Case Study Tag: Building our Membership Tech Stack

Newsroom overview

Who They Are
WTF Just Happened Today is a newsletter, blog, and community chronicling the "daily shock and awe in national politics"
Location
Seattle, Washington
Founded
2017
Launched membership
2017
Percentage of revenue coming from membership
100 percent

Matt Kiser launched WTF Just Happened Today? as a side project in 2017 in the earliest days of the Trump administration. As the project took off, readers asked how they could support the newsletter, which, as its name suggests, is a daily recap of what happened that day in national politics. 

Kiser set up a PayPal account for the project for contributions. But as the project continued to grow, Kiser decided to quit his job and focus full-time on the effort. To grow the revenue needed to make it possible for him to run WTFJHT full-time, he launched a tiered membership program on Patreon. He soon realized that the platform wasn’t working for him, and migrated to a new system. Even today, years later, he’s still dealing with the legacy of that decision. 

“From the jump, I screwed up,” Kiser said. 

Why this is important

No matter the reason or type of platform, migrating from one tech service to another is a headache. Kiser is now on his fourth payment system since creating WTF Just Happened Today? three years ago. Even though he asked users to migrate their information to the new systems, many didn’t so he still has to maintain the old systems, which is a drain on his time and resources. 

Publishers’ needs change over time, of course, but member-driven news organizations can save themselves a lot of trouble by considering potential growth and future use-cases as they make decisions about their tech stack. Kiser’s experience with payment systems is a cautionary tale for why these processes are so critical. 

“That’s one of the biggest decisions you can make,” he said. “What kind of platform lock in are you willing to accept?” 

What they did

As WTFJHT  began to attract a following, Kiser set up a PayPal account so people could support the project with a pay-what-you-want model. And as he quit his job to run the newsletter full-time beyond the planned duration of the Trump administration’s 100 days, he added the Patreon, where he set-up a tiered membership system. 

By April 2017, nearly 1,500 members were supporting Kiser with nearly $8,000 per month in funding via Patreon. But the system wasn’t working for him. 

In addition to processing payments, Patreon offers its users a suite of tools to enable them to post updates, communicate with their supporters, and more. But Kiser wasn’t using any of those features and the fees the platform charged were eating into his revenue. 

For example, on a $1 credit card charge, 10 percent was going to Patreon and 5 percent  was going to credit card fees. Then, 10 cents would be charged for the payment processor’s cut. Between all that, WTFJHT would only get 35 or 40 cents from that member’s contributions. 

“Obviously, the more you charge the less of a percent that becomes, but it was a huge amount of money,” Kiser said. “It would have been great if all of my product and service was held within Patreon. As if I was taking advantage of and using their tools to post and podcast and send newsletters, but I wasn’t. I was doing all of that elsewhere.” 

Kiser didn’t want to use Patreon’s editorial tools, and by January 2018, he decided to do a “crazy thing” and move to Memberful, a membership platform that connects users’ website, Stripe, and MailChimp accounts. Memberful handles all the automations and forms required to interact with Stripe and creates documentation such as receipts, but critically,  WTFJHT maintains ownership over the payment processing data via Kiser’s stripe account, so he would easily be able to move it from one platform to another. 

When he decided to switch, he sent an email to all his paying supporters explaining the decision and asking them to cancel their Patreon payments and move to Memberful. He decided to still maintain Patreon for members who wanted to stay there or didn’t respond to his request because he didn’t want to lose their financial support.

Screenshot of the email Kiser sent WTFJHT members about switching payment platforms. Read the full email here.

He explained to members that “I just hit this point where I’m burning your money on a platform I’m not using. I already feel guilty asking you for money as it is, so let’s become more efficient. Let’s reduce our costs. This is how we’re going to do this.”

The results

“A huge number of people” canceled their Patreon contributions and moved over to Memberful, Kiser said. By April 2019, only 734 supporters remained on Patreon. 

Now, 66 percent of WTFJHT’s members are on Memberful, 19 percent use PayPal, 10 percent remain on Patreon, and 5 percent contribute via DonorBox. 

