Year-end gifts help sustain the newsroom
The recognition comes as Voice of OC's annual NewsMatch fundraiser runs from Nov. 1 through Dec. 31, with donations matched up to $1,000. The outlet's campaign page showed $6,651 toward a $100,000 goal, including matching funds.
"INN Network member Voice of OC has participated in NewsMatch since its inception, and has historically been able to raise between a quarter and a half of its revenue from donations made in just the last two months of the year," wrote Sharene Azimi, communications director at the Institute for Nonprofit News, in a recent industry newsletter post.
In an interview with INN last month, Voice of OC Marketing Director Amanda Santana described regular readers' growing role in financing the newsroom, particularly through the year-end campaign.
"The small dollar donors are kind of like the silent heroes of fundraising," Santana said. "The real campaign is made up by people who donate between $25 and $100 one time," she said. "People who are committing to between $5 and $25 a month as a new recurring donor. And that's really laid the foundation for us."
Voice of OC also published a photo of founder Norberto Santana Jr. accepting the INN Service to Nonprofit News Award at the 2026 Nonprofit News Awards in Pittsburgh.
How reader support has grown
Voice of OC raised $25,000 in its first NewsMatch campaign in 2016, reaching the matching level. A Newspack case study called that a significant success relative to the outlet's earlier fundraising efforts.
The same case study, published in 2021, documented a substantial change in the newsroom's revenue sources: Gifts of $1,000 or less accounted for 0.2% of revenue in 2013 and 26% by 2021. At the time of the study, more than 4,000 readers were donating, and the outlet had more than 800 recurring monthly donations.
Orange County donors have repeatedly helped the newsroom obtain a share of national NewsMatch funding through the annual campaign. Voice of OC describes these tax-deductible contributions as a voluntary news subscription. They now supply a substantial portion of its budget, and the newsroom aims to fund its operations entirely through reader contributions.
NewsMatch's national record
Across its first decade, NewsMatch secured $45 million in matching gifts and helped generate $432 million in community support for newsrooms. INN says its campaigns have helped attract nearly 600,000 new donors to member newsrooms since 2017.
INN's 10-year impact report, released Sept. 29, 2026, traces the program to a Knight Foundation pilot in 2016. INN operates NewsMatch for its member network, and Knight says it has committed almost $25 million to the program.
The report also documents growth in locally secured matching support: Newsrooms obtained 1,255 local match funds in 2025, compared with 17 in 2017. Between 2021 and 2025, the share of donors giving more than $1,000 more than doubled.
Over that same 2021–2025 period, the budget mix among participating newsrooms shifted. Nearly 40% operated on less than $250,000 annually in 2021, compared with 22% in 2025. Meanwhile, the share with budgets above $1 million increased from 28% to 43%, and average staff size grew by 25%, according to INN.
