96,295 Little less donors by what can't do math. And that's 931. Thank you. 40 threes, the same number of members. 43, same number of days was about a month long, same May June timeframe. Our slogan was investing local media equals funding your community, same hashtag just for familiarity purposes. But we did add a second one local media are essential. And the big takeaway in this campaign was the triple match incentive that was new that we didn't do in the first year. We also extended the campaign by one more day that resulted in 200 More last minute donations, that really was the reason it pushed us over the edge in last year's and 2020s. numbers. So Tracy, if you want to talk about the triple match?

Yeah, right. I guess near the end of the campaign, it was kind of going a little slow. So I'm sure Shawn and a couple other people, I think city Bureau recommended, hey, why don't we do a triple match. And oh, my God, it was nuts. And we can't now you can't really plan for that. Because if people know it's going to be a triple match, they might not promote it. So I think we'll do the triple match on the front end, but the first few days of the campaign. But it was really great. And we people kept out because one of the important things was that we didn't want any one of our members, but some of our members, including the reader are larger than other members. So there's a cap, I think it's 20%. The most any outlet can get of the matching dollars is I think 20%. So II three hit the camp. That's a well, that way, you know, Blackout, for example, has 18,000 members, right? I guess they they could take the whole match money right away. So it was on a day to day basis or rolling. So we maxed our match right before the end of the campaign? I think. So it was it was actually really exciting, very collaborative, in terms of people having ideas like, oh, let's do this so we can get even more. So I think that that triple match made it possible for us to basically surpass the prior year.

Yeah. Okay, so I've been asked a lot. If this model can be replicated in other parts of the country. I think it can. And I'm going to try to share some key action items that I led before the official launch of the campaign. Number one, it took us about five to six months to organize this campaign for it to be one month long. So it took a good chunk of time, I was the only full time reader staffer leading the Chicago felines. So it took me like half a year to create all the things needed. Part of that was building a donation website. So we had one for 2020 that we completely rebranded and rebuilt for 2021. How that works is that this year part first, I've built the campaign based completely on feedback from people in 2021 of the biggest feedback that I got was that people wanted access to their own reports for how many donations were coming in, because we built the 2020 fundraiser so quickly that we didn't have the infrastructure for members to have or access their own reports of how much money they had coming in. So we built a website with dojo, our developer I always have to shut them out because they did such good work. It our website on the back end works like an E commerce site. Right. And that was really the only way we could find so as a donation is right as a donation on the front end on the back end is right as a transaction pretty much. So that's how we were creating reports for each of our members. There, we utilize stripe, for people to make their own stripe accounts connected it on the back end of our site. So every time someone donated it went directly to their bank account. We didn't it didn't stick it in our our see my reader bank account, it just went straight to theirs. Um, at the end of the fundraiser, they had backend access on WordPress to see how much like member reports which was different than the first year, which took off a lot of work on my end as having to carry those reports on the first year. Key key key key implementing a fundraising committee, there are so many decisions that have to be made that one person or a group of two people making them it's not it's not going to fly i The my phone more the collective decisions were the best way to get everyone because there was 43 members, it was the best way to get everyone on board to know what was going on at the same time. And the fundraising committee helps me with the marketing helped me with the language, the theme, the look the art, a bit they approved everything they edited my like, advertising or marketing language. Yeah, so we developed a marketing strategy. And so I want to ask our panelists, how did you all decide to market your own outlets for this 2021 fundraiser. Also, another big feedback I got was it was difficult to ask for individual donations when we're all collectively asking for donations to go to all. So I just want to turn it to these three and see how you will navigate is that.

