The Day, a daily newspaper in New London, Connecticut, covers a 20-town region in eastern Connecticut. Karen Florin, managing editor and participant in the LMA Lab for Journalism Funding, shares details about its successful fundraising efforts to dig deep into the local housing crisis. Local Media Foundation serves as fiscal sponsor for The Day’s Housing Solutions Lab.

What was your motivation to start fundraising for journalism? How did you prepare to go out and fundraise?

Karen Florin, Managing Editor

We’re a split-interest trust required to donate a portion of our annual profits to charity. We have a reputation for punching above our weight, and our newsroom brings home awards consistently from the New England Newspaper & Press Association and the Connecticut chapter of the Society for Professional Journalists.

Awards are nice, but we want to have an impact that benefits the community.

We’re not immune to the market forces that are diminishing local news publishers throughout the country. Our newsroom, though bigger than other outlets our size, has shrunk. We simply don’t have the staff to conduct in-depth investigations.

In 2021, The Day was accepted into the LMA Lab for Journalism Funding. I, along with Assistant Managing Editor Carlos Virgen, participated in the cohort and learned how to conduct fundraising for journalism. We went on a listening tour with community members and stakeholders, created a pitch deck and Givebutter page, and brainstormed with The Day’s newsroom.

Can you tell us more about your project?

We began a regionwide conversation on the housing crisis and produced 75 stories, along with photos, videos, newsletters and podcasts, that provided our audience with a better understanding of the housing crisis and put a face to those who are living in motels, facing eviction, or living with strangers in “shared housing.”

Our stories and images depicting people suffering from mold exposure at a public housing complex in Groton, Connecticut – a town also known as the Submarine Capital of the World and currently experiencing a hiring boom that puts even more pressure on the housing market – prompted the Connecticut General Assembly to pass a bill that regulates mold in public housing.

We highlighted solutions to the housing crisis that included private-public partnerships, land trust arrangements and time-tested programs such as Habitat for Humanity, and covered the creation of the Center for Housing Equity and Opportunity in Eastern Connecticut, a coalition of 42 local towns working toward solutions.

What led you to the funders who supported our project?

We knew our local community foundation was interested in social justice and equity, and we’d been working with them on a separate diversity initiative, so it was natural to approach them for funding. We continuously asked the question, “Who else should we be talking to?” — and it worked. The community foundation provided us with an introduction to another organization that agreed to a small grant.

We looked at organizations that support journalism and solutions journalism in our region and decided to approach another funder that fortunately was willing to help. Regarding our Givebutter campaign, we had worked with LMA on an audience-targeted fundraiser during COVID that was successful, so we applied it to this project.

We raised about $100,000.

Tell us about the team that is focused on fundraising. Who is doing the work?

We involved Publisher Timothy Dwyer, Executive Editor Timothy Cotter, and Managing Editor Izaskun Larraneta in the fundraising effort. Cotter and Virgen have left the company, so we will be training and involving additional team members in our next effort.

For our next project, we hope to hire a dedicated reporter to be the leader researcher/writer of the project. We reassigned reporters from their beats and backfilled their beats with freelance writers, which was not ideal.

What have you learned along the way? What would you share with others thinking about fundraising for journalism?

Since fundraising is a whole new arena for many journalists, those thinking about starting their own campaigns should take the time to get trained, as we did. We are still learning and honing our fundraising approach but like to think participating in the LMA cohort took us from zero to at least 50 percent.

Earlier this year, The Day implemented a hard paywall for most of our online content, but since the Housing Solutions Lab was funded by donations, we only kept the paywall on stories for the first two to three weeks.

Take a look at our work at https://www.theday.com/section/housing-lab/ and let us know what you think.