A conversation with Mariko Chang, Honolulu Civil Beat

Honolulu Civil Beat, a nonprofit news organization in Hawaii, decided to try something new. In response to the federal government’s decision to rescind $9 billion in funding to public media, Civil Beat ran a 24-hour campaign committing to donate 50% of that day’s donations to Hawaiʻi Public Radio and PBS Hawaiʻi. This appeal raised close to $11,000. 

Innovation in Focus Editor Emily Lytle spoke with Mariko Chang, director of philanthropy at Civil Beat, to learn more about how her team experiments with fundraising ideas and what they want to try next.

Lytle: How have you seen your approach to membership and fundraising change with the growth of Civil Beat?

Chang: It’s become more sophisticated and segmented. When we first started with, I would say around 1,000 individual supporters, we would go ahead and make thank-you calls to anyone who made a donation. And, in some ways, it was really wonderful in terms of how high-touch we could be. Now we have a donor base of about 7,400, so how do we scale with the technology? How do we take advantage of automations while still trying to be very personable? 

We still make phone calls to donors when their credit card fails, or of course, an occasional thank you call when someone writes something really meaningful into the “I was encouraged to give because …” part of our donation form. We now have – throughout the year – three annual fund campaigns that range from about two to four weeks, give or take. And a lot of that is email driven. So, with each of those, we’re thinking about experimenting with the language of the subject line, the timing of the email send, which specific segment receives that message, etc. So we’re continuing to fine tune it campaign over campaign.

Lytle: Can you share some examples of experiments that you’re excited about and what you’ve learned from them? You mentioned microgiving, where you asked readers to give even small amounts?

Chang: With the microgiving, we wanted some level of a control test, so we actually just advertised that opportunity on our app. It was a popup that came up, and I think the verbiage was something like, “our journalists love tips,” and so it was more of that tip concept of a dollar here and there. We honestly expected 10 new donors maybe, and then we’d put them on a path that has been very successful for us in terms of cultivation and stewardship where we’d migrate them to our email and get them more involved. By the end of our short-run experiment we had at least 75 – with a large portion of those being brand new donors. This experiment is still a work in progress. I think we need to move it to a stage two, which I know there’s a lot of skepticism in terms of can you renew them? Can you upgrade them? So that’ll be on us to figure that out.

Lytle: What was the thought process behind the donation to the public radio and broadcasting stations?

Chang: We’re operating under the assumption that our donor base would really appreciate the effort of us collaborating with our local public radio and public broadcasting station, so it would engender a lot of goodwill, and that they would have an affinity for these partners. 

Over the years, we have seen newsrooms do these kinds of partnerships. One that comes to mind: Sahan Journal ran a campaign where they donated to their local food bank.

In this case, it just kind of felt like all the stars really aligned where we could message our donor base, and we felt very confident that they would respond positively and donate a significant amount. We knew there was a risk that maybe we’d only raise a hundred dollars and then we’d give them a piddly $25 each. What really boosted those numbers is that it did engage some of our major donors. In the end, we raised a little over $11,000.

Lytle: What did you learn from this one-time campaign? Any lessons that you’re taking with you?

Chang: What was great about it was it had a bold message. It was a very timely call to action, and then it was very collegial as well. Outside of our campaigns, we do these one-off fundraising emails, and they don’t [typically] perform really well. It’s just kind of a way that we keep the fundraising cadence a little alive throughout the year, but we’d love to figure out how to do more of these so that we have spikes. 

Lytle: Are there any other ways that you are interested in collaborating or doing shared fundraising campaigns in this realm?

Chang: After the campaign performed pretty well, we were just thinking internally that it would be a good time to host an event together to visually remind people that we’re in this together, while also explaining to folks why they need to fund public media. We saw the Texas Tribune do a really great event last month. So I think taking it out of email would be something that I’d be interested in experimenting with, because Civil Beat has such a robust events program. We do monthly events, everything from really small, intimate conversations with folks that are very maybe topic specific, or we go out into more rural parts of the state using this model called pop-up newsrooms.

Lytle: What other strategies or ideas do you want to share for other news organizations looking to draw in new donors? What advice do you have?

Chang: We’ve been leaning on the event strategy pretty heavily these days. I think in smaller communities, especially, that person to person experience and introduction goes so far. But putting that aside, we are doing a little bit more transactional stuff. We’ve always really prided ourselves that folks definitely donate because they believe in our mission, but we’re also recognizing from within our newsletter audience, which is I think 46,000 these days, there are people that would really respond to swag, so that’s a good reminder for us. 

Mariko Chang is the director of philanthropy for Civil Beat, speaks with readers for an event in the Civil Beat newsroom (Cory Lum/Civil Beat/2018)

Lytle: I was just looking at the 15th anniversary fundraising you have going on right now, and you are offering a “mystery gift”?

Chang: Yeah, locally there’s a concept called fukubukuro, which is like a mystery gift bag. Like the labubus, it’s this mystery concept that we wanted to tap into. We’re going to launch it more publicly with graphics, and hopefully that catches people. We did design new swag items, but we’re pairing that with our surplus inventory of T-shirts, etc.

Lytle: What other ways are you leveraging your anniversary? 

Chang: We’re going to be experimenting with: can we upgrade major donors from $1,000 to $1,500? How do we resonate with this number for the remainder of the year? For a while, we’ve been holding back, so we’re encouraging everyone to give $15 a month. One thing that I’ve been thinking about: Because our content and everything that we do is free, how do we message that in a way that is new and resonates with people in different ways that we haven’t already said for the past 10 years? So, for example, we always say, “give a gift to support Civil Beat” so you can ensure that it remains free for those who can’t afford it. I would love to break that number down. By giving a donation of $15 a month, how many people are you allowing it to be free for, knowing that 500,000 people visit our website? 

Lytle: What ideas are you excited to try next? 

Chang: There’s something about a countdown that has been working really well for us. The flipside is I think we’re conditioning our audiences to wait till the very end to make a donation. But we’ve just noticed that these shorter time periods – for 24 hours such and such happens, or “there are three days left,” “you’re within the last 48 hours before we have to meet our goal” – [seem to work]. We now visually use a countdown clock on our website, on the top of our article pages and even in our newsletter on the final days. (We use a tool called MotionMail). So we reinforce that messaging of “time is running out.” 

The last thing I would say in terms of what we’re really excited about: We want to do a better job of branching out geographically, having reporters in very specific neighborhoods on different islands. So we’re in the process of doing pretty robust surveying, listening sessions, all of that I think will take place and continue on for the next six months and then again down the line. But I know folks have done really good work of surveying their audience, then reporting back as to what they’ve learned, and then communicating out how it has informed the newsroom. I feel like that is going to be a strong strategy for us going forward. So I think next year, that’ll be an exciting way to think about how we message and how we fundraise. 

If everyone tells us that they’re really interested in the cost of living in their communities, [for example,] then I think we’re going to focus on how do we uplift that beat and that reporter? How do we make sure that we’re logging all of the impact so that we’re then communicating that to our donor base, as well as how we are crafting these appeals to institutional funders and foundations. 

Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

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Cite this article

Lytle, Emily  (2025, Sept. 25). Creative experiments in fundraising, from shared proceeds to microgiving and countdown clocks. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/creative-experiments-in-fundraising-from-shared-proceeds-to-microgiving-and-countdown-clocks/