But Kiser has systems on all the platforms to allow people to make adjustments to their membership, cancel or change their credit cards, or update other personal information. To maintain those legacy systems on PayPal and Patreon, Kiser uses Zapier to keep emails up-to-date in MailChimp. 

“It’s a bear to maintain sometimes because it occasionally breaks, and Zapier isn’t exactly cheap,” he said. “But what are you going to do? Are you just going to be held hostage to a platform and pay whatever their increasing fees are to not use their platform? Or do you take things into your own hands and do what’s best by the business and take that risk?” 

The payment platform Donorbox supports payment for readers who come to WTFJHT’s website via an embedded form at the bottom of every daily update since neither Memberful or Patreon offered an embeddable option. 

What they learned

Consider platform lock-in. As you’re making vendor choices, one of the things you’ll want to consider is who maintains the connection between the member and your organization. The key data points you want to consider are who owns the members’ payment information and the mode of contact, namely email address. You should carefully consider whether you need to maintain control of that data.

“That’s one of the biggest decisions you can make: what kind of platform lock in are you willing to accept? There are lots of people doing amazing stuff on Substack, but their aspirations are only to send a newsletter and have a public-facing pseudo blog,” Kiser said. “That’s totally cool, but you have to know what you’re getting into. While yes you can export the email addresses, you can’t export the people giving 10 bucks a month.” 

Additionally, when you maintain control over your customer data, you can combine all your income from that member to get a holistic portrait of customer lifetime value. For example, when Kiser sells WTFJHT stickers on Gumroad, he’s able to export customer sales data and import it into the spreadsheet where he keeps other membership data, which allows him to piece together a more complete picture of a member. 

“I can see how long they’ve subscribed, when they became a member, how much ‘extra’ revenue they’ve generated by way of t-shirts or sticker orders, etc,” he said. 

Transparency triumphs. Members contribute because they believe in an organization’s work and they want to support its mission. If news organizations are up front with them and outline why their support is needed, members will be willing to chip in. The same principle applies when it comes to asking people to migrate to a new platform

When Kiser realized he needed to make a move that was critical for the long-term success of the newsletter, he explained it to his members. Most of them helped out by moving to Memberful themselves. 

Respond to members. One of the reasons that Kiser chose Patreon is that it easily supports different membership tiers, which were initially a key offering of WTFJHT’s membership program. Each tier offered different pieces of swag — postcards! Stickers! A zine! T-shirts! 

But fulfilling all those orders was eating into the time Kiser needed to actually produce the newsletter. 

“I found that I was spending too much time at the post office, as well as spending too much money on physical goods,” he wrote on his FAQ. “After speaking with members, it became clear that while physical rewards are nice, the real reward is supporting the continued production of WTF Just Happened Today.” 

By simplifying the membership offerings in response to member feedback, it made Kiser’s decision to move off of Patreon easier because he knew he wouldn’t be alienating core supporters. 

Key takeaways and cautionary notes

Don’t feel stuck: Just because you initially thought one platform was right for your needs, it doesn’t mean you need to stick with it. There will inevitably be a bit of pain as you make transitions, but if it saves you money or improves the experience for your members or potential members by making it easier to pay or ensuring that the coverage is easier to access, it’s worth it. If you’re using a system that clearly isn’t working for you, and there are other viable options, the best thing you can do is switch — waiting will only cost you time and money. 

Explain the process to your members. By giving your community a clear explanation for why you’re making a change, you can retain their trust and encourage them to help by taking any complicated steps you need them to take as part of the move. This advice applies to news organizations who are making a transition from being primarily a print subscription to primarily a digital membership, as Tiempo Argentino, Scalawag, and DoR have all had to do.

Data is 💰: As you consider vendors, do not make a choice until you know each vendor’s process for exporting data off of the platform.

Other resources

Startup (less than 5 years old) National Digital native Single-subject Single-Person Building our Membership Tech Stack Launching Membership WTFJHT

Newsroom overview

Who They Are
A non-profit investigative newsroom committed to informing society of injustices and abuses of power while promoting media literacy and educational programs
Location
Berlin and Essen, Germany
Founded
2014
Launched membership
2015
Monthly unique visitors
670,000
Number of members
10,400
Percentage of revenue from membership
30 percent

In 2018, German investigative newsroom Correctiv set out to make the Hamburg housing market more transparent by finding out who owned residential properties. In many countries, that’s a straightforward process – but German law only allows individuals with a “legitimate interest” to inspect property records. Journalists aren’t covered by that definition. Tenants are.

