Many community news startups are structured as nonprofit organizations. A recent profile of one such news outlet, Charlottesville Tomorrow, offers lessons for how nonprofit news can thrive through partnerships and donors.

This week NetNewsCheck profiled Charlottesville Tomorrow, which launched in 2005. This nonprofit news venue, which focuses on civic planning issues in a smallish Virginia college town, currently brings in $370,000 per year in revenue. This supports a full-time staff of two, plus two interns -- as well as a considerable original reporting and analysis of its core content topics.

Here are the highlights of how they do it:

1. Generous donors. Over 60% of the site's revenues come from major gifts over $1000 -- including from local celebrities, such as novelist John Grisham. An annual direct mail fund drive reaching about 1,400 potential donors is a core tool to support and grow this revenue stream.
2. Partnership with the local daily paper. Since 2009 Cville Tomorrow has partnered with the Daily Progress. After slashing its staff by more than half, the paper turned to the nonprofit startup to help with growth and infrastructure. This not only vastly expands Cville Tomorrow's audience in print as well as online -- it also brings in about $40,000 worth of in-kind support for project such as its voter guide.
3. Crowdfunding. This summer Cville Tomorrow raised over $7000 in a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund a Google Earth-powered 3D model of a proposed local highway bypass project, to foster community engagement.

While Cville Tomorrow isn't planning to franchise its model, its strategies might be useful to other nonprofit news sites, especially in university towns where the daily paper is struggling.

The News for Digital Innovators blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Cville Tomorrow was a winner of the Knight Community Information Challenge in 2011.