Case Study Tag: Daily Maverick

Newsroom overview

Who They Are
A national, born-digital publication focused on policy analysis and investigative journalism that has branched out into lifestyle, sports, and business coverage
Location
Cape Town, South Africa
Founded
2009
Membership program launched
2018
Monthly unique visitors
10 million+
Number of members
19,356
Percentage of revenue from membership
30 to 35 percent

With 19,356 active members as of November 2022, Maverick Insider, the Daily Maverick’s membership program, is one of the largest in the world. In the last couple years, membership revenue has allowed it to launch a weekend print edition, publish books, and more than double its staff. 

But at any point in time, the Daily Maverick has thousands of lapsed members with credit cards on hold, many due to high rates of credit card fraud and a lack of quality payment processors in the market – something out of their control. 

That’s why Maverick Insider Retention Manager Tinashe Munyuki has been focused almost exclusively on winning back on-hold members, reinstating about 10,000 since 2020. For context, the Daily Maverick has had an average of 1,100 members on hold at any point in time.

“Had that work not been done, we wouldn’t have had the growth we’ve had… and we certainly wouldn’t be feeling so confident,” said General Manager Fran Beighton. 

This case study will walk you through the tactics Munyuki has employed to bring those members back. What this case study won’t cover is member retention tactics such as a thorough onboarding, stewardship, and member engagement. You can find advice on that in the handbook. (Jump to “Retaining your members”)

Why this is important

Growth is comparatively easy in the early years of a membership program. But as a program approaches maturity, like Maverick Insider’s program, growth can get challenging – especially if you are losing a substantial number of members along the way.

As Beighton said, “Retention is everything. It’s easier to retain than to acquire.” 

A combination of economic hardship, credit card fraud, and subpar payment gateways means that at any point in time the Daily Maverick is looking at thousands of credit cards on hold every year – and thousands in lost revenue.

The research team has heard similar challenges from newsrooms all over the world. Retention advice tends to focus on how to keep members from intentionally canceling membership. But winning back on-hold members requires a different strategy – several, actually. As you’ll see, there’s no single slam-dunk tactic that wins back hundreds of on-hold members at a time. Instead, it requires near-daily effort, resulting in a drip-drip of small wins.  

What they did

There are four prongs to the Daily Maverick’s strategy for winning back on-hold members.

  1. They send frequent emails asking people to update their credit card.

Most newsrooms do this (called dunning), but the Daily Maverick is more aggressive than most. Munyuki sometimes sends as many as three reminder emails a week. They constantly test subject lines, length of emails, sender name, incentives, and more to increase open rates. The key is to keep these emails fresh in tone and content so they don’t become background noise. 

Occasionally they add conditional modules to their newsletters letting recipients know their membership is on hold. This yields three to seven conversions each time it’s included. 

A screenshot of a lapsed membership message in First Thing, their flagship newsletter
  1. They process transactions again.

Sometimes credit cards fail because of insufficient funds or a bank connection issue. This captures those errors. 

  1. They get on the phone.

In August 2022, they spent two hours calling and WhatsApping 194 on-hold members, reaching 93 of them. The call team included two Maverick Insider staff and three reporters. 

Any reader with an account, not just members, can opt to follow certain journalists and receive an email when that journalist publishes a story. This feature helped the team identify journalists with big followings who could call members and might have a higher chance of nudging on-hold members to take action.

Maverick Insider Manager Julia Harris wrote a script that everyone could follow, but after just a couple calls, they shifted to a more natural, 1:1 conversation. 

Munyuki emailed everyone on the call list just before the calls started so if a lapsed member said they wanted to renew, the instructions were already in their inbox and no payment details would have to be taken over the phone. Most calls were over after just 30 or 40 seconds, but occasionally they lasted 10 minutes. 

The call team used burner phones but one journalist started WhatsApping people from his personal phone, Beighton said. It became a challenge he wanted to win and he ended up taking the rest of his list home with the goal of getting them all “across the line.” 

  1. They show them grace. 

The Daily Maverick allows people to pause their membership if they can’t afford it for a time. They send regular reminders that can be summarized as, “If you still can’t pay, that’s no problem, but if you’re able to pay again, please update your account.”

The results

Regular emails asking people to update their payment information remain their most successful tactic. Overall, dunning emails have won back the vast majority of their lapsed members in 2022. 