So Correctiv turned to CrowdNewsroom, a platform they developed in 2015 to help them enlist community members in their investigative projects and assemble data sets. To get the property ownership information they needed for “Who Owns Hamburg?”, they invited readers to upload their leases to the platform. They collected more than 1,000 records, creating a meaningful property register that served as the starting point for investigations into the property market in Hamburg.

Then they took the project on the road. Today Correctiv has property ownership databases for other cities in Germany, and they’ve proven that inviting readers into journalism isn’t just a nice thing to do – it can create more impactful investigations, too.

Why this is important

By identifying a way for people to meaningfully contribute to its work, Correctiv has been able to investigate topics it wouldn’t have otherwise been able to investigate and given community members an opportunity to co-create journalism.  By building its own platform for this way of working, it could collaborate more fully with them. And by partnering with other newsrooms, it’s been able to broaden the number of people who contribute.

Audience participation is most fulfilling for audience members and most impactful for news organizations when the news organization finds the intersection point between their needs and audience members’ motivations to participate. Correctiv succeeded at this: it needed property records, and residents wanted to understand the housing market they lived in.

What they did

Correctiv began developing CrowdNewsroom in 2015 to enable large-scale reader involvement in investigations. Put simply, CrowdNewsroom creates forms that enable structured data collection from users. They first used it for investigations into financial irregularities in local banks and tracking class cancellations in public schools. 

“CrowdNewsroom is like a Google system for answers that are not given yet,” Correctiv publisher David Schraven told Solution Set.

CrowdNewsroom investigations tend to follow the same general process and take a few months to complete.

Here’s a look at how the typical CrowdNewsroom process works, with some details about what that looked like for “Who Owns Hamburg?” project in 2018:

Get the word out. Together with its newsroom partner, Correctiv launches a four-to-six week campaign to spread the word about the project, generate interest among the community, and encourage participation. For “Who Owns Hamburg?”, Correctiv partnered with local newsroom Hamburger Abendblatt, and the local tenant’s association helped promote it. Correctiv and its partner newsroom publish daily stories about the issues the project is trying to uncover, promote the CrowdPlatform callout on social media, and hold events. All of this is done with the goal of collecting data and making people aware of the investigation. 

“Before you start the campaign, you collaborate with the newspaper to give people a sense of what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and why it’s important,” Schraven said. “It’s a series of articles, it’s radio interviews, it’s a real journalistic series of stories.”

Collect data. Throughout the campaign, community members upload data and information into CrowdNewsroom. For “Who Owns Hamburg?”, individuals uploaded their leases to the CrowdNewsroom database and then gave Correctiv permission to pull the records from the land registry in their name. Correctiv also created a website for the Hamburg housing -market investigation where they regularly offered updates on the progress of this project and tenants could store their evidence and information.

To ensure the data is credible, every submission to CrowdPlatform has to be backed up with documentation.  Correctiv will only publish information that is verifiable. 

Process the data. Once the campaign ends, journalists from Correctiv and its partner newsroom will start to process, fact-check, and verify the collected data, then look for patterns to serve as the starting point for stories. Both Correctiv and its partner newsrooms have full access to the database. 

“Then we take the most important stories and report on them,” Schraven said. “But we keep the other stuff just private because this is private data and we’re not going to publish like Wikileaks everything that we’ve found.”

The stories that come out of the CrowdNewsroom are then published and shared by both outlets. 

The results

“Who Owns Hamburg?” took six months to complete. By the end of the campaign, about 1,000 tenants uploaded documents about the owner of their apartments. That data allowed Correctiv to tie more than 15,000 apartments to specific property owners. From that, they discovered that money laundering was behind about 10 percent of the real estate sales in Hamburg. They also determined that more than 1 in 3 of the 707,000 apartments and houses rented in Hamburg belongs to the city’s urban housing association in Hamburg or a cooperative. 

