INNovation Fund Application Round 3 - March 2nd, Submission Date :01:13. EIN of organization (or of fiscal sponsor's organization)

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1 INNovation Fund Application Round 3 - March 2nd, 2015 Submission Date :01:13 Organization Name Tax- exempt status EIN of organization (or of fiscal sponsor's organization) Website address T he Seattle Globalist 501(c)(3) organization Phone Number (206) Applicant's name T itle: Contact Jessica Partnow Executive Director jessica@seattleglobalist.com Proposed Project Start Date Anticipated Project End Date Total estimated budget for the proposed project Request amount from the INNovation Fund: What is the total annual budget for your organization or, if you are a fiscally- sponsored project of another organization, the total annual budget for your fiscallysponsored project. In two or three sentences, describe your organization's purpose and audience. Describe in detail the business experiment for which you are requesting funds. How does it fit with your sustainability plans? Explain the need for this project, and how you expect it to increase revenue and/or audience engagement. $19,610 $17,210 $286,108 The mission of The Seattle Globalist is to elevate diverse voices through media. We serve an audience concentrated in the Puget Sound region with news and information connecting global issues to local communities: our region s population is growing fast, and it is becoming more international every day. We serve this rapidly changing region with daily news and indepth reporting, and by developing new, diverse, writers who represent our changing community. The Seattle Globalist will offer a series of community workshops on a variety of media skills topics with two goals: to develop new contributing writers for the Globalist, and to increase our earned revenue stream. T his program is an effort to monetize the unique skill-development aspect of our organizational mission: roughly half of our contributors are new to journalism, and receive intensive mentoring, training and editorial guidance through the process of publishing with the Globalist. Currently that mentorship happens largely on an individual basis between each editor and their contributors, making it both time-intensive and hard for us to quantify in terms of the service provided to our writers. By creating a series of skillbuilding workshops for contributors and the public, we both maximize efficiency in our editorial process and create a new revenue stream. Our target audience for this workshop series includes three groups: existing Globalist contributors; new people we want to recruit as writers, and a more general audience who simply want to hone or build new media skills. We expect this third group, in particular, will be able to pay a higher workshop

2 fee in order to sustain the program. Each workshop will cover a topic of interest to a broad range of people, such as: reporting skills, smartphone photography, writing with voice, interviewing, pitching, and promoting your work through social media. Workshops will be led by members of our staff, which includes nationally award-winning journalists and filmmakers; faculty of a prestigious graduate program in digital media (the UW Communication Leadership program), extensive teaching experience, and the full range of skills needed to succeed in the new media landscape. The two-hour workshops will be offered for a fee, with both a regular rate ($50) and a discounted rate ($20) students, nonprofits and low-income individuals. We will reimburse the fee as a bonus on top of story payment when a workshop participant publishes his or her first article with The Seattle Globalist, thereby encouraging new contributors. T he workshop series will generate revenue in multiple ways: First, our tiered fee-for-service model will generate money from participants who are able to afford the workshops without excluding those who cannot. We will aim for half of our workshop participants to pay the full rate and half to pay the discounted price. Built into our model is the understanding that not all workshop participants will decide to seek publication with the Globalist. T hose workshop fees will remain revenue for the organization. We also expect one half of participants to register for a subsequent workshop. After a participant s first workshop, registration fees will not be reimbursed. Second, we know from experience that Globalist supporters enjoy donating to programs that provide media skill-building opportunities to people who cannot otherwise afford them. We will create a fundraising campaign for individual donors to help support our ability to offer discounted workshop rates to low-income participants. We will set aside a portion of INNovation fund grant money to be used as a challenge grant that will be unlocked upon reaching a target number of donations for a workshop scholarship fund. T hird, we anticipate securing several corporate sponsorships and new web advertisements from area businesses that will be interested in getting in front of our workshop participants. We will specifically target business near the Hillman City Collaboratory, and businesses serving international populations, which will have a vested interest in serving our workshop participants. T he workshop series fits within our sustainability plans because we know that earned revenue is a major source of potential funding for the Globalist. Earned revenue currently makes up a third of our income, despite the fact that we have not significantly invested in developing our earned revenue streams. We have had success in offering one-off workshops for other organizations and trainings for individuals, suggesting that there is significant interest in our services and that people are willing to pay for them. This project will allow us to more fully explore the market for our revenue-generating services. Additionally, the Globalist is in the process of hiring for a new position (Business Developer) that will be focused solely on fundraising. While this position is currently budgeted to be half time, we hope to grow the Business Developer into a full-time position to help ensure the organization s sustainability. T he funds and activities from this grant would allow the Business Developer position s hours to increase from 20 to 24 per week, giving him or her three full days per week in the office. Finally, we know that the Globalist needs to constantly attract new writers, as our contributors tend to be active for a finite period. We will use a two-pronged approach for publicizing the workshops. First, we will target Seattle s international communities through strategic advertising with ethnic and neighborhood publications, our relationships with community leaders, and partnerships with community organizations.

