Tone Madison marks a successful NewsMatch campaign for the fourth consecutive year

Reviewing the year-end total from a crucial fundraiser that powers our work.

Hey, remember Tone Madison‘s annual year-end fundraising campaign, and those matching funds we told you about from the national NewsMatch program? When all was said and done, donations from you, our readers, unlocked a $22,500 award from NewsMatch’s 2024 cycle. 

That number reflects NewsMatch doubling our base goal of raising $15,000 in reader donations, plus bonus awards Tone Madison received for raising community match funds from a group of generous local donors, and for bringing in more than 50 first-time donors. 

We’re grateful to all of the readers who stepped up. Direct financial support from our readers is the main thing that powers our fiercely independent coverage of culture and politics in Madison. In today’s climate, it’s not getting any cheaper to create painstaking, labor-intensive, thoughtful journalism, nor is it getting any easier to secure grant funding or attract and retain advertisers. If you’d like to help us out individually, please consider making a one-time or recurring donation. If you represent a business that would like to advertise with Tone Madison, here’s more information on how to do that.

NewsMatch, operated by the Institute for Nonprofit News, bundles together money from foundations and donors across the country to match reader donations at participating outlets. Crucially, these are unrestricted funds, meaning that we can use them to support our ongoing operations as we see fit, rather than earmarking them for specific projects. That’s hard to find in the nonprofit news world, and it provides an indispensable lifeline for a small publication like ours.

NewsMatch had a record-setting year nationwide in 2024, despite (or perhaps in response to) all of the economic and political threats looming over American journalism. While this was Tone Madison‘s fourth year participating in NewsMatch, our awarded funding in 2024 was actually our smallest since we began participating:

2024: $22,500

2023: $31,824

2022: $35,200

2021: $28,775

This is in part because, during the first three years we participated, NewsMatch secured additional matching funds for outlets in specific states (including Wisconsin), which effectively made for a triple match. In 2024, we just had the one layer of matching funds from NewsMatch, but we did raise an additional $21,000 in matching funds from some generous local donors.

For more about how we use these funds, see our 2023 Annual Report. We’ll be working on our 2024 Annual Report for release in May.