First of all, let me say I wasn't worried about the second campaign, I knew it was going to be successful. The first campaign you ever do will be the hardest campaign you do. And you can still do it. But what you're doing in that first campaign is kind of setting it up and building an expectation among your your constituents. And so I think that the messaging, you know, is really important. And every outlet has a different message. There are no cookie cutter messages, you know, your audience best, you know, what you do best and what your community values. So really setting up those messages. When you're fundraising and thinking about all the different channels you can deliver those messages on, you know, whether it's your social media, whether it's an email list, whether it's in your outlet itself, you know, obviously, we ran Scott's on the air and talk to our listeners directly. We also have a culture of fundraising in our organization, so our listeners know what to expect. And that's why your second campaign will always be easier, because you've created that culture with the first campaign. And human beings are creatures of habit. So the second time they see it, if they gave the first time, they're like, oh, that again? I love that outlet. Absolutely. Here's some money. And but but really speaking to your audience, don't look at what everybody else is doing. I mean, you can just to get ideas, but really think about what is meaningful about your outlet? Why do people care about it, and use that message in your fundraising? And that's what we always do.

Yeah, I think for us, we were intentional on being like, let's just pull for everyone. Because also, at the same time, just a little bit earlier. So Fox had done it's all no fundraisers, we're like, this is a cool opportunity to continue to raise money, even though we just did one, we can now kind of just shift the narrative on like, Oh, this is all of the same Chicago media rather than just so much. And I think for that first fundraiser, I think those are some of the things that helped a little more. And then the second one, it was normally why, like we made as, as an entity, a little less money than the first one, because that shared pool pot wasn't as big right. But I think the key factor then is looking at other dollars or philanthropy dollars, and how that can influence what we all got. So those groups,

And for me, we were successful, because we had already planned on having a fundraising campaign. And so we had something that was working, and I just decided to break all the rules and do two at the same time, which will anyone will tell you, that's a bad idea, but it worked for us. And when the double and triple donations came through, I literally was working a month in advance. I had my spreadsheet, I was calling people, because you know your people, or at least if you don't know if you should know your people. And so I knew that people who I needed to call people who want to text I knew the people who I needed to send an email to, or the people who needed both. And so I had gone through my list and I was telling people what we were fundraising for what we needed. I had just quit my corporate job that February. So this was like an important moment of survival for what we were doing. And so people were prepared to get because people need to budget, right? I live on a budget, you live on a budget. And so I was calling in advance. And so when the double triple dollars came in, I called everybody again, because we had our Indiegogo campaign, which was going well, but at the same time, I had some larger donors. And by large, I mean, people were given $500. For me, that's a big donation. But that 500 was 1500, when the triple match came in, and so I was like, Can y'all read budget for me and wait until this moment, and hit the site, because their donation is going to go a lot further if you get through SEMA than with me. And so I did do that. I do also know some folks who were like, Yeah, I'm doing that for you. But I'm also donating to all. So I know that that happened as well. So for me, it was a lot of upfront preparation that really proved to be the secret to our success, and really just taking the time to talk to folks around what was important to them why they wanted to support us. And, and that's really why we were able to hit our goal.

So the reader we did, we promoted both aspects of the promoted certainly support the reader. But the reason we really started this was because I know that, you know, we're in a collaborative journalism Summit. Funders, like collaborative individuals, like collaboratives, the people that we're going to give to a collaborative wouldn't necessarily have given individually or they will additionally right, it's a separate give. So I was never worried about cannibalizing the reader fundraiser, really the reverse, I knew that if all of us promoted this campaign, more of us would get it, like more money would come into the ecosystem than ever would have before. And then ongoing donors down the line. So the reader promoted both aspects of this to our entire, you know, 50,000 person, email list to 60,000 print copies during the campaign, all of our social media, the seamless social media, so we did it for both. And each year, we were like, third or fourth place. Yeah, right. I was really glad we didn't win the first year, because then it wouldn't be like, Oh, the reader just did this to get like, No, we didn't want no when we wanted the whole

system to win. Yeah.

Well, and I would add to like, then once things started going for, for us groups that are a little smaller in capacity. Everything was laid out pretty cake. And so whether that was social media for like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, and or like newsletter stuff, everything was packaged in such a such a way that it was difficult to mess up, which is great when you got 100 things going on. And so I do think that that is in trainings prior to in 2020. And you know, renewed in 2021 really helped a lot of our team members be able to feel like they can engage and feel like they're participating in something, even if it's for the first

time. Yeah. I heard there was questions?