From the multitude of tests they’ve run, the team has learned: 

  • Short, to-the-point emails are most successful, as are direct subject lines like “Your membership is overdue”.
  • Sends from Munyuki make a difference. His emails had lower open rates but higher conversions. People who no longer wanted to be a member wouldn’t open it; people who had lapsed accidentally knew immediately what the email was about and would open.
  • Sending dunning emails from journalists can backfire. One sent from a well-known journalist had higher open rates but also a much higher unsubscribe rate when people realized what it was about.
  • Incentives don’t convert on-hold members. Munyuki experimented with offering on-hold members discount vouchers for products in Daily Maverick’s online store, which includes not just branded swag but books. Conversion rates are “significantly low”, Munyuki said. In June 2022 they made this offer to 909 on-hold members and won back 70 of them. In October 2022 they made this offer to 799 on-hold members and regained 54 of them. These conversion rates are comparable to their win-back efforts that don’t involve any incentives, but more costly due to the discounts offered.  Once a quarter Daily Maverick also offers voluntarily paused members an opportunity to resume payments at a lower membership tier price with the full benefits of the higher tier, but these discounted memberships don’t show meaningful conversion either. 

The tactic of processing credit cards again yields an 8 to 10 percent success rate, Munyuki said. From December 2021 to November 2022, they’ve retried credit cards 3,700 times, winning back close to 300 members. 

Their phone banking day taught them a lot – not just about that tactic, but about others that might work. They called 194 people and reached 93. Of those 93 people they reached, 78 said they would update and 11 actually updated their credit card details. They weren’t able to track the WhatsApp conversion as precisely, but they found the people they reached there to be friendlier and more engaged. Because the phone banking turned out to have comparable results to other lower effort win-back tactics, they’re investing more resources in that WhatsApp strategy now. 

They’re planning on getting WhatsApp for business, and in October 2022, they used WhatsApp to let people know about home delivery for DM 168, their weekend newspaper. Harris hypothesizes that this works because people are more likely to ignore a phone call from a number they don’t recognize than a WhatsApp message – but the thing they’re paying the most attention to is how much more responsive people are via WhatsApp than email. 

Harris said they used WhatsApp soon after to notify people who receive their weekend print edition at home that there were delivery issues and their newspaper would be delayed. People saw and responded to the texts promptly.

Up next: on-screen notifications for lapsed members. 

The Daily Maverick doesn’t have a paywall, and that’s not going to change. But that complicates retention efforts. If someone’s membership lapses, they might not realize it because their ability to access stories doesn’t change.

But they recently launched a registration wall, which means people have to be logged in to read and can receive regular renewal reminders in another place that’s not a crowded email inbox. They’ll soon start experimenting with ribbons at the top of a page notifying people of expirations and with a link to a payment page.

An early demo of the ribbon. Courtesy of the Daily Maverick.

What they learned

Incentives don’t convert. Benefits and discounts have never played a major role in their membership growth, and it turns out they don’t do much for winning back lapsed members either. Incentives to rejoin had little impact. Those who update their information do it because they want to support the Daily Maverick, Munyuki said. It’s the same with member conversion. 

Emails don’t last as long as phone numbers. Phone banking showed that many lapsed members were lapsed because they changed jobs and lost access to their former email address. But people tend to give their personal phone numbers, which last much longer than email addresses.

Eventually, you have to stop trying. After a year, they’re unlikely to get someone back. They stop investing any resources at that stage, letting on-hold members go with a final email that says, “We still need you, but we don’t think you’re coming back.” 

Key takeaways and cautionary notes

You can be more aggressive with the frequency of email reminders than you think. If someone wants to be a member, you’ll get their attention. If they don’t want to be members, they might unsubscribe – but you were unlikely to win them back anyways. 

Winning back members happens through routine. You can’t win back hundreds of members with one or two pushes a year. Winning back lapsed members takes several different tactics, all executed regularly and with a close eye on the data. 

Email is efficient, but that means inboxes are crowded. It can take dozens of dunning emails to accomplish what one push on WhatsApp accomplishes because of how quickly member renewal emails can get buried in people’s inboxes. A successful dunning strategy requires constant experimentation to make those emails stand out. 

Other resources 

Disclosure: Membership Puzzle Project supported the Daily Maverick’s membership program in 2019 with a grant from the Membership in News Fund.

