PITTSBURGH — One indicator of the energy and interest around live events in newsrooms these days: At INN Days — the Institute for Nonprofit News’ annual conference, held last month in Pittsburgh — a series of lightning talks on “Events that Build Audience and Revenue” was a standing-room-only session.
Presenters from five nonprofit newsrooms described event experiments with different scales, scopes, and challenges. But some common advice emerged from their experiences: Don’t do it alone. Tap your partners to help with publicity. And lean into the thing your newsroom can offer your community that no other organization can.
“What is the thing that only you can offer to your audience?” Jewish Currents deputy editor Naomi Gordon-Loebl said. “That’s the thing to build your event around.”
The Swampscott Tides’ Moth-style storytelling evening
Years before co-founding the Swampscott Tides, Anne Driscoll was a storyteller for one of The Moth’s live events in Dublin. As board president of the small nonprofit newsroom in Massachusetts, she realized a local version of the storytelling event could serve the outlet’s mission, bring the community together, and attract local sponsors.
In 2025, the Tides hosted the first installment of what has become an annual event, “Fish Tales,” at the local high school. Six community storytellers — from students to “local celebrities” like the official magician of Salem to residents whose ancestors helped found the town — share a story at each event; each prepares by working with a storytelling coach (Driscoll and another Moth storyteller). Driscoll recommended giving a storytelling event some structure by selecting a locally resonant theme (for Swampscott, themes reflect “our coastal vibe,” she said, starting with “Changing Tides” in 2025, then “A Fish Out of Water” this year, and, in 2027, “Off the Hook.”) The event feels like “a celebration of Swampscott.”
“We saw this as an opportunity to build our audience engagement, but also to diversify our sources of support,” Driscoll said. The event generates revenue from ticket sales and sponsorships (including “Gold Fish” and “Swedish Fish” supporters). Swampscott is “three square miles; it doesn’t have a huge business base — but it does have a lot of banks,” and many of those have grant programs to support community events. The Tides applied to almost a dozen different banks for support, and several became sponsors. The nonprofit also secured a local cultural arts grant.
Per-event expenses totaled between $1,000 and $2,000. Profits were $26,000 in year 1 ($12,000 of that from sponsorships) and $30,000 in year 2. A volunteer sub-committee helps organize.
“All of it made for a low-investment, high-yield event,” Driscoll said. “Expenses were low, rewards were very high.”
The 51st’s D.C. trivia night
How does a local news organization serve a transient city? Shortly after launching, The 51st introduced the column “Ask a D.C. Native,” inspired by Gothamist’s “Ask a Native New Yorker,” in which locals help transplants get to know the city.
“I wanted to turn it into a live event,” said Christina Sturdivant Sani, executive editor at the worker-led nonprofit and the column’s creator. “And I was thinking about a panel, and I was thinking about how boring a panel would be…” (Lots of knowing laughs from this panel’s audience.)
What would be more fun than a panel, she decided, was a game show. Drawing inspiration from local events she’d attended and heard about like Culture Tags (a gathering built around the party card game), Historically Black Phrases (a live adaptation of a book by that name), and the long-running D.C. high school quiz show “It’s Academic,” she envisioned an evening of local D.C. trivia with D.C. natives competing.
First, Sani recruited an MC she had in mind, D.C. native and poet/artist/youth advocate Dwayne Lawson-Brown, to host for free. An artist residency she was doing at a local hotel and coworking space required her to host three events, so that gave her the venue. She and Lawson-Brown developed the categories and questions, which the hotel required a “trivia consultant” to review (“I thought it was unnecessary, but it actually helped,” Sani said).
The 51st has hosted five trivia evenings throughout the city since last May and has three more planned for this year. Next year, Sani is hoping to hold the event monthly. The best turnout they’ve seen is around 65 people, and their email list includes 300 people who have registered. The event is structured as four rounds of trivia, eight questions each — a photo round, a music round, and two audience rounds — in which two teams of three D.C. natives compete. The 51st sources prizes from local businesses, theatres, and restaurants. Recruiting contestants is consistently the biggest challenge, Sani said. Over time, The 51st has found ways to promote its stories through the event; the team has attendees complete information needs surveys, and some have signed up for The 51st’s newsletter.
