Step Twelve: Going For It!

After all your planning, you’re finally ready to take the leap.  Take a breath.  And then jump in.

It will often take months from the date you start planning until your first major funding comes in, or your first stories are published.  In the meantime, focus on some of these things:

• Attend conferences and other public forums where you can start to raise the profile of your organization.
• Explore grant opportunities and begin filing applications.
• Collect email addresses from those interested so you can update them as you proceed.
• And watch out for fatigue. 

A few other tools you may find helpful:

• J-Learning.org: A website that will help walk you through how to build your news site, with News Site In A Box.
• Knight Citizen News Network:  KCNN.org is packed with some of “Things We Like”, stories of interest to community news websites, and more than a dozen learning modules that can help guide you through your work. 
• The New Media Makers Toolkit may also prove useful, as it tracks foundations that support many nonprofit.
• Multimedia training from the Knight Digital Media Center

Once you get going, make sure you tell us about it.  We’ll want to include your work in our directory of community news sites. 

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