National Investigative Digital native Daily Maverick Retaining our Members

Newsroom overview

Who They Are
A national, born-digital publication focused on policy analysis and investigative journalism that has branched out into lifestyle, sports, and business coverage.
Location
South Africa
Founded
2009
Launched membership
2018
Monthly unique visitors
3,500,000
Number of members
13,693
Percentage of revenue from membership
25 percent

When the Daily Maverick launched its membership program, Maverick Insider, they had two goals: make membership as inclusive as possible, and make it easy for those who could provide financial support to do so. So they eschewed membership tiers and implemented a “pay-what-you-can” model, with one key benefit that incentivized those who could afford to contribute more to do so.

Why this is important

The design of your membership program sends clear signals about who it is for. Tiers can help nudge members toward certain financial levels and add predictability to your financial modeling, but they can also bring a level of exclusivity that is discordant with a commitment to equity and inclusion.

The Daily Maverick sought to address this tension by using a pay-what-you-can model for their membership program, Maverick Insiders. Well-designed defaults and benefits nudge those who can afford to pay more to do so, helping the Daily Maverick continue to meet its membership revenue targets.

What they did

When the Daily Maverick launched membership in August 2018, they launched the pay-what-you-can scheme with a slider tool on their membership landing page. Although members could select any amount above R75 (about $4.50), they sought to influence members’ selection by setting the default to R150 (about $10). That was the most common selection among early members, followed by the minimum of R75, or less than $5. (That was the lowest the payment gateway company would process recurring billing contributions.)

The Daily Maverick’s membership landing page includes a slider (Courtesy of Daily Maverick)

This decision was partially informed by the donations drive they ran a few months earlier. The average recurring contribution during that campaign was 100 rand (about $8). The Daily Maverick hypothesized that R150 (about $10) was a reasonable ask once the benefits and community of membership were offered in exchange.

In addition to providing an easier payment process, the Daily Maverick also believes that the pay-what-you-can model helps put their membership in a different category than subscriptions, addressing the issue of subscription fatigue. Tiers are less common among charitable causes, and the Daily Maverick sought to frame joining as charitable support for a free press and equal access to information.

“It taps into a different part of the brain – and budget,” CEO Styli Charalambous writes. “Research shows that the average American household has $30 available for subscriptions and within that space, enough for just one news subscription. And that’s wealthy American households. But people can and do support multiple good causes that resonate with them. We wanted to convey our cause that was worthy of support alongside the Society for the Protection of Animals, National Sea Rescue Institute, or educational development programmes.”

A few months later, the Daily Maverick had a chance meeting with the head of business development for Uber in Africa. Charalambous pitched Uber on the idea of using Uber vouchers to encourage the acquisition and retention of members. They settled on R100 in Uber credit every month to every member contributing R150 or more every month. 

It wasn’t a no-brainer decision – the Daily Maverick knew that its members were not interested in being a part of a corporate reward program, and didn’t want Maverick Insiders to become that. All of their other benefits were connected to the Daily Maverick’s journalism. But events were a critical part of their membership strategy, and this seemed like a valuable way to make it easier for members to get to events. 

For Uber, it was a chance to achieve greater brand awareness and ridership as they entered the South African market.

The results

When the Daily Maverick first launched the pay-what-you-can model, about 50 percent of their members chose the pre-selected R150 option – a percentage the staff was happy with.

The addition of the Uber benefit, however, was a game changer. It worked, almost instantly. According to CEO Styli Charalambous, the number of people contributing R150 or more a month jumped almost immediately to 90 percent with the addition of the voucher. Daily signups also increased by about 30 percent, with monthly sign-ups consistently topping 300 people. 

Although it wasn’t a no-brainer decision for the Daily Maverick to offer this benefit, it was a no-brainer decision for most members to opt into it. If they were likely to use Uber at least once a month, they would actually save money by increasing their contribution to R150

What they learned

People won’t give the bare minimum, even if they can. One of the assumptions that goes into the design of membership tiers is that people will give the minimum amount they have to give to get member benefits, so there needs to be a floor. The fact that at least 50 percent of the Daily Maverick’s early members (pre-Uber benefit) opted for the suggested R150, rather than the minimum R75, disproved that assumption, at least for the Daily Maverick.

Key takeaways and cautionary notes

Be smart about your nudges. A well-designed, well-targeted discount or reward can help nudge members toward the contribution level that you need to be sustainable, but choose these benefits carefully.

“We have been careful not to be pulled into the discount offer space,” Charalambous writes. “We made this single exception and it worked, but we have not offered any other membership benefits that don’t relate to the [Daily Maverick] experience in some way. We are not a corporate rewards program, we are a cause, and the membership programme should reflect that.”