Yes. We've got two questions from our virtual attendees. So I'll pitch them both. And then I bet you all have some questions too. As an activist, we're going to wrap fader for collaborative meditation then a lot. So first question is, Can you say more about how the member committees helped advise seamless programming and planning.

So we had one committee for this fundraiser that I mentioned, helped put together marketing, we are actually in the very beginning phases of starting a steering committee, that will be compensated for their time, but that will help myself and our other Sima coordinator, make overheads decisions. So I can speak more on how the fundraising committee helped us great. Okay, so Well, Shawn was part of our fundraising committee. And like I mentioned, I built the fundraiser this year completely based on feedback from last year, one of the biggest feedbacks we got was that people felt really unprepared to fundraise just because they've never done it before. Like Tracy has mentioned, we do have smaller scale outlets. So what I brought to the committee was let's create a training prior to the launch of the campaign on five best fundraising strategies and practices. So Shawn, who was one of the committee members led that training, so our committee members helped us decisions, but our committee members also were involved in training and leading other members, I view the committee as part of my team. Like I didn't view them as an extension, I viewed them as my sites, like coworkers like they were they were my go to change. So we made a lot of overhead decisions together, I gave him a lot of authority over things. And let them correct me on things all the time. So I hope that answers the question.

So one more question, and then we'll open it up to folks in person is from Lisa Rudman. I'm interested in the follow ups and stewardship with individual donors after the campaign to help them get closer to the outlet. How do they need to contact information?

Yes. So so that was something I had to do manually and it's something I'm hoping to build into our website next year. So our website only gave us a number base reports many reports I had to our website when people gave they wrote their name their email Have we had a privacy policy saying how we would use their name. So that's a key thing have a privacy policy. So then every every outlet on the backend, say the Chicago Reader would be populated with how many member names or emails and their addresses. So then I would export that into a PDF file and send it to each one of our 43 individual campaign members. And so from there, they would take that and they would send thank you, which Tom to talk about. Thank you. So how important that is.

A big part of any successful fundraising campaign and building that culture of fundraising, again, is making sure that you thank your donors. Sometimes it's easy to feel like the campaign's done, you made money, you're like, Yeah, success. And people overlook the fact that you need to go back and tell the people thank you, who gave to your campaign that makes it

so much more like? likely

they'll give again, it makes them know that their gift was appreciated. And again, you can do that in a lot of different ways. Because you know, your audience best you can send an email, you can send a handwritten card, if you've got a physical address, you might even offer some sort of a little incentive, you know, you send out a bumper sticker or something like that, but people really just want to know that their donation is appreciated. So don't overlook that portion of the campaign. Even just a short thank you email. Problems, a recognizable name, can make a real difference and let people know how much you care, because it's important that they know that you

care. You don't want to answer

Oh, I will send him thank yous when they landed in my inbox. Because people will give, or they say, I want to get we're gonna give but the moment I saw it, I sent them a quick message. I did something formally later. But there's something about that immediate response, like, Oh, they got it. That and sometimes it literally was just thank you so much. And I think it was very well received. I did more of a formal thing after the campaign rep. But I was responded right away. And that's awesome.

And we had an auto response to that went into their email saying what they just gave to Yeah, but it wasn't as as special as coming from outlets that folks might have given to directly

Yeah, and you can never overthink. Yeah, well, so if they get the recognition that, you know, the auto responder, and then they get a personal message, or they get a quick email and they get a card in the mail or something. Nobody's gonna be like, Why are they thanking me so much?

Yeah, we have some questions.

Looking through you know, you've got 43 members, and they're all kind of getting into this, obviously, different ways. How do you kind of make things fair and equitable on the, what you put into it? Because you're all getting a share of what comes out of it? How do you determine that are requirements for the different members in order to participate in something like this? Just wondering.