Correctiv also published 10 examples of how non-transparency harms tenants (and what could help), which divulges more findings from the research, such as the fact that tenants don’t always know who their owner is. This was only possible because of the CrowdNewsroom platform.

Correctiv spent about €1 million to develop CrowdNewsroom. Half of the funding came from a three-year €500,000 grant from Google’s Digital News Innovation Fund.

“The rest was from our other sources of income,” Schraven said. “We have foundations funding us, we have individuals donating money to us as a nonprofit. We even have a small for-profit outlet that publishes books.”

What they learned

Making the project accessible for people to participate is key. The CrowdNewsroom investigations can’t happen unless people know about it, so Correctiv approaches its CrowdNewsroom investigations almost as if they were fundraising or political campaigns — it unleashes a torrent of coverage, promotion, and events to get the word out about the investigations and encourages people to participate. It also makes the CrowdNewsroom platform itself intuitive and simple to use. As of February 2019, more than 4,000 people had contributed to CrowdNewsroom projects.

Keep callouts focused. In its first CrowdNewsroom investigations, Correctiv asked its readers overly broad questions. The responses were all over the place and were not as helpful as they could be. Correctiv realized it needed to create a more focused way to ask readers to contribute, and began focusing on seeking out just one thing from readers for each investigation. When asking readers to get involved in the production of journalism, it’s important to spend time making sure the call outs are clear and set up to elicit responses that are actually actionable. 

Collaboration with other publishers is essential. Correctiv also realized that its reporting would have more impact through working with other news organizations. By partnering with a variety of other publishers for CrowdNewsroom, Correctiv is able to reach audiences it would not have access to otherwise. When it covered class cancellations in public schools, for example, one of Correctiv’s partners was a student newspaper, which allowed it to make more focused call outs and also ensured that the reporting was reaching relevant communities. 

Key takeaways and cautionary notes

Correctiv’s investigations would not be possible without the individuals that assisted with the reporting and contributed their information. 

The benefits of co-creation co-creating journalism with community members extends beyond just the investigations at hand. Correctiv can use the platform to identify some of its most engaged constituents and invite them into the reporting process. But Schraven also said the process has been a powerful fundraising tool and more broadly helps educate the community about the importance of independent journalism and how investigative reporting actually works. 

“But to be clear: Not the published stories are most important in running the CrowdNewsroom,” Schraven said over email. “Most important is the debate and the engagement within the community of the newspapers and media organizations we are running the CrowdNewsroom with. It is like a campaign for good journalism in a community.”

“When it comes to community building, something like this is really important,” Schraven said. “People understand that we care about their issues, we’re working on it, and we’re not just talking about it. We really put effort into it. They understand that if we want something like this to happen, we need to support those guys. It works. When you see this CrowdNewsroom, it’s not something you just do for one month — it’s for a few months. You build community around the newsroom. When you’re in the local area, it’s exactly the area you’re publishing day-to-day and all these readers and contributors understand why you’re there.”

Other resources

Local/Regional National Investigative Digital native Developing Memberful Routines Correctiv Building our Membership Tech Stack

Newsroom overview

Who They Are
A progressive-leaning, member-supported digitally native news site in Spain
Location
Madrid, Spain
Founded
2012

By 2017, five years after its launch, El Diario realized that the technology underpinning its membership program was holding it back. It needed a system that enabled it to connect users across its website, its payment systems, and its email service provider. 

The team began looking for options on the market, but it was unable to find an existing product on the market. So, it decided to build its own system. 

With funding from Google’s Digital News Innovation Fund, El Diario partnered with a local tech firm to create BrainHub, which is centered around four key elements: “community, intelligence, engagement, and data.” (The Membership Guide is also supported by the Google News Initiative.) 

Why this is important

By the time El Diario decided to create its own system, it was in a bind: Its existing technology was difficult to use and hampering its ability to grow and expand its membership program. 

If you realize that there’s nothing existing out there that can meet your needs, and it is critical to your membership business, it may be worthwhile to invest in creating your own tool. However, you should be aware that building your own software comes with a considerable, and ongoing, investment of money and resources. 

