Funder prospect research for an early-stage nonprofit media organization

MORE has been producing The Africa Desk Live since May 2026, a weekly two-hour public affairs broadcast working through all 54 African countries in sequence. The show has aired every week without missing a scheduled broadcast, and we have interviewed scholars, journalists and civil society leaders from each country about their own country. That part works.

What does not work is everything past the broadcast. Three programs are designed and waiting on funding: a journalism fellowship providing training and technical infrastructure, beginning in Liberia and Sierra Leone; a written news arm producing articles drawn from our weekly interviews; and a television channel. None of them can start without money, and we have never raised any.

The obstacle is not willingness, it is knowing where to aim. We are a first-year organization with an annual operating budget under $25,000, run by its founder with a volunteer board. Every hour goes into producing the show, and the founder is a journalist rather than a fundraiser. When we have looked at foundation directories, the result has been a long undifferentiated list with no way to tell which funders would actually consider an organization at our stage, in our field, at our size.

We have not attempted a structured fundraising effort before. There is no prospect list, no pipeline and no case for support. This would be our first. Rather than send generic appeals to a hundred foundations and hear nothing, we would rather have twenty to thirty well-researched prospects with the eligibility details, the deadlines and an honest read on which are realistic for us now and which are worth building toward.

One constraint the volunteer should know. Our board has adopted an editorial independence and underwriting policy. Funders whose support would carry editorial conditions are not a fit for us, and prospects need screening on that basis.

The deliverable is a researched funder prospect list of 20 to 30 organizations, supplied as a spreadsheet or table we can work from directly.

For each prospect:

Name, and the program officer or contact point if publicly available
Giving focus and stated priorities
Typical grant size, and the range they actually award
Geographic and program eligibility, including whether an organization our size qualifies
Application deadline or funding cycle
Whether unsolicited proposals are accepted, or whether an invitation or letter of inquiry is required first
Two lines on why this funder fits MORE specifically, referencing something concrete about them rather than a general match

Sorted into three tiers: funders we could credibly approach in the next six months; funders worth building toward over one to two years; and funders that fit on paper but would require a track record or a relationship we do not yet have.

Prospects should be screened against our editorial independence and underwriting policy. Funders whose support would carry editorial conditions should be excluded, with a note on why.

Success looks like this: at the end of six weeks, I can sit down on a Monday, pick the top five names on the list, and know exactly what each one funds, whether we qualify, when their deadline falls and what the first move is. Today I could not do that for a single funder. The measure is not the length of the list. It is whether I stop guessing.

A short written note from the consultant on what they learned about the funding landscape for small media nonprofits, including anything they expected to find and did not, would be valuable but is secondary to the list itself.

Organization Mission

MORE exists so that African journalists can practice excellence in journalism from where they stand, without leaving home to be taken seriously. We do that two ways. We train reporters and equip newsrooms, beginning in Liberia and Sierra Leone, with the skills and the technical infrastructure the work actually requires. And we build the platforms that carry their voices out, including The Africa Desk Live, our weekly two-hour broadcast. The two halves are one idea. Training without a platform produces skilled journalists nobody hears. A platform without training produces a stage with too few people ready to stand on it. We are building both, at the same time, on purpose. Why now: Across the continent, the space for independent journalism is narrowing. In December 2025, Ugandan security forces raided the home of Sarah Bireete, a constitutional lawyer, and held her for a month. The charge arose from her having publicly discussed the national voters' register, a document any citizen may read. Two weeks after her arrest, her organization's operating license was suspended along with those of several others. Cases like hers change what a program like ours can do. There are weeks when the person best placed to explain a country cannot safely speak from inside it, and we go to the diaspora instead. That is not a compromise we are comfortable with. It is the reason the work matters. Our founder started a human rights newspaper in a refugee camp because there was no one else to write it. That instinct is still the whole organization: when the story is not being told, build the thing that tells it. What we have built so far: Since launching in May 2026, The Africa Desk Live has reached more than 390,000 people on Facebook alone, with over 24,000 interactions and 2,500 shares. In the last thirty days, 72,000 viewers watched the program. The audience has grown by more than 9,000 followers in three months, with no marketing budget and no paid promotion. Nineteen episodes. Nineteen countries. Thirty-five to go.