3 Second, we will target a portion of our outreach to individuals who will explicitly be likely to pay full price for workshops. We will advertize in neighborhood publications, such as Next Door Media, Capitol Hill Seattle, and T he Stranger; KUOW public radio; and the University of Washington s extensive alumni lists, particularly alumni from the Department of Communication and the Communication Leadership program. In addition to generating revenue, we believe this project will increase audience engagement. We have consistently found that the more content we produce, the more our audience grows (February 2015 set a traffic record for us, with over 124,000 visits), and that coverage of particular international communities can not only draw significant traffic from within that community, but also develop new returning audience members. Which of the following statements best describes your proposed business experiment? Is this a new project? Who will help carry out the project? Describe the key staff and capabilities. If you plan to use outside partners, consultants, or vendors, tell us why you chose them (or how you will select them). Will you need to hire additional fulltime or parttime help to complete your proposed project? Principally a stand-alone revenue-generating project that we plan to do again if successful Extension of an existing project. We are doing this now or have done it in the past year. Most workshops will be run by two of our three co-founders, Jessica Partnow (Executive Director), Alex Stonehill (Editor-in-Chief) and Sarah Stuteville (Creative Director). T he three are all award-winning international journalists who have been working with aspiring media makers for the past ten years. T he three are all artists-in-residence at the University of Washington s Department of Communication, where they teach journalism and documentary filmmaking at the graduate and undergraduate level. T hey have extensive experience working with youth, immigrants, and refugees, and represent a broad base of media production skills, including reporting, writing, photography, radio production, filmmaking, web development and social media and marketing. Our new Business Developer will be in charge of soliciting area businesses for workshop sponsorships and individuals for donations to support the Globalist s ability to provide discounted workshop fees for low-income individuals. He or she will also work with our partner organizations to coordinate workshop recruitment and logistics. The Globalist will also lean on its community partners to ensure that our outreach and programming decisions are as appropriate and effective as possible. In particular, we will look to Runta News, Horn of Africa Services, Refugee Women s Alliance (ReWA), El Centro de la Raza, Casa Latina and OneAmerica to provide targeted publicity and consultation on best practices for hosting successful events with the communities they serve. We will provide organizational stipends to make sure that we are not taking advantage of these relationships. How will you measure progress? Please be specific and concrete about the metrics you will use? Suggestion: Keep the number of suggested metrics limited and make sure that they are actually measuring the results of the proposed business experiment. Using those metrics, how will you know you have succeeded in meeting the objectives for the business experiment. Please be as specific as possible. We will measure our progress based on the following metrics: *We will average just under one workshop per month. *We will average 18 participants per workshop. *Fifty percent of workshop participants will be from Seattle s international communities. *Fifty percent of workshop participants will pay the full workshop rate. *Fifty percent of workshop participants will register for at least one more workshop. *We will raise an average of $630 per workshop. *Fifty percent of workshop participants will contribute at least one story to the Globalist. We will consider this program successful if, by August 31, 2016: *We have held 10 workshops. *We have provided workshops for 180 participants. *Of the 180 participants, 50% are from Seattle s international communities. *Of the 180 participants, 50% paid the full price for their workshop. *Of the 180 participants, 50% registered for at least one more workshop. *Fifty percent of participants have published at least one story (or be in the