For El Diario, where membership now brings in more revenue than advertising, it was a worthwhile tradeoff.

“Ideally it’s better to buy something,” said María Ramírez, El Diario’s chief strategy officer. “It takes so much time and if you don’t have funding it’s quite expensive [to build from scratch]. But if there’s nothing, and at the same time it’s a tool you really need to manage subscribers, if you have the money it’s painful, but it’s an investment you really need.” 

MPP offers this case study as an example of how one newsroom decided to make the investment, and what they learned from the process.

What they did

In 2017 and 2018, El Diario received funding from the Google News Initiative to build out the system. 

Here’s how Google described the project, called BrainHub: 

A comprehensive journalism funding system that understands its audience’s behavior patterns and engages with their interests, inviting niche groups of readers to fund a specific story or topic. A platform for new media wanting to build sustainability based on crowdfunding campaigns and communities of readers with four dimensions: community, intelligence, engagement, and data.

The initiative totally revamped the back end of El Diario’s systems.

“One of the things we spent time doing was the connections,” Ramírez said, noting that its CRM now connects to Mailchimp, its email service provider. 

The system is a database of all El Diario’s members, and it gives it real-time information on membership data, including daily new sign-ups, cancellations and the reasons why members cancel.

It also tracks renewal failures and a stat the site calls “change of mind,” which is people who have previously asked to cancel their membership but changed their mind. Pop-up banners and membership marketing campaigns are also run through the system.

The results

El Diario relaunched its new system on July 4, 2020. 

For members, the biggest difference was a website redesign that featured a new logo, updated fonts, and a revamped mobile presentation, along with other features. 

One of the benefits of El Diario’s membership program is that members do not see any advertisements on the website. One of the keys of the site redesign was to make that experience better for members: 

“Until now this simply consisted of blank spaces appearing, on the cover and in the articles, in the places on our website where readers find the ads,” editor Ignacio Escolar wrote in a note to readers. “Now our [members] will have access to a new version of elDiario.es that is more comfortable to read; without advertising, as before, but with a different layout that takes advantage of these spaces to facilitate reading” 

For staff, the main change is how much better its access is to data on its members. El Diario’s next step will be to offer more options for payments by improving the checkout interface and accepting additional currencies.

What they learned

Be patient. These projects tend to take longer than expected and can go over budget. El Diario received  91,749 euros in 2017 and 166,554 euros in 2018 from Google for the project, but it still had to invest some of its own money to finish the job. Ramirez said it was still too soon to say how much El Diario is going to spend above the Google funding. The new CRM was supposed to be ready in summer 2019, but it finally launched in July 2020. El Diario went through multiple teams working on the project as well. 

“It’s been a year and a half at least, and it’s not even ready with the things we want to do,” Ramírez said when MPP spoke to her prior to its launch. 

If you’re going to undertake a massive project such as this one, be prepared for delays and be patient. 

But there might be a business opportunity on the other side. Now that the process is complete, El Diario is contemplating whether it has an opportunity to whitelabel the system to other membership-focused organizations. If you’re going to build a new system, this could be a good revenue booster as well. “Maybe El Diario will finally be the company to sell it to everyone who avoids doing this horrible thing,” she said.

Key takeaways and cautionary notes

Building your own tool is a huge decision. It’s cheaper and less labor intensive to utilize existing tools to support your membership program, but if there truly are no tools that meet your needs, it could then be worthwhile to invest in building your own. 

The development process, however, can be long and expensive. It’s also easy to miss deadlines and go over budgets as use cases change. You should also be prepared to budget for maintaining the systems once they’re completed. 

However, building your own systems opens up new revenue potential as you could potentially license it to other organizations.

Other resources

Editor’s note: This case study was updated after publication to accurately reflect what type of software El Diario developed.

National Digital native Building our Membership Tech Stack El Diario

Newsroom overview

Who They Are
A Dutch member-driven news organization that brings context to the news by rejecting the daily news cycle and collaborating with their readers.
Newsroom
De Correspondent
Location
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Founded
2013
Launched membership
2013
Monthly unique visitors
550,000
Number of members
68,944
Percentage of revenue from membership
53.8 percent*

The Dutch news organization De Correspondent made a commitment from the beginning to collect as little data on their audience members as they could. In addition to an internally built CMS called Respondens, De Correspondent uses the “Google Analytics alternative” Matomo. 