The 51st hosted the event at the hotel twice before branching out to other locations. Venues now ask to host the event; The 51st has developed a relationship with a new restaurant in a local food desert, The Strand, and helped bring more people to it through the event. Finding the right location, Sani explained, has been key to connecting The 51st with the people it is trying to reach. The young newsroom started out with a built-in audience from previous publications that skewed white and transplant-heavy. “I’m a D.C. native, and I’m Black, and I remember Chocolate City, so I’m like, ‘No, we gotta get some Black subscribers and D.C. natives,'” Sani said. That’s one of the reasons she wanted to start this event series.
The first couple events were “a mixed crowd and multigenerational, which was really cool,” she said. “But then once we started hosting it on the Black side of town, you could tell we were really reaching the audience that we wanted to.”
El Paso Matters’ community run with a local twist
5K? 10K?
Not in El Paso, thanks to the news nonprofit El Paso Matters, which organized a 9.15K, a distance inspired by the local area code, 915. The run, development and events director Alyshea D. Johnson said, was an experiment that’s become the newsroom’s “signature fundraising event” and raises money through a mix of registrations, sponsorships, and donations.
The event’s theme is “One Run, Countless Stories,” and it includes a street-festival style celebration following the run. The newsroom team had noticed an uptick in free runs and run club participation locally, and “we felt this run, although unconventional for a newsroom, really aligned with our mission of being community-first and community-driven journalism,” Johnson said.
In 2025, the event’s first year, the newsroom set a goal of 500 signups, and got well over 600. Pricing started out at $40 and went up closer to race day (“El Paso is a last-minute city, so that worked to our benefit,” Johnson said). Race registrants could donate when they signed up; of the 65 who did donate, 60 were first-timers, she said.
Social media was a major registration driver. El Paso Matters relied on local influencers to spread the word and “give us some legitimacy with their audience,” while also leaning into trends and “authentic” posts to attract engagement and break through. The social media emphasis might explain why many race registrants skewed younger than the newsroom’s typical audience demographic, giving El Paso Matters the chance to “connect with people that we hadn’t before.” The nonprofit followed up to give race registrants the opportunity to subscribe.
“Everybody got to run and have fun, but now they get to know El Paso Matters,” Johnson said. “We get to build trust, and in turn, that hopefully turns into support, whether that’s a subscribe from people that are meeting us for the first time or a donation, because they see what we’re doing for the community.”
Jewish Currents’ “Day of Politics & Culture”
“Jewish Currents Live: A Day of Politics & Culture” was always going to be an ambitious undertaking for a magazine run by a small team. In September 2024, Jewish Currents hosted over a thousand people in person on New York City’s Lower East Side, and hundreds more online, for an all-day event comprising a dozen sessions spanning “performance, learning, and discussion of the most urgent issues facing the Jewish left in 2024.” The sessions, which included a live podcast taping, dance, theater, a workshop, and panel discussions, featured 60 presenters (plus a comedy show and afterparty). By hard and soft metrics, the event was a success; Jewish Currents Live brought the newsroom hundreds of new members and subscribers, raised tens of thousands of dollars, and strengthened relationships with readers, speakers, partners, and funders.
That success is all the more notable because one of the biggest challenges of an event of this scale is finding a venue with space for a thousand people, “and ours canceled 10 days before for political reasons,” said deputy editor Naomi Gordon-Loebl.
In a last-minute, all-hands-on-deck troubleshooting effort, Jewish Currents pivoted to hosting the event across two venues half a mile apart. The cancellation ended up being “incredible publicity” that Gordon-Loebl thinks helped galvanize more people to show up in support. Jewish Currents was intentional in how it messaged to the public and to partners, and “in some ways, because [the venue] pulled out for political reasons, it emphasized the importance of the event,” they said.
Even without the venue curveball, “events like this are an enormous logistical lift,” Gordon-Loebl said, “and this one took so much of our financial resources [and] staff time [and] labor — it was a lot.” High-profile guests, they noted, are a moving target and often cancel last minute; the organization had to anticipate “what the needs and vibes will be of the event ahead of time” in making decisions like how long sessions should be, how long to leave between sessions, and which sessions to plot against each other.
