As a nonprofit organization, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists relies on donations to support our investigative journalism. This series provides a regular update on who our major donors are and why they choose to support us. If you have questions or would like to learn more about donating to ICIJ, please contact us at insiders@icij.org.
On #GivingNewsDay, we challenged you, our readers and supporters, to help us reach 300 new ICIJ Insiders before the end of 2019.
I’m so happy to share that our final tally is above and beyond this goal. More than 500 people became an ICIJ Insider between November 1 and December 31. We now have nearly 1,500 ICIJ Insiders who are dedicated to ensuring that strong, collaborative investigative journalism thrives in 2020 and beyond.
We also set some internal fundraising goals to help us strategize through the end of the year and into 2020 — and our Insiders made sure we exceeded those, too.
We sailed past our $200,000 NewsMatch goal and raised nearly $300,000 in total in November and December (this includes $20,000 in matching funds through NewsMatch, which we qualified for only a few weeks into the campaign!). This huge boost helped us crush our goals for the year — we had set our sights on $400,000 from individuals in 2019 and thanks to you, we ended up raising $469,000!
This represents significant growth over just the past year. In 2018, we raised nearly $220,000 during NewsMatch and $383,000 over the full year. As you can see, ICIJ and our Insiders program are on an impressive upward trajectory — all thanks to the generosity of our readers.
Overwhelming support like this is so significant not only for our ICIJ Insiders membership program (which you can learn more about here), but also because of what it means for our strength and stability as a nonprofit organization.
The more we grow our ICIJ Insiders community, the more we have a strong foundation of reliable support and can direct more resources to the work we do best — building partnerships with the best investigative journalists around the world, exposing global corruption, and holding the powerful to account.
With your help, we’ll keep delivering the kind of fearless and bold journalism that you expect from ICIJ. Thank you for a wildly successful NewsMatch, and here’s to 2020.