Data analyst Daan Aerts explained that information from Matomo cannot be traced back to an individual person, but that anonymized aggregated information includes details like pageviews and homepage visits, country-level location, and sign-up page actions. Location information doesn’t get more specific than city-level, and the company uses a visitor’s full IP address to determine his or her location before stripping off the last digits and storing the address. There’s no tracking of visitors across their devices.

Member-specific information can be used to internally understand information including how much on-platform conversation an individual article has generated, new member reach, and average member financial contributions. Aerts adds, “I benefit from a well-designed data governance plan. In my work, I never come across identifiable information about our members. Within our organization, people have access to data on a need-to-know basis.”

In the U.S. the investigative news organization The Markup similarly limits its collection of reader data, partially informed by De Correspondent’s approach.

*95 percent of De Correspondent’s revenue came from readers in 2019. The remainder came from book sales and donations.

Why this is important

Nearly every online interaction we have – shopping, reading, socializing – is tracked. At a time when this has become standard across the industry, many individuals are concerned about their digital privacy and footprints. As detailed in one of the more human, readable examples of an organizational privacy policy, De Correspondent limits what it collects both on principle and in practice. 

As their sister English language news organization The Correspondent details in their member compact, privacy and audience revenue don’t have to exist in tension with each other. And the organizations stands out in being forthright in their intentions in this regard, telling readers, which helps build trust.

Courtesy of The Correspondent

What they did

Most De Correspondent members are located in the European Union or the European Economic Area, and are protected under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). But it isn’t the only reason that De Correspondent has committed to collecting minimal data.

Over seven years of publishing, De Correspondent has seen that its current and prospective members don’t just say they care about how their privacy is treated on site – they truly want to know the organization’s policies with regards to their own information. As shown below, the company provides more details on the handling of user data than many of its peers. 

These practices are also detailed in the privacy and cookie statement on The Correspondent and shared here in English. (Note that under US law, where many members of The Correspondent reside, unfair or deceptive uses of data are unlawful. Beyond that, federal privacy laws vary by the type of data or marketing used and also vary by industry. The Correspondent’s policies are voluntarily and comparatively conservative in terms of what data the company collects, as detailed below.)

More information regarding the handling of member information is as follows from the public privacy and cookie statement. Note the sentence “we also use all of this data to gain insight [in]to the reading preferences of our members (in legal terms, because we have a legitimate interest to do so)”:

The results

While it may be harder to “know” members without having much data about them, De Correspondent has been able to get the information it needs to design smart editorial products and cultivate loyalty through voluntary audience research.

Part of that comes down to their decision to invest more in editorial and membership staff. For most of its existence De Correspondent has not employed full-time data analysts. Aerts became the organization’s first data analyst in 2019 and works on the three-person membership team alongside a strategist and membership director. (Conversation and engagement editors work in parallel from within the editorial department.)

Aerts has spent the past 18 months building dashboards and synthesizing membership data, as well as creating self-service tools for the organization, including a “Daily pulse” Slack channel  – an automated Slackbot that provides organizational clarity into how membership is growing or stagnating compared to goals.

De Correspondent cofounder and CEO Ernst Pfauth said that with this work the organization is still following its principles and anonymizing user data, but presenting it better internally for cross-team intel. Pfauth said that the days are past when, “If I wanted to know something about churn, for example, I had to ask a developer [and] a developer made a query and then they showed it to me. And now by building these dashboards [we’re] making the data more accessible to everyone.”

Relevant information is also distributed in a weekly member email and monthly presentations to all staff.

What they learned

Prioritizing privacy does not mean you will be data poor. Mayke Blok, Aerts’ teammate and membership strategist at De Correspondent and The Correspondent, told MPP: “We believe that you can often get sufficient information without collecting huge amounts of data from your members. There’s always a way to work around not having all the metrics available. You can use surveys, or ask the questions you have in a different way.” For more information on De Correspondent’s surveying practices with members, jump to MPP’s case study on how De Correspondent collects qualitative insights about its members.