Other resources 

Disclosure: Membership Puzzle Project has provided support to the Daily Maverick’s membership program through the Membership in News Fund.

National Investigative Digital native Making the Business Case for Membership Daily Maverick Designing our Membership Program

Newsroom overview

Who They Are
A national, born-digital publication focused on policy analysis and investigative journalism that has branched out into lifestyle, sports, and business coverage
Location
South Africa
Founded
2009
Launched membership
2018
Monthly unique visitors
3,500,00
Number of members
13,693
Percentage of revenue from membership
25 percent

In the months leading up to the Daily Maverick’s August 2018 membership launch, they migrated “just about everything” that the Daily Maverick ran on technologically, CEO and Publisher Styli Charalambous writes. By May 2018, everything was in place for a membership launch – other than the critical technological infrastructure.

Rather than wait to ask for financial support until they were technologically ready, the staff decided to launch a pre-membership minimum viable product. They had two goals: start bringing in much-needed audience revenue as soon as possible, and test some of their assumptions about whether, why, and how much loyal readers would financially support them so that they could have a more impactful official membership launch. 

When they officially launched their membership program in August 2018, they were thrilled – but not shocked – at the enthusiastic response. The donations drive and surveys to donors afterward had already shown them they were on the right track.

Why this is important

Launching a membership program has a lot of moving parts, and not everything will go according to plan. The Daily Maverick ably turned an unexpected delay into an opportunity to gather additional insights for designing their membership program, reducing the guesswork.

This case study is also offered as an example of a low-investment, accessible way to test some of your assumptions before committing to a high-stakes launch. MPP is sharing their approach because it doesn’t require any skills or tech beyond what most newsrooms already have.

What they did

Only a couple days elapsed between the decision to launch the one-time donations drive and the actual launch. 

On June 1, 2018, they launched a call for recurring, pay-what-you-can donations with no benefits attached. With that campaign they sought to answer the following questions: 

  1. Whether people would financially support the Daily Maverick on an ongoing basis
  2. Where on their owned platforms they would find their most engaged readers 
  3. What membership messaging most resonated 
  4. How button placements and color schemes affect signups 

They answered the first question simply by asking for donations in the first place. There were no benefits or rewards offered for donating during this time.

They tested their second question by placing a call for donations at the bottom of their long-form features and in their newsletters, and studying the conversion rates on each. Although they lacked the technology to A/B test different messages on their site, they gathered data to answer their third questions by running different messages in their newsletter to assess which motivations for joining resonated most strongly. They tweaked button placements and color schemes over the two-month campaign and studied the data to determine how that influenced sign-ups, to answer the fourth question. 

When the donations drive concluded, they surveyed the donors, treating them as a group of beta members who could inform the design of Maverick Insiders. They asked them the following questions:

  • How long did you read the Daily Maverick prior to donating?
  • How frequently do you visit our site?
  • You have previously donated money to Daily Maverick. What made you decide to donate? (Open-ended question) 
  • Which content most influenced your decision to donate?
  • Who is your favorite author?
  • What was your primary reason for donating to Daily Maverick? (Choose one)
    • Credible investigative journalism costs money and needs public support
    • Quality independent journalism is worth paying for – it’s the right thing to do
    • I no longer buy newspapers and feel I should pay for news
    • The newsletter is an invaluable start to my day and worth paying for
    • I’m aware that advertising doesn’t cover the costs of news publishing any more
    • My contribution helps keep DM free for others who can’t afford to pay
    • Other
  • We’re launching a membership plan for readers who want to contribute to the cause and engage with DM staff and other members across a range of platforms and events. Is this a community you would be interested in being a part of?
  • What benefits would motivate you to join our membership plan? (Please drag items in terms of importance to you; see image below)
  • What other potential benefits would influence your decision to join our membership plan? (Open-ended question)
  • Would free Daily Maverick branded merchandise on sign-up influence your decision to become a member?
  • Which Daily Maverick branded merchandise appeals to you most? 
  • What, to your mind, do we do well? (Open-ended question)
  • What do you feel we could do better? (Open-ended question)
  • Thanks! Anything else you’d like to share with us? (Open-ended question)

The results

At the end of the two-month test, they had 314 recurring donors giving an average of 100 rand a month (about $8) and 621 one-time donors, giving between the minimum charge of 15 rand (about $1) up to 25,000 rand ($1,670). Donors could choose how much to contribute. 