Jewish Currents’ dozen partners and more than 100 “volunteers” were critical to the event’s success. (“We call them volunteers, but we pay them, and I encourage you to do the same,” Gordon-Loebl said.) While in the first year it was a request to partners to publicize the event, “this year, part of partnering is, you have to share it with your audience,” they added.
The event was ticketed, with discounted member pricing. “Charging even a little bit ensures that more people actually come,” program coordinator Noa Azulai said, adding that it’s helpful to have a sense of how many people to expect, especially when filling a big venue. Jewish Currents has also found an “add donation” button can bring in significant additional revenue on top of the ticket price.
Jewish Currents raised over $35,000 that it donated to another organization, but the event itself “was not actually the revenue driver; it’s not a gala,” Gordon-Loebl said. What actually drove revenue were fundraising and donations both before and after the event. “A lot of our donors really want to see community, they want to see participation, they want to see things happening in real time…We also need to be able to give them something that they can experience that’s not just an article,” Gordon-Loebl said. So an event like Jewish Currents Live “is an incredibly good sell for a donor.”
That said, “a lot of what came out of JCLive was not about the numbers,” Azulai said. “We brought our community together for a day that really demonstrated our communal power, solidarity, the tensions that were coming up in our community, and gave people a sense of communal pride and a place to gather.” The magazine will host the event again this year on Oct. 11.
The organization learned some surprising lessons about the elements of a successful event. “The best sessions were the ones that ran right towards the controversies in our community rather than away from them,” Gordon-Loebl said. “I encourage you to think about…the things that actually divide your audience, and open them up at an event.”
Jewish Currents’ organizational strength is “we represent a community, the Jewish left, that really doesn’t have any other publication exactly that is a home for it,” they added. The team leaned into that strength with Jewish Currents Live, offering a unique in-person gathering opportunity for that community. For other newsrooms planning events, Gordon-Loebl recommended thinking about, “What is the thing that only you do? What is the thing that you are the only place that can offer?”
Block Club Chicago’s block party
Six years after Block Club Chicago launched as a news org serving the city’s diverse neighborhoods, it held its inaugural Block Party in 2024.
“A block party is everything that you would see at a Chicago street festival,” VP of partnerships Maple Walker Lloyd said. The event featured the block party staples you’d imagine, and then some: food trucks, local bands, local DJs, a bouncy house for kids, but also jewelry and candle-making, Wiggleworms, and Jesse White Tumblers.
Between year 1 and year 2, Block Club Chicago learned a lot about which attractions would give it the most bang for its buck. “Always expect to spend more in year one; you’re learning, you’re trying to figure it out, and you’re also building relationships, so people are taking a huge, huge risk on you,” Walker Lloyd said. She recommended paying for an event planner in the first year of an event of this scale.
In 2025, for instance, Block Club decided to cut the expense of local bands, largely because that led to significant savings on AV costs; it added magic shows and a live podcast. Partnering with a local brewery for the block party’s second iteration led to savings on multiple fronts — Block Club didn’t have to pay for porta-potties, because attendees could use the brewery’s indoor bathrooms, and didn’t have to hire outside bartenders. (The savings from cutting a garbage contractor line item: $17,000.)
The block party, like all of Block Club’s events, is free and open to the public. In its first two years, about half of its revenue came from sponsorships from local businesses and foundations. Other revenue streams include vendor fees, a silent auction (one avenue to partner with local businesses willing to do in-kind donations), donations, and merch sales. Walker Lloyd specifically recommended creating an option for QR code donations on site.
In 2024, the block party generated $94,000 in gross revenue and cost $75,000, leaving Block Club with $19,000. In 2025, gross revenue dropped to $66,000 — but through strategic savings, expenses dropped even more, to $20,000, so Block Club came out with more than double the net revenue: $46,000.
“You don’t know what you don’t know,” Walker Lloyd said. “In year one, you’re experimenting, testing, learning, and growing. Then once you’ve got your year one down to a science, the above leads to streamlined logistics, and you’re setting yourself up for what’s important and what’s essential in the future.”