Blok said that the membership team is regularly coming up with questions about its members, such as how important the first 30 days of a membership are to their willingness to keep supporting the publication, and considers those insights along quantitative data.

“To answer that question we looked at cohort data, but also implemented a survey that provided us with a lot of context. You need to contextualize the numbers you do have, instead of falling into the rabbit hole and just keep trying to find out more by collecting more and more data,” Blok said.

It’s not just about not collecting as little data as possible, it’s about making sure it’s used only for the right purposes. Protecting users’ privacy is also about making the right choices with the data you do have access to. Aerts offers an example: Technically, De Correspondent could tell who is very interested in journalism about LGBTQ issues and use that a number of ways. But De Correspondent opts to use that data only to show someone their “recently read” stories.

Key takeaways and cautionary notes

It’s possible to maintain user privacy while collecting meaningful data for product decision-making. De Correspondent collects data including time on site, bounce rate, visits per visitor (according to cookies), e-commerce sales, and events like clicks on menu items and comments, all of which they track anonymously. Compared to other digital news organizations, this is a low amount of information – something its members value greatly.

Other resources 

Disclosure: De Correspondent was a founding partner of Membership Puzzle Project.

National Digital native De Correspondent Building our Membership Tech Stack Developing Membership Metrics

Newsroom overview

Who They Are
A conservative news startup that serves audience members primarily through newsletters and podcasts
Newsroom
The Dispatch
Location
Washington, D.C., USA
Founded
2019
Launched membership
2019
Number of members
16,000

The Dispatch launched in 2019 as the first news organization to publish entirely on Substack, the email-first platform that is primarily aimed at serving individual writers. 

The mostly member-funded publication publishes primarily through email newsletters and podcasts. The team knew it needed a publishing platform that supported both content types and would allow them to easily process member payments – and the founders wanted to do it cost-efficiently to extend their runway.

The Dispatch didn’t care as much about having a website as it did about having a seamless newsletter, podcast, and payment experience for its audience members. So the founders turned to Substack and worked with the team there to tweak the platform to meet The Dispatch’s needs. Although they had to make some tradeoffs, such as giving up a personalized landing page, it’s been able to achieve its main goal: keep the tech stack as simple as possible so that its small team could focus on its editorial coverage and serving members.

Why this is important

Because it was launching into a competitive political media landscape with limited resources, The Dispatch knew that its coverage would need to be highly differentiated in order to stand out. It strived to make its tech choices as simple as possible so the team could focus on its editorial coverage and be sure members would have a seamless experience. 

“We decided that we’d launch a little smaller, and we would really make the website the third most important of the editorial products, with the first two being newsletters and podcasts sort of tied for No. 1,” Hayes told Nieman Lab. “In retrospect, we’re very glad that we had that flexibility and that we didn’t just stick to our original plan and learned along the way.” 

No solution is perfect, but the Substack platform got The Dispatch most of where it wanted to be. And because they were the first news organization to work with Substack, the company has been responsive to The Dispatch’s needs, building out some new features and making some accommodations on to their platform. The Dispatch has also developed some of its own temporary workarounds. 

This case study is an example of an organization that chose an out-of-the-box technological solution and made it work for its needs. Being clear about your priorities, like The Dispatch was, will allow you to make a clear-headed decision about what is worth time and expense, and also potentially empower you to lobby more strongly for what you need to make an out-of-the-box solution work for you.

What they did

When The Dispatch debuted in 2019, it wanted to focus on reporting. 

“We’ve just said to people we want to provide you with content, really good content with reporting, and we otherwise want to leave you alone,” Hayes told Nieman Lab. 

That’s why it turned to Substack: the platform handled email publishing, podcast hosting, and payment processing, the core elements needed to run its membership program. 

“It’s an interesting experiment that we have newsletters as our core product, and the website is the less important product,” Hayes told us.

Like with all Substack publications, when you go to The Dispatch’s website, the first screen is Substack’s standard newsletter call to action that also allows readers to skip through to the content. This is a sharp departure from the comprehensive websites that most news organizations launch with.