This told the Daily Maverick a couple key things about their audience that influenced the design of their membership program: 

They did not need to set a floor for membership contributions. Supporters willingly gave what they could, rather than the minimum required.

They had an engaged group of readers willing to provide recurring financial support, even without any benefits.

They would find their loyal readers at the bottom of articles and on their newsletter lists. Calls-to-action elsewhere on the site were less effective. This allowed them to invest their limited time and resources on the places they knew they would be most effective at converting members.

Button placement and coloring would have some impact on sign-ups. They experimented with a few arrangements, and found that adding a bold background and pre-selecting their most desired contribution amount (R150) helped swing recurring contributions from an average of R75 to R150.

That R100 average recurring contribution benchmark allowed them to develop more informed revenue projections for their membership program. 

They received 645 responses to the survey they sent to the donors. The responses told them a few critical things:

Mission-aligned benefits such as opportunities to get to know the journalists and a members-only newsletter resonated much more strongly than special offers and discounts. 

Their investigative reporting motivated the most contributions, and they also learned which journalists had the most loyal followings – two valuable data points for marketing efforts 

A resounding 92 percent of respondents said that swag upon sign-up would not motivate them to join.

Response from Daily Maverick’s survey (Courtesy of the Daily Maverick)

CEO Styli Charalambous told MPP, “At the time we were debating whether a high-value prize would entice readers to join, and it ranked so poorly that it emphatically ended the debate for us.”

What they learned

From these data points and survey results, the Daily Maverick inferred the following:

Their cause alone was enough to motivate readers to support them financially. If more than 300 people were willing to become recurring supporters without receiving anything in return, offering benefits and a sense of community via a membership program would lead to even stronger returns.

A pay-what-you-can model, which would make membership financially accessible to more readers, had viability. They could reasonably expect an average contribution of 100 rand (about $8) a month and readers who could give more might do so.

They did not need to implement a paywall to incentivize people to support their work. 

Cause-driven membership appeals would resonate more strongly than membership appeals tied to perks, particularly those oriented around keeping the journalism freely accessible.

The experiment also changed the way the Daily Maverick thought about testing new ideas. The success of this test encouraged them to suppress their “perfectionist” tendencies and just try things. 
As Charalmbous wrote on Medium, “This was a great example for us to show us how we could launch something good enough, very quickly that could test multiple hypotheses and provide rich data and insights that are currently still being used today. It’s fair to say our membership launch was more successful because of it and we made fewer mistakes along the way. MVPs are a useful way to be more audience-centric because it removes the guesswork and assumptions from decision-making and actual user behaviour is used.”

Key takeaways and cautionary notes

If you have clarity about what you need to know about your audience members, it’s easy to design tests to find that out. When designing tests, it’s helpful to go back to the basic framework of a scientific experiment. What is your hypothesis? How can you test that hypothesis? Can you design the test such that you can isolate the variables and draw meaningful conclusions from the results? Your most loyal supporters are eager to see you succeed and can be valuable “product testers” for big strategic changes like launching membership.

Other resources 

Disclosure: Membership Puzzle Project has provided support to the Daily Maverick’s membership program through the Membership in News Fund.

National Investigative Digital native Conducting Audience Research Daily Maverick Adopting a Product Mindset Designing our Membership Program Launching Membership

Newsroom overview

Who They Are
A national, born-digital publication focused on policy analysis and investigative journalism that has branched out into lifestyle, sports, and business coverage.
Location
South Africa
Founded
2009
Launched membership
2018
Monthly unique visitors
3,500,000
Number of members
13,693
Percentage of revenue form membership
25 percent

When the Daily Maverick launched its Maverick Insiders program in 2018, two people were working on the membership effort. Two years on, the Maverick Insiders team has grown to seven, with roles including a general manager, membership retention manager, and marketing ninja. They have found that some areas need dedicated roles – such as events and retention – while others can see skills and responsibilities come together in unusual combinations. 

This case study explains what hires were made for the Insiders team, when, and why, as well as how the Insiders team now works together with the rest of the Daily Maverick newsroom.

Why this is important

The way the Daily Maverick grew its Maverick Insiders team offers one blueprint for staffing a full-service membership team – from product to community management, events to marketing, and tech to retention. The Insiders experience offers a great example of how to build gradually by prioritizing your membership needs, and then using that team to distribute membership efforts across your organization more widely.

