Solana Camaño is the co-director, head of finances and coordinator of the School (Escuela in Spanish) of Feminacida, which defines itself as a “collective media organization committed to promoting an inclusive and respectful perspective to communication by giving visibility to the struggles and realities of the women’s and dissidents movements in Latin America.” The outlet was launched on International Women’s Day (March 8), 2018. It publishes daily news, primarily through its website; offers workshops on topics such as journalism or sex education through its academy and provides consulting services in gender perspective to organizations, companies and institutions. Its team consists of 14 staffers, three of whom work in business development and sales, and approximately 20 freelancers. These salaries are paid mainly thanks to international grants, workshops and public and private advertisements.
Although Feminacida has always felt the need to have specialized team members focusing on how to make money, it was not until the 2021 edition of the Latin American GNI Startups Lab, an accelerator of independent digital media in Spanish co-led by SembraMedia, when the outlet started to establish clear roles and “plan with objectives” as Camaño puts it. As a result, the majority (60 percent) of Feminacida’s salaries now go to the organization’s sustainability (from finances to membership), with the rest paying for content creation. As these changes have taken place, its revenue has more than doubled.
However, according to Camaño, there are mandatory preconditions to making this work: “First, you need to prioritize your content. If you don’t have quality content and an established audience, unless you have many contacts, no one is going to fund something that has no potential to grow.” She also stresses the importance of finding the right people for the task: “Sometimes you need such specialized expertise that, if you hire, it is very expensive: this is why we preferred to learn it ourselves.”
According to Silvia Calarco, a business development expert with a degree in communication and media studies and head of partnerships at Will, the most important thing a person in her role needs is what she calls “value alignment with the reality you work for.” Will defines itself as a community of people and companies aware of their future impact. When it was launched in 2020, its founders decided to offer the editorial staff enviable salaries and technological capital that would allow them to address issues such as the economy and the climate crisis using social media as the first channel and creating a specific strategy for each social media network. This mind-set was so rare in Italy, where digital disruption has been slower than elsewhere in Europe and where costs tend to be kept low, that it was important for Will to find the right people to help them with sales from the start of the process. This led the outlet to hire dedicated team members such as Silvia Calarco.
Both Feminacida’s and Will’s approach to business development consists in starting from the editorial content and then looking for potential partners who could bring value, and funds, to their ideas. This is how, for example, Will created a documentary about droughts and floods in Italy in 2023 in collaboration with the energy company A2A—and how Feminacida came to be developing a campaign about political violence toward environmental activists, alongside UN Women, for the upcoming International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (Nov 25).
In line with the “value alignment” Calarco refers to, Riccardo Haupt, Will’s CEO, explains that the job interviews they do for business development and sales positions are very similar to those for potential content creators. What they are most interested in is where people get their information and how well-informed they are. “This ensures that when they sit with partners to negotiate, they can sell intelligence,” he adds.
Image: Courtesy of Will
In its three years of existence, Will’s team has grown rapidly. Today, it comprises 48 staffers (including six people dedicated exclusively to sales), approximately 10 freelancers and four interns. Its main revenue sources are branded content or native advertising, and content development for others. The outlet recently launched a membership model.
The path toward successfully developing their businesses has not been exempt from obstacles. As Calarco puts it, the main difficulty is that, “in order to sell something like Will, which still needs to be explained, you have to be really persuasive and show the urgency the others may not feel.”
In the case of Feminacida, the challenge has been more related to its human resources. “We have team members with a good journalism profile who unfortunately stopped making content to focus on sustainability,” Camaño says. At the same time, she highlights that since they have dedicated staff for sales and business development, their internal work processes have improved so much that this has also boosted their content: they can now experiment with more audiovisual content and live streaming, and they have also recently released a new and more user-friendly webpage. Above all, she is proud of the fact that in a world where “women and dissident people still struggle to occupy management positions,” at Feminacida, they are putting all their efforts in ensuring the outlet’s sustainability, and they feel confident they are going in the right direction.