The Dispatch’s main page (Courtesy of The Dispatch)

By clicking through to “let me read it first,” readers are taken to a modified Substack homepage that features a top story and then a stream of content. Unlike most Substacks though, their homepage lists the series of newsletters and podcasts that readers can subscribe to. The Dispatch publishes about three stories per day. 

The Dispatch had to give up a few features to work with Substack, though. Because Substack is designed for single writers, it doesn’t have a sophisticated analytics tool and doesn’t allow users to segment email audiences. This prevents The Dispatch from targeting different elements of its audience with membership appeals.

The Dispatch built some workarounds with Google Analytics and hired an outside consultant who developed a dashboard that enables The Dispatch to segment a bit and understand a bit more about its audience.

Meanwhile, Substack made some accommodations to support The Dispatch, such as the more extensive landing page mentioned above that integrates its podcast and newsletter operations. The Dispatch also has its own URL that doesn’t include Substack. (Most Substack users have a URL that reads name.substack.com.)

And The Dispatch said Substack plans to add improved analytics tools in a few months, which made the wait worth it. 

Substack has also adapted to The Dispatch’s language and mission. 

The results

At Substack’s recommendation, The Dispatch initially offered all of its newsletters for free as a way to gain an audience and build loyalty before asking people to become members. By the time it made some of its newsletters member-only in February 2020, it had gained 53,000 newsletter subscribers. 

The Dispatch began its membership program by offering lifetime memberships at its soft launch in October 2019. The lifetime membership costs $1,500, which comes with invitations to special events. In early December, they began offering annual memberships. The Dispatch now has a membership program that costs $100/year or $10/month.

The Dispatch has 16,000 paying members today, generating more than  $1 million in revenue the first six months. Substack takes a 10 percent cut of the membership revenue. 

Today, The Dispatch offers eight member-only newsletters, including a daily morning roundup and a weekly overview of the best news. It also produces three podcasts. They’ve maintained two free newsletters and plan to add more over time.  

The Dispatch’s 2020 goal was initially 2,000 paying members. When lifetime membership took off in the fall, it revised its goal to 4,200 paying members. With 16,000 members, it has surpassed even those initial projections.

“Much of the growth that we’ve seen at this point has been organic,” Hayes told us. “We have not yet set our year end 2021 goals. We’ve so blown past our year end 2020 goals.”

What they learned

Start lean. The Dispatch initially planned to launch with a staff of 25 to 30 people and a traditional website, but given the challenges of the news industry, the outlet decided to just start publishing and grow from there. By utilizing the Substack platform, it was able to get immediate feedback from its members and continue to tweak its offerings in a cost-effective way. 

Platform as a partner. Hayes emphasized The Dispatch’s appreciation of working with Substack and getting to learn from their experience with many newsletters. Without Substack’s suggestions, it may have not started out free, gained its organic growth success, or received the newsletter success. In return, Substack also recognizes Dispatch’s opinions and feedback, and the two organizations have had an effective partnership.

“The Substack folks have done a good job of reaching out to other writers and trying to help them build and come up with ideas, and one of the things that they do is they share and see from their perspective what has worked,” Hayes said. “They gave us a bunch of ideas about how to use our Twitter accounts to build out membership.”

Key takeaways and cautionary notes

Launching on Substack allowed The Dispatch to outsource its core tech concerns and prioritize its journalism, which is its core membership offering. Substack didn’t offer everything the site wanted, but it was enough to provide a useful user experience to its members. 

Know your priorities. Every technical decision has tradeoffs. Being clear about your priorities will help you make smart technical decisions that serve your mission and your members’ needs. For The Dispatch, a good user experience with newsletters, podcasts, and payment were more important than having an extensive homepage. Knowing that helped them feel confident choosing substack. 

Know your worth. As the first media company on the platform, The Dispatch is valuable to Substack, too, and has been able to request some accommodations. “We’re experimenting as we go,” Hayes told us. “Every time Substack says in conversation to us ‘subscription,’ we say ‘no, members!’”

Other resources 

Startup (less than 5 years old) National Digital native Small Newsroom (fewer than 10 people) Building our Membership Tech Stack The Dispatch