So just to clarify there, 69 members of SEMA that represent about 81 outlets, right. So every project we do is opt in each year 43 outlets opted in, there was slight overlap, like there were some that came in when you're right on the the fundraiser, what you put into it, you get more out of it, right. But we are going to make a minimum threshold, which the committee will decide probably 100 or something, token them out, because that at least shows you tried. There were some members that were in the shared pool, that that individually only raised like $1. So it was very clear, they weren't really pushing it. But on a lot of the different other projects we do, it's it's kind of what you put in, you get out. So we've done a lot of member to member trainings, we had an audience engagement training from Harkin a couple of weeks ago, that we always tape, so that if you can't participate, you can do it later. We want to have very low expectations, given the labor involved with collaborations, and we absolutely are trying to get more funding so that if you are on a committee, you get compensated. And that and that will incentivize. And if you participate in an editorial collaboration, because of a grant, you're getting compensated right, there's just because there's so small, we have to value that time, but we're working on that we're trying to grow to add more staff as well as more resources overall for SEMA.

A question? It sounds like the triple matching was really impactful. Who who was matching?

So last year is Joyce Foundation, MacArthur Foundation is very much McCormick Feinberg, and I might be missing one Chicago reader.com/sema. Ci Ma has our reports from everything we've been talking about today, including both years reports that Yasmin put together, that will tell you all the funders this year MacArthur has agreed to again, crossroads when it's hosting it, and we've got requests in that could give us even more than the 70,000 we raised last year. So if other requests go through, we might be around $100,000 match this year. And on the triple match, we'll probably do it on the front end. So over the first five days of the campaign, we're we're going to be meeting with the easy tomorrow to talk about doing our campaign this fall in not in a way that conflicts with their campaign locally, and then they may cross promote our campaign, which will really up the level of people knowing about it, that are that are not aware of what seemed even is so um, yeah, I mean, it's, it's foundations that we're gonna get through locally. And I could definitely see it growing. And if the pooled fund ever comes to be in Chicago, I can see this being embedded in that project, right like that more funders might get involved in it and have less lift for us, because basically, it's just me asking funders right now. It's not, it's not very institutionalized. So we want to get that less random, and more more in this system of funding to Chicago.

Yeah. And I just want to say to that, I have printed out copies of the reports that list all of our founders that gave to the matching fund, so I'll hand one to you. But Tracy, Leslie, the mouth was McCormick MacArthur, Joyce Feinberg, and two individual donors to

We have time for one more question. One more question. Yeah.

I was curious. What like the average donations.

Our so did, individually, each one of our outlets that promoted the fundraiser, including the matching funds walked away with a total of about between 1001 $1,400. So that was the average.

But that was the average to the SEMA members, the average donor was around 100 bucks. Oh, and that's what was fascinating to us, because that's a high number, especially for the first campaign. And it's because they didn't want to choose, it's because two thirds, I would have never guessed it would have been two thirds of the people coming in gave to everybody, because they were all coming in from our individual promotion. You know, we weren't getting a lot of other mainstream media on this. This was our members promoting it to their audiences. And I would have said, a third, the two thirds number stood both years. Yeah, and the average student both years. So I think people it is showing us that people really do want to support these kinds of collaborations, and they discovered new media outlets, readers of the reader found out about so Fox and vice versa. You know, like that really was an added benefit that, you know, we heard from Chicago Tribune, journalists contacted us and said, I have no idea there's this many outlets in Chicago. I'm like, this is like a third of the members like we have 69 but there's well over 100 outlets in Chicago, probably even 200 If you count brokered radio and stuff. So really, it's an educational effort as much as is a fundraiser.

Like I was mentioned to us well, my values with SEMA guests dollars are very important. So our eyeballs and people knowing the names the campaign response, but it also increases the visibility and popularity of a lot of different hyperlocal and smaller outlets in the city.

Thank you all. Thank you.