How LOOKOUT created a new policy and intake process for future partners

LOOKOUT, a two-year-old nonprofit investigative queer news outlet, partnered with Innovation in Focus to explore additional revenue opportunities. They wanted to answer the question: how do we ensure that our future advertisers and sponsors align with our newsroom’s mission and values? 

This question was especially important as LOOKOUT’s leadership heard from readers that a lack of transparency around advertising contributes to their distrust of news media.

To address this, LOOKOUT drafted an advertising ethics policy and worked with Innovation in Focus to create an intake process that would help us learn more about each advertiser and their content before signing any contracts.

Building an ethics policy centered on advertising

While LOOKOUT has an editorial ethics policy related to transparency, conflicts of interest, fairness and accuracy, the newsroom wanted to specify what kinds of ads or sponsored content would violate their values or commitment to their community.

We first brainstormed a list of nonprofits and businesses that LOOKOUT knew to be mission-aligned or mission-adjacent like Be Well, a health clinic that provides gender-affirming care, or the Greater Phoenix Equality Chamber of Commerce. 

Then, founder and editor in chief Joseph Darius Jaafari identified the common denominators of those organizations to determine why they may accept or reject a specific advertising pitch. Joseph created a list of questions he’d want to ask potential advertisers and sponsors based on a core set of values.

Questions

• Is your company B Corps certified, or recognized by any of the national DEI certification groups? 
• Does your company have a DEI statement? 
• By your own knowledge, does your company give to political campaigns? 
• By your own knowledge, has your company ever taken a stance against LGBTQ rights? 
• Is your company for-profit or nonprofit? 
• Is your company associated with any political parties? 
• Does your organization promote a specific religious viewpoint? 
• Is your ad promoting or endorsing any political party?
• Is your ad for a LBGTQ+ event or program? 

Values

• We at LOOKOUT believe that companies do good by being good.
• We believe in transparency.
• We believe in integrity.
• We believe in equal rights.
• And we believe in honest governance, from lawmakers to company or community leaders. 

Why we would say no

• Active hate speech or veiled bigotry.
• Promotion of ideologies that align with hate groups, defined by SPLC.
• Company SEC filings show donations to anti-LGBT candidates.
• Money comes directly from campaign finances.
• Company is a spokesperson for a political party.
• Company has shown exclusive interest in favorable coverage of them. 

Choosing a tool: Feathery

For past Innovation in Focus projects, we have tested form builders such as Typeform, which we used to build a news quiz, or Jotform, which helped us make a community resource hub. However, we found that some of these, like Typeform, limited the number of responses you can collect on the free plans or didn’t have all the features we wanted.

Here are some parameters we considered when evaluating the different platforms 

• Can we embed the form on LOOKOUT’s website?
• Can someone download a media kit directly from the form?
• Can we manage the results in a spreadsheet?
• Does the form allow us to set up conditional logic or workflows? For example, if you answer one question in a certain way, can it send the user to a contact form to chat with us further?
• Can we collect contact information?
• Does the form allow us to collect data as the user answers, not just when they click “submit” at the end?

While we considered tools like Airtable, Google Forms and Jotform, we ultimately landed on Feathery because it provided the conditional logic functions we wanted and offered one of the most accessible free plans with 500 submissions/month. While evaluating tools, we also looked at the platform TechSoup, which helps nonprofits find free and discounted tech.

A pricing note on Feathery: If we wanted to remove the branding or customize a subdomain for the form, the lowest possible pricing plan was $100 per month. If this customization ends up being a priority, it would be more cost efficient to use a tool like Typeform ($50 per month, allowing for 1,000 responses per month) or Jotform (currently $19.50/month and allowing 1,000 responses per month).

Here’s a guide for how we created the form using Feathery.

Collecting feedback about the form

The next step before launching was to gather some early feedback. Jake Hylton, LOOKOUT’s executive director, sent the form to current partners and colleagues. 

While they did not receive much feedback at this stage, it was helpful to know that they could easily share the intake form internally.

What happens next

As part of LOOKOUT’s new focus on advertising and sponsorship, they worked with Lawyers for Reporters to create a set of basic terms and conditions for advertising. LOOKOUT will publish these terms and conditions on their website, as well as an ethics policy and intake form.

Following through on their goal to maintain readers’ trust through this process, LOOKOUT will explain this advertising workflow and all related changes.

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Cite this article

Lytle, Emily (2025, Jan. 20). Aligning your advertisers with your mission and values. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/aligning-your-advertisers-with-your-mission-and-values/