Just one month ago we announced the City Budget Watchdog pitch, reporting on San Francisco’s half-billion-dollar hole.

A few things made this pitch unique.

• It was our first “beat pitch.” The deliverable here isn’t a single story – but to cover a topic for a period of time. If we reach our goal, then the bonus is that we will create a follow up pitch and continue covering that topic for an extended period of time.
• We had a gracious matching grant from Ruth Ann Harnisch. If we could raise $1,000 in the first month, our donations would be matched.

We raised $1,710!!!!

Adding the Harnisch Foundation‘s grant we are at $2,710 just over half way to our goal!

The Public Press has a post about it as well: “Evidence that the micro-funding paradigm works for journalism.”

While the Spot.Us team had been focusing on spreading the word and fundraising the Public Press has been doing the reporting. You can see their work on the Public Press project page: City Budget Watchdog. The most recent piece included this YouTube interview with city supervisor Chris Daly

So What Made this All Work?

A few things became clearer in the last moth with this pitch.

• Donating is social.

I have to thank George Kelly and Amy Gahran for demonstrating this point for us. In some respects we’ve known this all along on Spot.Us. The reason we list donors on a pitch is for both transparency but also to give those donors recognition. But we need to do more. We should find a way to let people easily share these donations with their own networks and even match them up. Kara Andrade calls it donor buddies.

• Every Pitch is a Campaign

Again this is something that we’ve known all along on Spot.Us but this pitch has been, perhaps, one of the better demonstrations. About one week into the month our team had raised some money, but not enough to hit our goal. So the Spot.Us and Public Press team had a brainstorm about how to market the project.

Our original title for this was: “City Budget Blues.”

It was agreed that while the alliteration was nice – we were sending the wrong message. This project wasn’t aimed at being a downer on the city budget (the fact that we are half-a-billion in debt is enough of a reality check), but rather to keep an eye on what is happening. Document and spread knowledge about how city officials are reacting and repositioning. The Public Press wants to be “the go to spot” for updates on the city budget. “Watchdog” kept coming up and we finally settled.

• Outreach is personal

In a dream world Spot.Us could send out 500 emails to San Francisco residents and the 1/9/90 percent rule would take action: Five people would donate, fifty would check out the site and maybe come back later to donate or comment and the other 450 wouldn’t do anything.

But emailing 500 people is a lot of work. Instead – we reached out to our core communities. People we’ve engaged with in various ways and asked them to donate or spread the word. In the end – we have to make an ask. It is something that many journalists find discomforting – but we live in an age of microphilanthropy. If the Sandler family has a right to give 30 million to ProPublica then the Smith family has a right to give $30. They just need a platform and to be engaged.

Spot.Us created a spreadsheet of possible contacts and started going down the list.

To the extent that it is a campaign – we will continue to be in touch with those that donate (email updates with our content) and we will follow up with those that didn’t. This isn’t an attempt to be rude, but to try and identify the potential 9 percent that might still donate and to serve the purpose of our project – to inform folks about what we find.

• What makes a good partnership?

We recently started a beta “media partners page” on our blog which will appear on the main site later. Spot.Us is built on the idea of collaboration. While we believe collaboration is queen we also know that collaboration is wet. So we are trying to figure out the necesities for succesful collaborations. The following are notes from Chuck Lewis.

What we look for in collaborations.

• Trust – we want to work with folks that we can trust and who trust us.
• The collaboration should be in the interest of all parties.
• “Buy in” with decision makers. They need to be on board otherwise it will hit the fan later.
• Key liaison – somebody from every party who is tasked to the project.
• Commitment of time/resources and/or money from both parties. It does not need to be all three.
• The story/project. We are looking for good stories – that has to be at the heart of it all.

Having worked with the Public Press (and in full disclosure being on their steering committee) we have all the above.

• Start reporting on day one.

Spot.Us’ job is to market reporters work to the public. Some reporters sit and wait on Spot.Us for the money to flow in. It doesn’t. They have to create material that we can show off on their behalf. That is why every pitch has a blog attached to it. We then collect the best of these posts for our main Spot.Us blog (blog.spot.us)

• One small refund

We got a donation from a city supervisor. It actually came as a shock. In fact, I’m still not sure how the city supervisor found out about the pitch. While his $20 donation was made in good spirit and would have been a negligible part of the money raised, we decided to refund this donation. On Spot.Us we have a rule that sources cannot donate and vice-versa. While this is a situation that some journalists will harp on and claim Spot.Us is ruining journalism ethics, I tend to shrug it off. This was one of the more minor moments in the last month. The city supervisor didn’t know our rule, made a small donation in good faith and when we became aware of it we said ever so Palin-esque “thanks, but no thanks.” The supervisor in question agreed to donate his refund towards another pitch that is not being produced by the Public Press.

So these are just some of the lessons learned in this immediate phase of the City Budget Watchdog beat pitch. I know this: The Public Press is excited and amped on reporting this to their fullest capabilities. And Spot.Us is going to support them in any way we can. We are still shy of our goal, but hopefully we can get there and the San Francisco city budget cuts won’t continue without a careful and critical eye.

Until then we must give incredibly hugs, thanks and kudos to our donors so far: Ruth Ann Harnisch, Full Circle Fund – Technology, Full Circle Fund – Environment, David Cohn, Lila LaHood, Megan Casey, Kara Andrade, Louise Yarnall, Neal Gorenflo, E.O. Stinson, Sylvain Foissac, Suzanne Yada, Ariel Vardi, Deepti Gottipati, Renata Ament, Mike McCarthy, Howard Rheingold, Andrea Genovese, Sara O., Michelle Fitzhugh-Craig, Amy Gahran, Lauren Rabaino, David Amann, Adele Fasick, Scott Rosenberg, Donica Mensing, George Kelly, Sarah Milstein, Joni Marshburn, donors through the Facebook Cause (names to come!), Tony Long, Rosa Lara-Fernandez and Eric Arbanovella.

Related posts:

1. The Watchdog Mixer: Help us investigate city budget cutbacks
2. Give, drink and talk it up with our City Budget Watchdog team tonight!
3. City Budget Watchdog – Help Us Shine a Spotlight on the Budget Cuts
4. City Budget Watchdog Mixer – It Takes a Community to Move Mountains
5. Shining Light on the City Budget Blues