How the Washington Informer raised $72,000 in its first year of launching a reader revenue strategy

The background: The Washington Informer has been a cornerstone of Black news coverage in the Washington, D.C. metro area for more than 60 years. Family-owned and deeply embedded in the community it serves, the Informer built its business almost entirely on advertising revenue — a model that sustained it for decades but left it exposed as the media landscape shifted.

The bottom line: After joining Newspack’s Revenue Development Program and simultaneously relaunching its website with reader revenue in mind, the Washington Informer raised $72,000 in reader revenue in its first year — more than triple what years of episodic fundraising through its charitable arm had produced. 

Chief Officer of Technology and Grants, Ra-Jah Kelly, came to his role at the Informer as a writer and editor, not a revenue strategist. He’d interned at the paper in high school and college, contributed as a freelancer for years, and eventually took on the Informer’s digital operations — managing everything from the newsletter and mailing list to the website and event planning. But reader revenue was new territory. “I didn’t really know a lot about newspaper revenue, ad revenue, and knew almost nothing about reader revenue before we started this program,” Kelly said.

The Informer had done some episodic fundraising through its charitable arm, raising roughly $20,000 over several years via platforms like Givebutter. But those funds came with restrictions on how to spend them (Givebutter restricted funds to programmatic spend), and the once-a-year ask model wasn’t building anything sustainable. Leadership knew ad revenue alone wasn’t enough. They needed to diversify. But the path forward wasn’t clear.

The big picture

Apryl Pilolli, the Director of Technology and Innovation for the Knight x LMA BloomLab, originally suggested Kelly apply for the RDP to help him understand how to optimize the Informer’s use of Newspack tools. Kelly found his experience in the Reader Revenue Track so fruitful that he participated in the Newsletters and Ads/Sponsorships Tracks, as well. His experience in all three RDP Tracks helped drive $72,000 in reader revenue and more than 12,000 newsletter signups. He joined the program when the Informer was in the middle of a full website redesign, and he was leading that project with a specific goal: build a site that could support a real reader revenue funnel from day one.

That meant setting up Newspack’s Reader Revenue and Audience Management system, which makes it easy to manage donations, convert readers to subscribers, and manage advertising all from one place. He partnered closely with the Newspack team to make sure everything was in place before launching their strategy.

At the same time, Kelly was grappling with a mindset challenge. The team was hesitant to ask their readers for financial support too often. They were worried about burdening or alienating them. “That was the underlying thought, perhaps, for our publisher, senior management, and certainly myself,” Kelly recalled. “Are we bothering people?”

Getting to the next level

The RDP helped reshape that thinking. Kelly’s coach, Ryan Tuck, of Blue Engine Collaborative, helped reframe their thinking by telling them, “You’re not asking enough.”

“Ryan’s main thing was, you’re not asking enough,” Kelly said. “And I think we’ve found that to be true.”

“The mantra became, ‘Why not try more?’ Worst case, we would learn what works and doesn’t, and as long as we were respecting the UX and monitoring for ‘bad impact,’ it would be all upside for the team,” said Tuck. 

Armed with that perspective, Kelly built reader revenue touchpoints into virtually every layer of the Informer’s interactions with readers and made sure they stayed there.The sticky header on both desktop and mobile now features a prominently placed support button in the Informer’s signature red. A Guardian-style ask appears at the bottom of articles, featuring a note from the publisher. Reader donation asks run in available newsletter ad inventory. And the Informer’s ticketing platform, built on a white-label version of Ticketsauce through their CitySpark partnership, now includes a donation request on every RSVP page — even for free events.

“Anywhere we can put the request, we do so,” Kelly said. “We just want to make sure that we’re consistently asking.”

One of the most significant moves Kelly made during this period was a partnership with Elizabeth Booker — known online as Bookersquared — a former FDA attorney-turned-comedian and content creator with more than 500,000 followers across Facebook and Instagram. The partnership came through Onyx Impact, a nonprofit that connects content creators with independent news publishers to combat misinformation.

Booker lives in the D.C. area, shares significant demographic overlap with the Informer’s audience, has her own established community, and reaches a younger audience, which is one that the Informer wanted to reach. She crafted content that highlights the Informer’s editorial work in her own voice and closed with a direct ask, whether for reader revenue or newsletter signups.

Over the course of the partnership, Booker has driven several thousand new subscribers to the Informer’s newsletter list and meaningful revenue. The majority of posts Booker publishes on behalf of the Informer have a call-to-action asking people to subscribe to their newsletter. Kelly and the team were pleasantly surprised by the amount of donations they received from those who also subscribed to the newsletter after seeing Booker’s posts. For example, a post from February, 2025, for Black History Month, netted more than $11,000 in donations.

“Being able to partner with someone like Booker, who had established her own community of trust, was incredibly impactful,” Kelly said. “Booker, in particular, is flexible to the demands of the newsroom and is mission-driven, as well.”

The Informer also launched Best of the DMV (District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia) in the summer of 2025 — a community recognition campaign where the Informer invited people to nominate their favorite businesses and organizations. The top nominees were added to a ballot for the public to choose the winners, and the Informer celebrated them at a public event. This was the Informer’s first time running a campaign like this, and it served a dual purpose: uplifting local businesses and organizations while dramatically expanding the Informer’s reach beyond its existing readership.

During the voting period, community members didn’t just vote — they also donated to the Informer through a welcome series of emails designed to ask subscribers for donations. The campaign helped the Informer achieve its highest revenue month on record in September 2025, a month that also coincided with the Congressional Black Caucus annual conference, where Kelly spent four days in person with an iPad and QR codes, talking directly to attendees about why the Informer needed their support.

The result

By the end of the Informer’s first year with the RDP program, they raised approximately $72,000 in reader revenue — more than 3.6 times what years of charitable fundraising produced. The majority came through donations, both one-time and recurring, with print subscriptions sold through the Informer’s store rounding out the total.

The event integration alone generated roughly 8,000 tickets sold. The majority of those attendees joined the Informer’s mailing list and entered an onboarding welcome series that included an ask for donations.

Also very important is that the revenue is now consistent, and the accounting team can plan with it. “Whereas before, we couldn’t even conceive of reader revenue making any type of significant impact in terms of our ultimate bottom line,” Kelly said.

Working together to find solutions

What changed at the Washington Informer wasn’t just the tools. It was how they used them. They stopped treating reader support like a once-a-year campaign and started weaving it into the everyday experience, in ways that felt consistent with the Informer’s identity instead of interrupting it. The RDP gave Kelly the inspiration, framework, and confidence to put that into practice. “Everything Ryan asked us to do, we did,” he said. “And that worked out pretty well for us.”

The Informer’s 60-year legacy gave them a strong foundation: deep community trust and a loyal readership. Even so, Kelly and his team were hesitant at first about asking readers for support. The program helped close that gap by giving them the encouragement to do it.

“The most important thing was visibility,” Kelly reflected. “I was confident that once people in our community knew we needed support, they would give. We just needed to make sure they knew.”

After more than six decades of informing and uplifting its community, the Informer is focused on ensuring it can keep doing that work for decades to come. “We’re building a way that we can continue to inform our community for decades to come,” Kelly said. “At least 60 more.”