Three Things Datebook for the Week of 2/28/2022
This week's Datebook previews some helpful research on Women and Philanthropy. Plus, the power of being an ally and the movement around solutions journalism.
A lot is going on this week that we’ll get to in a moment, but first, I have to give a shout-out to the team at Classical 89 WDAV in Charlotte for making history last week.
As noted in the Tweet below from ratings historian Chris Huff, WDAV became the first Classical station ever to top a PPM measured market.
WDAV’s cume also surpassed 100,000 listeners for the first time in several months to go with the phenomenal AQH results.
PRPD President Abby Goldstein wrote a great piece in a newsletter post detailing the station’s efforts to serve and expand its audience. This includes its outstanding WDAV Noteworthy project that pairs gifted Black and brown artists from Charlotte’s music scene with classically trained musicians.
We should also take a moment to recognize the scale of this historic accomplishment. WDAV is a modest operation with a budget of about $3 million dollars a year licensed to Davidson College serving market #22. This didn't happen at an enormous organization in a top 10 market with seemingly unlimited resources. This milestone was set in a mid-sized market by a mid-sized university licensee, which is a familiar environment for many of you. Also, this is not the first time WDAV has seen ratings success. In August of 2016, the station earned an average quarter share of 3.6, ranking it 8th in the market and #1 for all classical stations in the country.
Congratulations to General Manager Frank Dominguez, Content Director Rachel Stewart, and the entire WDAV team (this really is a team win!) on making history.
THING ONE: Women & Philanthropy
A little more than a year ago, The New York Times ran a piece on the growing and critical role that women are playing in the world of philanthropy. The story focused on the high profile giving of MacKenzie Scott, who was reported to have donated $4.2 billion (that’s with a “B”) of her wealth in the last four months of 2020. In addition, the piece detailed the increasing influence of women in impacting the nonprofit sector with targeted and transformational gifts.
The Times’ Valeriya Safronova also noted the increasing participation of female donor giving circles such as the Women’s Donor Network and the Women’s Funding Network, both of which have grown substantially over the past two decades.
In November, Maria Di Mento reported for The Chronicle of Philanthropy on an extraordinary women-led fundraising effort at Dartmouth.
The university recently announced that 104 alumnae each gave or pledged $1 million or more. They gave a total of $386 million in direct gifts and pledges and an additional $61.5 million in planned bequests, going to a range of programs across the university. It’s the first time the university has ever attracted so much in donations from affluent alumnae. The effort was one of three peer-to-peer fundraising programs that were conceived of and led by Dartmouth women volunteers as part of the university’s $3 billion Call to Lead fundraising campaign.
To help better understand this vital role of women in philanthropy, Patrick Schmitt, the co-CEO of FreeWill, will be leading a webinar on Tuesday, March 1, 2022, at noon (Eastern) that will offer some new insights on trends on women and giving.
Here are some of the areas the session will cover:
Shifting demographics & wealth
Trends that are shaping how women give in 2022
Data on gift types and differences in men’s and women’s giving
Fundraising strategies that resonate with women
These webinars from FreeWill are always engaging and interactive, and you can register through this link.
THING TWO: The Power of Being An Ally
Another webinar happening on Tuesday comes from the Power Shift Project’s Jill Geisler. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Workplace Integrity curriculum that Jill has been leading since 2018.
This project aims to build a workplace free of harassment, discrimination, and incivility – and filled with opportunity, especially for those who have traditionally been denied it.
This particular session this week will center on how those of us in privileged positions can be better allies to support people who do not have those same privileges. Sarah Hashish, a communications exec with Siemens, wrote a terrific post on Medium late last year on “The Power of Being an Ally.”
An ally is a helper, colleague, partner, family member, or friend. In this context, an ally is someone who has certain structural privileges and joins forces with people who do not have these privileges.
For example, men can become allies of women in the feminist movement, cisgender people can take action in alliance with trans people, people without diabilities can aid the disability movement by fighting ableism, and white people can make common cause with the BIPOC community in the fight against racism.
It’s always a matter of taking self-reflective action against discrimination from your respective position of privilege, that is, with awareness of one’s own privileges. An ally takes responsibility for overcoming this discrimination.1
This one-hour interactive session will explore with attendees such vital topics as:
*Why being an ally right now — during a period of reckoning on racial justice and the ongoing pandemic — is more critical than ever.
How to have courageous conversations with the right words at the right time
How to keep bias from finding its way into decision making
Why micro-aggressions aren’t really so “micro” — and how to stop them
How to address the burden of “invisible work” that can harm underrepresented staff
Real-world situations in which newsroom allies made a difference for their colleagues — and created better journalism, too
That last bullet is one of the reasons why this training is so helpful and vital for public media since it’s geared specifically for news and media organizations.
The free webinar, Workplace Integrity: Do You Qualify as an Ally? (Especially Now), is scheduled for 1:00 pm (Eastern) on Tuesday, March 1, 2022, and you can register at this link.