What they did

Prior to the launch of Maverick Insiders, there were two people working on getting the program off the ground. Publisher Styli Charalambous led the planning of the program, acted as product manager, and secured buy-in throughout the company, while former head of product Brett Lensvelt considered how technology, editorial, and business, would all work together to implement the program. 

This two-person team worked with external developers for engineering and testing requirements as they built out an MVP. After that showed promise, they realized  that Insiders would need someone working on it full-time after launch.  Publisher Styli said they were looking for an “allrounder” to take on the coordination of member events, member-related copywriting, liaising with editorial, public speaking, and more. Francesca Beighton was hired two weeks after the program’s full launch, initially as a part-time community manager, but within two months this role went full time, and Beighton (now Maverick Insiders’ General Manager) was charged with running the program and building the membership team out. 

With member communication and engagement a high priority, this build-out began with graphic designer and community manager Sahra Heuwel, who was already a designer at the Daily Maverick. Her responsibilities include everything from creating forms and surveys, to designing direct mailers and banners, to managing comment moderators, researching new comments policies and platforms, answering member emails, and managing the inbox support team.

Five months after launch Tinashe Munyuki joined the team to help with inbox support. With maintaining hard-won members another top priority, he is now Membership Retention Manager.  At eight months, events specialist Nicole Williamson came on board (her job description grew to include “Live Journalism Manager” once the coronavirus pandemic arrived) , followed by Junior Membership Business Administrator Suleiman Krigga, and most recently Marketing Ninja Fiona Berning (full details of their each team members’ responsibilities can be found in The Results section). With the exception of Sahra and Head of Product Rowan Polovin, all team members were hired after Insiders launched. 

Beighton said: “I think if membership is working, you’ve got to be prepared to reinvest in people and training.”

Their next hire will be someone to cover member inbox support, currently the junior membership business administrator’s job, as well as bringing in freelancers to help with copywriting and design overflow.

The results

Today the Maverick Insiders team consists of seven people, with responsibilities broken down as follows:

  • Francesca Beighton, Maverick Insider General Manager: manages the MI team, edits the MI newsletter, drives membership growth, conceives and implements marketing plans, liaises with newsroom on all member-related initiatives, manages member benefit relationships
  • Tinashe Munyuki, Membership Retention Manager: manages retention and churn, manages MI inbox, provides technical support to MI community, leads tech training of support staff
  • Suleiman Krigga, Junior Membership Business Administrator: responds to community queries in MI inbox, assists with retention management
  • Nicole Williamson, Live Journalism Manager: concepts and implements events and webinars, manages speaker and sponsor relationships, handles logistics, manages budgets and invoices, assists with engaged journalism efforts
  • Fiona Berning, Marketing Ninja: implements and reports back on marketing and advertising campaigns, coordinates social media, provides design assistance
  • Sahra Heuwel, Community Manager & Graphic Designer: produces design elements for marketing and branding campaigns, provides membership support to MI community, liaison on community moderation, trains and manages member support staff
  • Rowan Polovin, Head of Product: project manages all technology related activities, tracks and analyses MI growth metrics

The team, Publisher Styli Charalambous, and Editor-in-Chief Branko Brikic meet weekly to discuss upcoming projects and challenges. There is also a weekly webinar and events meeting, and a weekly marketing meeting. Meetings to coordinate engaged journalism work remain ad-hoc, but they plan to formalize this process too. 

Team members report to General Manager Fran and work full time on membership, but Daily Maverick’s aim of being a memberful organization means the Insiders team get involved in other areas of the operation. Charalambous explained: “For example, webinars started out as a member benefit but evolved into live-journalism efforts to [serve] a wider audience that is now part of membership acquisition efforts. It’s run by the membership team and requires coordination with journalists and editors in the hosting of these events.”

“If membership is to really be about community building and for it to be a success, it’s our view it cannot be a siloed effort that sits on the side. It has to be integral to the entire organization and be the thing that brings it all together.”

What they learned

It’s crucial to have someone responsible for securing buy-in at the top. Particularly at the proposal and planning stage, this person will fight for resources to get things off the ground and act as a lobbyist or champion for membership more broadly across the organization.

Think outside of traditional role boundaries. Creating positions that play to each person’s varied skills and strengths. For example, Sahra Heuwel is both a community manager and graphic designer. General Manager Fran Beighton said Heuwel’s patience, calm, and natural problem-solving marked her out as a great fit for community management as well as graphic design, and the diversity this dual role offers keeps her stimulated.

Create career paths for people within your membership team. Fran said they are constantly thinking about how they can upskill their people. 

