Lubbock Lights celebrated its second anniversary last month. We’re fulfilling our goal of giving you interesting, important and in-depth local news stories with no agenda.
We’ve created a successful – if tiny – local news organization.
Here’s what people are saying about Lubbock Lights
I really like Lubbock Lights! They cover LOCAL news stories no one else is doing and they do it in depth, fairly presenting all sides of the issue. I’ve been involved in some things they’ve reported on, so I know they provided fair coverage, which gives me faith in their reporting when they report on things I’m not familiar with.
George McMahan
As a professional and as a mom, I want to stay connected to what’s really happening in our community, not just the headlines. Lubbock Lights’ coverage is thoughtful, reliable and full of interesting stories impacting our city. It helps me feel informed, engaged and proud to call Lubbock home.
Andrea Tirey
In an era where truly thorough and unbiased local reporting is increasingly rare and difficult to achieve, Lubbock Lights excels. They provide relevant, timely, and traditional news coverage that is exceptionally easy to read, follow and understand. Their commitment to the community is invaluable.
Murvat Musa
Lubbock Lights provides the in-depth coverage of local events that often is not available through other news sources. I look forward to reading it.
Alan Henry
I follow Lubbock Lights because their articles are founded in solid and meaningful journalism skills, now lost by so many other “news” outlets. Their articles are researched with extreme care, attention to detail, and with relevant follow-up ongoing as events and stories continue their path. They are pros in investigative journalism. They ALWAYS follow up!
LeeAnn Dumbauld
Financially, though, we need your help to become sustainable, growing from tiny to, well, small or modest.
The goal is to do more of what we’ve been doing – filling a local news gap – stories other local media isn’t doing or more in-depth stories than the newspaper has staff or TV has time to do. We don’t consider ourselves competition for other local media, which is why we also offer our stories to them.
Starting tomorrow, we begin a NewsMatch fundraising campaign to build a donor base.
NewsMatch is a program offered by the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) and we’re members.
They’ll give us $15,000 if we can match it through your donations up to $1,000 between now and the end of the year for a total of $30,000.
But we’re aiming higher than $30,000.
NewsMatch allows members to add to the $15,000 they’ll give us. We’ve raised $4,000. So now, we’re asking y’all to match $19,000 – but working to raise some more money and we’ll announce that as the campaign continues.
If you want to donate now – and thanks! – here’s the link to our donation page. We appreciate any donation, but love recurring donations.
Speaking of recurring donations:
Any new recurring monthly donation beginning during the campaign period from now until the end of the year will be matched by NewsMatch at the 12-month value of that donation up to $1,000. For example, a new donor starting a donation of $10/month in December will be matched at $120 ($10 x 12). If a new person makes a donation of $500 a month, NewsMatch would only match up to $1,000.
We can get a $1,000 bonus from NewsMatch for 50 first-time donors of any amount.
For those of you who’ve signed up for our Saturday newsletter, you’ll get weekly campaign emails starting tomorrow, ending December 31.
You can opt out of the emails. If you don’t want to donate, we still want to keep you on our email list so you can get our weekly newsletter summing up what we’ve done that week.
And yes, we’re a 501c3 organization.
If we match $19,000 to reach $38,000, or a higher number, that’s great, but not enough to be sustainable.
So let me explain our business plan.
Many nonprofit websites grew financially three ways (in this order):
- Foundation support
- Donor base
- Sponsor advertising
We’ve heard there are millions of foundation dollars to support what we do, but as I made inquiries, it wasn’t easy to get. Plus, a friend of mine at another nonprofit news site on the east coast said foundations are great if you can get them, but it’s not always easy to keep them.
So we reversed that list above – wanting most of our revenue to come from sponsor advertising. We appreciate our sponsor support since our first year. You can see their messages on our site.
We’ve had some much-appreciated donor support, but it’s a smaller amount compared to our sponsor advertisements.
Our revenue now is around $80,000 a year and our goal for 2026 is to get to $400,000 with 80 percent of it coming from sponsor advertising.
Here’s some context:
The median Institute for Nonprofit News member generated $532,000 in annual revenue last year, up from $477,000 in 2023, according to a recent INN report.
So we’re asking donors and sponsors to get us to a place that’s still less than the median nonprofit site. It’s also tiny compared to the $2.5 million budget I had almost 20 years ago as editor of the Avalanche-Journal.
During these first two years of Lubbock Lights, we’ve discovered a lot of organizations, like INN, helping nonprofit local news websites. Hundreds of nonprofit newsrooms are growing across the country to address local news gaps following newspaper staff cuts over the past few decades.
To help support sponsor advertising, we switched to a new website platform in May from Newspack, allowing more ad positions than our previous site. And we recently started working with Broadstreet, a company designed to help nonprofit news sites offer more interesting advertising options. You can see two of those on our site right now – the UMB Bank ad in the “Top Banner” position and the Hub Funding Solutions “Local Authority” on the right side of our site.
Another important point of our business plan is to not have more than about 5 percent of revenue coming from one business or individual, helping us stay independent.
As we grow, we want to hire on a development director. As interesting as it’s been to learn how build sustainability, it’s not my background. We need a professional fundraiser to help us get closer to that median number and hopefully higher.
We’ll grow as we can support it. We don’t believe in getting out ahead of our skis.
But the days of local newsrooms having 45 people (which I also had here less than 20 years ago) may never return. Having a leaner newsroom doing more in-depth local news is sustainable.
We appreciate your help.