I had the opportunity to attend a similar session with Jill last year (below) that was excellent, so I encourage you to check it out.
THING THREE: Solutions Journalism Investigates, Explains, and Seeks To Solve Shared Problems
I can’t tell you about the number of conversations I’ve had with colleagues that if we were to invent the public media system at this moment in time, it would look much different than it does today.
It’s kind of an interesting thought experiment.
So when the folks at the Solutions Journalism Network (SJN) promote a conversation with its co-founders, David Bornstein and Tina Rosenberg, titled “What If We Could Build Journalism From Scratch,” I thought it might be worth checking out.
Since 2013, the SJN has worked with hundreds of journalists, and dozens of newsrooms to produce rigorous, in-depth reporting on responses to social problems.
They describe their work under an umbrella of Four Pillars2:
A solutions story focuses on a RESPONSE to a social problem — and how that response has worked or why it hasn’t.
The best solutions reporting distills the lessons that make the response relevant and accessible to others. In other words, it offers INSIGHT.
Solutions journalism looks for EVIDENCE — data or qualitative results that show effectiveness (or lack thereof). Solutions stories are upfront with audiences about that evidence — what it tells us and what it doesn’t. A particularly innovative response can be a good story without much evidence. Still, the reporter has to be transparent about the lack of data and why the response is newsworthy anyway.
Solutions stories reveal a response’s shortcomings. No answer is perfect, and some work well for one community but may fail in others. A responsible reporter covers what doesn’t work and places the response in context. Reporting on LIMITATIONS, in other words, is essential.
And it seems to work.
In research conducted by the media firm SmithGeiger and released last year, 51% of respondents said they preferred the solutions journalism story they viewed versus 32% for a corresponding problem-focused story.
A majority preferred the solutions journalism story for each age group between 18–45. In addition, a plurality (47%) of those in the 45–54 age group also chose the “solutions” story.
The study also found that 79% percent of people surveyed believed it’s either essential or important that local news both “identify specific problems facing your local area and also report on the solutions community members have found to address these problems.”
And when you talk about impact, the SmithGeiger research found that respondents were also about 10% more likely to say the “solutions” story changed their understanding of an issue and would make them watch/read/listen to the station’s coverage again.
In October 2021, the SJN launched the Advancing Democracy project with eight reporting projects in 10 newsrooms across the United States exploring local problems related to the democratic process and (and this is the “solutions” part) ways those problems are being addressed. The project is working with a small cohort of newsrooms all led by and serving people from communities that have been historically disenfranchised in this country.
One of the partners on this project is KOSU Public Radio in Oklahoma. The focal point of this project is Black Oklahoma. This hour-long current-affairs radio program covers issues of relevance to Black Oklahomans produced by the Tri-City Collective airing on KOSU.
Another project that the SJN is offering has an application deadline of this Wednesday, March 2 at 3:00 pm (Eastern). This initiative will build a cohort of newsrooms this year that will report on labor issues in the U.S., learn from each other and share insights from their projects with our growing network of journalists and educators. Newsrooms selected for this project will receive $50,000 and, additionally, each newsroom will also be asked to select one fellow to engage in six months of activities to share what they’ve learned with other journalists in 2023. The fellow will receive a separate stipend ($2,500).
You can read the entire application at this link.
Sree Sreenivasan, a leading social and digital media consultant and trainer working with nonprofits, startups, companies, and executives worldwide, will host the webinar this week.
The session is this Thursday, March 3, 2022, at noon (Eastern). The conversation will focus on healthier ways to define “news” to truly serve communities and how solutions journalism can fill coverage gaps. The session will take audience questions, and there’s no registration needed. All you need to do is go to this link on the SJN’s YouTube channel to join the discussion.
One More Thing
We opened with a thing on fundraising, and we’ll add one more to close this week’s Datebook.
The Lenfest News Philanthropy Network presents a one-hour workshop for nonprofit news organizations on how to best utilize email newsletters for fundraising and stewardship.
If you’re not aware of the Lenfest Network, it’s a community designed to support and build capacity for fundraising and development professionals in journalism. They sponsored the inaugural Lenfest News Philanthropy Summit in early November last year, providing numerous excellent panels and workshops over the three days.
You can see recordings of some of the sessions here.
The 60-minute workshop this week is on Tuesday, March 1, 2022, at 3:00 pm (Eastern).
Lenfest Institute Editorial & Communication Director Joseph Lichterman will provide an overview of core newsletter best practices, highlight tips for how to best utilize editorial products for fundraising, and share successful examples of publishers leveraging their email products.
You can register for the session at this link.
That’s the Three Things Datebook for this week. Thanks for reading.
Sarah Hashish is an Egyptian living in Germany since 2008. She works for Siemens Energy and has always had a passion for working on people-related topics. She often shares stories, feelings, thoughts, and ideas on her blog with the hope of helping the world become a better place one human at a time.
From the December 9, 2020 post on Medium, “Solutions Journalism: What is it and why should I care?”