Staff elements that are central to your membership program accordingly. Be clear about how critical different skills and initiatives are to membership success, and prioritize those in your organizational chart. For Daily Maverick, this meant having a dedicated person to run and manage webinars and events.

A member saved is worth more than a member gained. In recognition of this, staffing retention efforts has been key for Maverick Insiders. 

Adequate training for membership staff requires time and space. The Insiders team has learned to step back and analyze what is and is not worth their effort so that they can refine their workload and make space for that training. For example, the team is careful not to spend time on unnecessary events, which Beighton defined as “putting on an event as a tick-box exercise as opposed to a genuine opportunity for an important discussion [and] engagement.” Other areas where the team have pulled back include unnecessary surveys or big-effort projects like referral programmes that don’t have the same level of return on effort. Beighton added that setting OKRs has allowed them to focus: “If it doesn’t serve our objective, it’s culled from the workload.

Key takeaways and cautionary notes

Prepare for success when starting out on your membership journey, and assess the resources that will need to be added every few months. You can “layer” new team members or skills onto the team in priority order. If you can afford it, it’s easier to scale back the resources you provide than to play catch-up. 

From Publisher Styli: “Membership touches every part of the business, every part of the business needs to be represented there, editorial, business, product and tech, finance might drop in, maybe account managers. We buy into the fact that membership is such an integral part of the organization’s effort/mission.”

Other resources

Disclosure: Membership Puzzle Project has provided support to the Daily Maverick’s membership program through the Membership in News Fund.

National Investigative Digital native Daily Maverick Staffing our Membership Strategy

Newsroom overview

Who They Are
A national, born-digital publication focused on policy analysis and investigative journalism that has branched out into lifestyle, sports, and business coverage
Location
South Africa
Founded
2009
Launched membership
2018
Monthly unique visitors
3,500,000
Number of members
13,693
Percentage of revenue from membership
25 percent

After two years of marketing Maverick Insider, the Daily Maverick’s membership program, Publisher Styli Charalambous and Maverick Insider General Manager Director Francesca Beighton mapped out, audited, and set objectives for the marketing strategy going forward. 

They also invested time in understanding and applying the behavioral biases that underpin consumer behavior, which has helped them understand what motivation they’re trying to appeal to whenever they write a membership appeal. These are the results of that exercise.

Why this is important

Categorizing, measuring, and routinizing their marketing strategy helped Daily Maverick streamline its marketing efforts, which helped to reduce the amount of time and decision-making required to execute. This gave them more time to devote to cause-driven work that makes membership more appealing, and also made it easier to adapt to the coronavirus pandemic.

This strategy document also helps keep Maverick Insider marketing mission-aligned. When targets are ambitious, it can be tempting to try anything to hit them, including exaggerating, making promises you can’t keep, and tailoring your message to increasingly niche audiences, warns Beighton. Having a North Star document gives staff members something concrete to hew to. It also helps when onboarding new team members.

What they did

The Daily Maverick records the conversion rates of every piece of marketing outreach at the weekly Maverick Insider meeting.  Using that data, they took a holistic look at what worked and what didn’t, then took a look at their goals for Maverick Insider and built the roadmap from there. 

The strategic overview includes the following:

  • A definition and mission statement for Maverick Insiders
  • An articulation of Maverick Insiders’ values, including how that presents in the tone used 
  • Objectives and key results for 2020, both quantitative and qualitative, plus an articulation of what part of the Daily Maverick team is responsible for each objective and key result
  • Characteristics of potential members and the size of their target market
  • A marketing plan for converting readers into members, broken down by channel (direct mailers, banners, post-article footers, etc.)
  • A marketing plan to raise general awareness of Maverick Insider and reinforcing value for existing members, broken down by channel (an onboarding series, press coverage, net promoter score surveys)

After establishing the baseline with all of the above, Beighton turned to the core phases of growth hacking to develop a plan for 2020 and beyond. Different marketing initiatives can be at different stages at any point in time. 

  • Test: Create a MVP. In other words, test a campaign to see if it resonates with our readers. 
  • Track: We need to track – and report – on what is and is not working using a combination of analytics and member feedback. 
  • Alter: From our reports, we should be able to pivot quickly and fix what is not working. 
  • Improve: We should be constantly striving to improve our marketing using innovation and our technical capabilities. 
  • Scale:  We don’t do things by halves in Maverick Insider. When it’s working, ramp it up and maximise our returns. 

