Get some interesting insights into the complicated choreography of donor engagement in module 3 of the Fundraising Guide:

“As a rule, foundations are more approachable and maintain a closer relationship with grantees than government agencies...It is fair to say that their priorities and spheres of interest are more consistent than those of state-funded bodies since they do not answer to political paymasters.”

Ever wondered if you were wasting your time on cold-calling donors? MediaDev Guide author Michael Randall has this to say about it:

“It is probably fair to say that desk officers live in fear of cold calls and certainly do not encourage them. But this does not mean that the approach should not be tried.”

On Sept. 16 GFMD’s Executive Director, Mira Milosevic, participated in a roundtable discussion at the World Congress of the International Press Institute. She presented a comparison of the findings from three recent studies: 

• Foundation Approaches to Journalism Funding. A JFF Survey by Eric Karstens, 2020 (for EJC)

• GFMD Study: Recipient Perceptions of Media Development Assistance, by Cara Stern 2019

• Lessons learned in providing emergency relief funding during the pandemic, Federica Cherubini 2021 (RISJ)

At the micro-level, these reports show that core, operational support is the most common funding awarded by philanthropic foundations. This is immediately followed by project support. 

This is a good sign as one of the most frequently mentioned demands by journalism outlets is for core rather than project funding, flexibility, ease of access and a plurality of approaches.

This is in contrast with international development donors who largely provide short term, programmatic funding. When asked what kind of operational improvements they would like to see in the provision of assistance, 94% of GFMD survey respondents expressed the desire for more institutional/core funding and 92% for longer-term funding.

At the macro level there is a clear absence of scalable systems that would provide systemic support to journalism (especially local, community, investigative and accountability journalism) which often struggle to sustain themselves through solely commercial models.

Journalism remains a niche topic among philanthropies: 

• In Europe, out of almost 150 000 foundations spending over €60 billion Euro per year there are currently at least 19 journalism funding programmes run by philanthropies (2020 JFF survey). 

• These 19 funding programmes spend around €20 million Euro annually (0.03% of overall philanthropic donations).

• For comparison, Google’s ‘Digital News Innovation Fund’ alone spent an average of €37.5 million per year from 2016-20).  

International assistance to the media remains a small fraction of total aid: just 0.3% of total official development assistance. An average in recent years of around 500 million Euro). The case for journalism is being made increasingly at the moment with what success remains to be seen.

The 2019 survey of GFMD members had many interesting findings. Here are just three: 

• The sector’s needs and donor priorities are too often not aligned. There is a lack of collective and shared clarity about which strategies are proving effective. Donors have expressed a need to create ongoing mechanisms for effective collaboration and knowledge-sharing.

• More data, evidence, literature reviews, diagnostics, and M&E are required for donors, policymakers, practitioners, and researchers to truly understand the issues at hand and to find appropriate solutions.

• Donors want data and in-depth information on media landscapes and markets, existing media funding (financial and thematic) and impacts according to an agreed standard, which currently does not exist.

These three reports (and others) show: 

1. A clear need to put greater focus on research and learning in order to enhance understanding of the sector and to provide easy access to evidence of “what worked, what didn’t, and what shows promise”. 

2. That donors, funders, and implementing agencies all agree that they would benefit greatly from access to these insights as well as from independent advice and guidance when devising journalism support and media development strategies and programmes.