Voice of San Diego Launches Platform to Promote Nonprofits

By Scott Lewis, Voice of San Diego CEO

A few years ago, I was just getting the hang of trying to raise money and I quickly learned a now obvious lesson about philanthropists and sponsors: They support a lot of different things.

It dawned on me that as publishers, we had a unique way to show gratitude. What if we re-deployed “ad spots” in service of other nonprofits that donors supported? For instance, if you donate to Voice of San Diego at a certain level, perhaps we could recognize it with a banner promoting another nonprofit you supported. It would compound the impact of your contribution.

The idea didn’t exactly blow up but it stuck in our heads.

Fast-forward a few years and now, many of our “corporate” sponsorships are coming from other nonprofits trying to get the word out about their services. These are mission-driven organizations whose causes can’t be summed up easily in simple display banners.

We realized that those traditional banner ads, like this one, don’t offer the nonprofit much room to say anything in depth. Yes, there are videos and animated ads but those are hard to build, hard to host, hard to manage and often obnoxious.

At the same time, our development team has learned a lot about how to get messages across. They wanted to give nonprofits, and the people who support them, more space and help to communicate something about their services.

So we’ve rolled out a new product: Partner Voices. We think it’s the best way for nonprofits and the people who support them to communicate something about their mission and service.

Check out a few of the new Partner Promos, as we’re calling them. These aren’t from our editorial team — they’re paid for and approved by either the group being featured or the funder. But they’re ways to get messages across we think might turn out to be quite compelling. For instance, here’s one for Just in Time for Foster Youth.

We hope it’s a platform and product the nonprofit sector will love. SDG&E is sponsoring the launch and helping a number of nonprofits get their own promos done.

We’ve gone to great lengths to make sure Partner Voices is clear and distinctive from the content on the rest of our site.

Let us know what you think. If you would like to give a nonprofit a chance to say more than a few words, contact Emily Tillson.