Here is a detailed overview of the Daily Maverick’s Maverick Insider marketing strategy, including their actual targets for each channel.

The results

Using the strategic plan, Beighton set member conversion targets for each channel. The Maverick Insiders team will be spending the rest of 2020 testing different channels and messages to determine the right mix for reaching their average monthly member growth target of 1,000 people.

Marketing ElementNumber of ActionsTarget sign ups per actionTarget Total
Direct Mailers2150300
Banners41040
Post-article footers525125
Newsletter footers41560
Social Media21020
Editorials17575
Webinars81080
Piano targeted messaging2100200
Referrals1100100
Total1000

With the basics mapped out, they can now get more sophisticated with their test/track/alter/improve/scale framework. 

They recently started categorizing their marketing messages based on the behavioral biases that each appeals to. Those biases, articulated in detail by social media platform Buffer, are: 

  • The bandwagon effect: The tendency for someone to do, say, believe something if a high number of other people have already done so.
  • The zero risk bias: The tendency to favor paths that seem to have no risks. (This is why companies offer money-back guarantees, for example.) 
  • In-group favoritism: The tendency to prioritize products and ideas that are popular with a group they’ve aligned themselves with.
  • Confirmation bias: The tendency to favor and recall information that confirms or amplifies beliefs that they already have.
  • Endowment effect: The tendency to assign more value to things merely because they already own them. 
  • Not invented here: Not Invented Here is the aversion to use products or accept ideas that are developed outside of a group. If you as a customer don’t recognize, identify with, or understand a product or service you’re less likely to use it. To counter this, newer companies often align themselves with better-known brands. 

Another not mentioned in the Buffer overview that the Daily Maverick appeals to often is the “IKEA effect” – the tendency to value more highly things that you’ve already invested effort in. 

The Maverick Insiders team uses these biases to design A/B tests and systematize their marketing efforts. The biases offer a formula for good writing and can be used as a “checkbox exercise” to make sure there’s a strategy behind the appeal. Beighton often asks herself, “What bias am I writing to?”

It’s no longer “today we’re going to ask aggressively,” Beighton says. It’s “how are we going to nudge people toward certain behaviors?” 
See here an example of a recent direct mailer, which Beighton says was designed to appeal to the bandwagon effect (by highlighting the 12,000 members Daily Maverick already has), and to test the efficacy of reverse psychology (“You probably won’t be interested in this, but…”). See here another example of the bandwagon effect, published early on in the coronavirus pandemic.

What they learned

A systematized marketing strategy has uses beyond membership. Maverick Insiders is one of several components of the Daily Maverick’s work that needs to be marketed. They also have a books division, a robust events strategy, a suite of newsletters, and a budding podcast division. Going through this process for Maverick Insiders “makes it surprisingly manageable to keep track of [marketing for] all the different divisions,” Beighton told us. 

Categorizing, tracking, and analyzing has allowed them to build routines, design templates, and craft a realistic roadmap that they can stick to. It’s become a simple, formulaic process to determine the right channel and message for marketing something new, whether that’s a newsletter, podcast, or event. 

Putting the values down in writing proved critical as the Daily Maverick experienced a major staff growth spurt. They’ve added a lot of new staff recently who are still learning the value proposition and how to apply it to marketing efforts. “It’s so easy when you’re marketing anything to cross the line. It’s so easy to tell a white lie. The minute you start doing that, everything falls apart,” Beighton warns. “It keeps you honest, which is essential.”

Beighton said it also helps that Publisher Styli Charalambous is in the weekly marketing meeting and both he and Editor-in-Chief Branko Brkic are in the weekly Maverick Insider meeting, which helps keep the messaging aligned. “The busier we become, the faster we work, the easier and more likely we are to have an error in judgement. These meetings reconnect us with the cause each week,” Beighton said.

Key takeaways and cautionary notes

You don’t need deep analytic expertise to measure your marketing efforts’ impact. Simply categorizing each appeal by the type of message it conveys and tracking the conversion of each will give you valuable insights about what resonates most with your audience, reducing the guesswork with each membership appeal.

Keep your value proposition front and center. Without a common, well-articulated understanding of the mission and values of the thing that you’re marketing, using these structures can become overly formulaic to the point of lacking resonance. Getting the value proposition right is just as important as categorization, routinization, and test-and-learn process.

Other resources 

Disclosure: Membership Puzzle Project has provided support to the Daily Maverick’s membership program through the Membership in News Fund.

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