4 process of doing so) with T he Seattle Globalist. *We have raised $6,300 in earned revenue. How will INN be able to validate the metrics and how the project did using those metrics? What do you hope to learn from this project, and how do you hope to apply what you've learned over the long term? We believe in complete transparency, whether it s in our reporting, our accounting practices, or in our efforts to build an initiative like this one. We will give INN access to the exact same data and analysis we use to measure success (sign-in sheets; tracking sheets for data such as participant demographics, participant story contributions, participant reregistration; revenue reports), and work closely with the organization to make sure we are capturing the data we need to assess the project. We hope to answer a few different questions with this project: First, we want to test whether we can take our existing community trainings and make them into dual-purpose events: new contributor development and fundraising opportunities. As we test this question, we hope to narrow in on a sweet spot for workshop composition and workshop fees that will maximize both our return on investment and the number of workshop participants we are able to attract. Second, we want to know if offering to reimburse a workshop fee as a bonus for successful first publication with the Globalist will encourage new community members to contribute stories. Third, we hope to learn whether these community workshops could be used as fundraising tools in other ways, namely through sponsorships and advertising by local businesses and targeted campaigns to individual donors. Why are you the right organization and team to do this project? While Seattle has a richly diverse media landscape, with multiple ethnic and community publications, much coverage of international and immigrant communities is siloed away from larger citywide publications. T he Globalist is unique in bridging the gap between ethnic press and mainstream media. Our existing corps of contributors is diverse: 20% were born outside the US and 40% are people of color (as compared to the 12% average in US newsrooms overall or even Seattle s population, which is about 16% foreign-born and 30% people of color). As educators and international journalists who have been covering immigration and refugee issues in the Seattle area for close to a decade, our staff knows how to work with first-time writers, youth, students, professionals, English Language Learners, immigrants and refugees. Our trainings will be based on the curriculum we have developed through our work with high school and college students (including as journalism instructors at the University of Washington), and our community contributors. Since 2006 (when were known as the Common Language Project), we have partnered with several community organizations throughout the Seattle area, including OneAmerica, Runta News, EMP, World Affairs Council, and numerous public high schools with high percentages of international students to develop media literacy, journalism and media production trainings. Our workshops are always well received and there is usually a higher demand for these events than the capacity to produce them. These past partnerships and extensive training experience make us the right organization for this program. How is this project similar/different than other projects you've researched ahead of this proposal? What can you learn that is different from what others have already tried? T his project is similar to other fee-for-service projects that charge based on a sliding scale. However, our model is different in that we are pledging to reimburse the workshop fee upon a participant s first publication with T he Seattle Globalist. T his reimbursement will be in addition to our standard freelance rate, which we pay to all contributors, and which starts at $50 per story. We hope that by removing all financial risk we will encourage even more people to register for the workshops and to seek publication.

5 Additionally, this project increases our organizational efficiency by streamlining our editorial mentorship work with contributors in addition to generating revenue. It takes one of the most powerful parts of our work: intensive editorial mentorship, and turns it into an opportunity to raise funds. T his project also draws from last year s High Country News proposal, which used a portion of grant funds to leverage individual donations by means of a matching challenge grant. We will similarly set aside a portion of grant funds as a challenge for Globalist donors to invest in the sustainability of this workshop series. Rather than unlocking the challenge grant funds after reaching a certain donation dollar amount, we will unlock them upon reaching a target number of donations. Like many news organizations, the Globalist recognizes that building a broad base of low-level supporters will help with long-term sustainability and we hope the challenge funds will help us toward that goal. Why is this project timely? Why is now a good time to undertake this project? We are in an incredible moment of growth and change here in Seattle as our city becomes more prominent nationally and globally, and as our demographics continue change. As Seattle becomes ever more international, it will be increasingly important to make sure that all of our communities have a voice in how they are represented. On a local, national, and global scale, this is a moment of potential polarization. Recently, the news has been full of stories that underscore the divisiveness of difference, be it religious, ethnic, political, racial, or ideological. T he Charlie Hebdo attacks, which have given rise to heightened religious conflict, and recent police shootings across the United States, which have ignited racial tensions, are two examples. Here in Seattle, there has been a rash of ethnic- and religiously-motivated hate crimes. While these stories and events raise concerns of polarization, they also signal that this a moment ripe for conversation. T he Seattle Globalist has the right platform with which to foster this conversation. We are unique in that we not only cover diverse perspectives; we also elevate diverse voices so that they can speak for themselves. Programs such as the workshop series give community members the tools needed to contribute to local, national, and global conversations. Adding greater nuance, opinions and experiences to stories is a sure way to work toward greater understanding and inclusiveness. Upload your project budget SeattleGlobalist-Budget.xlsx