Case Study Tag: Developing Membership Metrics

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 from membership
100 percent

When Matt Kiser launched WTF Just Happened Today (WTFJHT) in January 2017, it started as a side project to report on the first 100 days of Trump’s presidency. Early on in the site’s founding, Kiser was spending ~$500 per month (mostly on Mailchimp) to publish the newsletter and run the blog. 

About a month into running the site, Kiser decided to ask his audience for money to help offset out-of-pocket expenses. He knew he needed to raise about $4,000 per month to cover the first 100 days of his work, so he reached out over his email newsletter list to ask for donations. In just a few days, 415 people signed on to support the site. By mid-February, 540 people had signed on and Kiser was up to $3,100 per month in recurring reader support. 

That’s about when he decided to funnel that support into a membership program and quit his day-job to run WTFJHT full-time. That’s also when he realized he needed an actual budget. 

Why this is important

When it comes down to it, the costs and revenues of running a member-driven news site are what determines the longevity of the site. But figuring that out, especially in the beginning, can feel like guesswork. Kiser was only able to commit to WTFJHT once he raised enough money to feel secure enough to quit his day-job. 

Today, he has a more sophisticated sense of what he can expect each month in terms of costs and revenue (and has started to pay for freelancers and other staffing support), but in his early days, Kiser had to make strategic decisions each month based on his revenue projections. 

What they did

Three years after launching WTFJHT, Kiser has accrued a few more monthly costs – including his new, full-time salary, a budget for freelancers, and additional software and tools. Kiser is extremely transparent about the monthly costs associated with running this site. His method for managing his budget remains fairly straightforward. 

In order to be fully transparent with his readers and members, Kiser lists out all of his monthly costs on his website. See below for those costs, ranked from highest to lowest. In total and including other fluctuating costs month to month, this equals a little over $16,000 per month. 

Monthly costs:  

  • Kiser’s full-time salary:  $7,385 
  • Kiser’s risk adjustment for being a full-time contractor: $2,089, or 15% of total cost (quarterly taxes, healthcare, other unexpected costs)
  • Freelancers: $3,000
  • Podcast and Hosting: $2,000 (AWS S3 to host the daily podcast and cache the files with AWS CloudFront; and monthly stipend for podcast producer)
  • Mailchimp Email Service: at least $900 (with a 15% discount applied)
  • Other Tools: ~$320 (a GitHub subscription for hosting the code, YellowBrim for email efficiency, Cloudflare for various security and serving issues, Buffer for posting, Canva for quickly creating social images, and Zapier to automate boring tasks, among others): 
  • Hosting via Amazon S3, and CloudFlare to manage  DNS, SSL certificate, and handle caching: $125
  • NewsWhip Spike, a tool to source daily news (with a discount applied): $100
  • Subscriptions, to the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, and a few others: ~$100

WTFJHT is 100 percent supported by members – Kiser doesn’t take any advertising or sponsorship dollars, which is why when he lost 150 net supporters over the past year, it was cause for some alarm. Kiser sees this churn as a part of the natural life cycle of his members, but knew it meant that he would be losing about $900 a month in income. It was time to reach out to his members again and ask for their support. 

Kiser does not like doing fundraising drives (he feels uncomfortable asking for money). But at the end of the day, this is his full-time job and he knows it needs to be done. So in July 2019, Kiser launched another membership drive with a goal of signing up 200 people to become members. Here’s what he said in the body of an email to readers: 

WTFJHT’s email newsletter appeal (Courtesy of WTFJHT)

The results 

Three days later, after sending only two reminder email to his list, Kiser’s membership drive was about a dozen people away from his goal of 200 new members. 

See below for the update he sent over his email list open to the public: 

WTFJHT’s email newsletter update on the membership drive (Courtesy of WTFJHT)

The membership drive brought Kiser back to the financial threshold that enables him to continue publishing without sustainability concerns. 

Over the years and after a few membership drives, Kiser has been able to develop a more sophisticated understanding of incoming revenue from his membership base. This clearer method of projecting revenue took time — after years of collecting data and observing member behavior.

Kiser identified the below three metrics as crucial for developing stronger revenue projections:

  1. Member conversion rate: ~1-2% (a rough percentage of WTF’s audiences — newsletter and website combined — that becomes a member) 
  2. Average monthly contribution per member: $6.17 
  3. Annual Churn Rate: 5.8%

These three numbers help Kiser determine whether he’s on track and what he can afford each month.  Here’s how he explains it: “I’ve outlined my costs and what I want to be earning on the blog. As long as the budget balances, that’s all I care about – It’s how I know I’m creating sufficient value.” 

What they learned

Always set a goal (with a reason behind it) in your fundraising drives, and communicate this to your readers and members. In the past, Kiser made membership campaigns a week long, with no specific goal. At the end, he felt like his audiences were exhausted (and he was exhausted, too, from running his own membership drive over a week where he was still providing coverage each day). Now he always offers an explanation to his readers about why he’s doing a drive (like in the above case, because WTFJHT lost some members), and he sets a clear target. Once Kiser hits the goal, he ends the drive, and starts focusing on how he can retain his new members. 

As a one-person newsroom, don’t get overwhelmed by metrics. Kiser isn’t hyper focused on all of the audience data at his disposal. As he explains: “it’s more important to focus on the basic accounting of income and expenses than any tool or app.” Kiser looks at newsletter and membership conversion rates, average contributions per member, and annual churn rate as his major pieces of “directional evidence” to determine, essentially, is this working or not? At the end of the day, it’s really about making sure revenue exceeds expenses. As long as he can predict when he’s heading for the red and can correct course with member drives, he’s all set. 

Here’s some budgeting advice for other one-person newsrooms: Kiser prefers to use the self-employed version Quickbooks to track his expenses. He likes how Quickbooks has an app and website, connects to his business credit card and bank information, and allows him to easily categorize and create “rules” for expenses that come in. Apart from the DIY version of budgeting, Kiser also uses a CPA once a year to help with his taxes. As a “disregarded entity” (a sole creator with an LLC), Kiser’s unique tax status means he prefers professional help every March to make sure he files taxes correctly. 

Key takeaways and cautionary notes 

Be honest and upfront with your audiences. It helps to share your financial situation with your readers and members, even if it borders on TMI. Kiser finds that being radically honest with his books also helps him alleviate some of his hesitations around asking for money from his readers. As he puts it, “you can see, nobody’s getting rich here!” Being transparent is also one way to build trust when asking people to optionally contribute to your work.

Know when it’s time to pack up. Kiser doesn’t know how long this model will last, and he’s prepared to be able to make a call based on how he sees his member program fluctuate in the months ahead. He’s going to keep tracking the key metrics he uses to forecast incoming revenue and whether or not he needs to ask more folks for financial support, and he knows that he doesn’t know his ceiling. As he puts it:  “I’ve long had a compact with the audience that I’ll keep doing this as long as they keep supporting me. It keeps everyone honest and there will be no doubt come a time when WTFJHT ceases to be relevant, and it’s time to pack it up.” 

Other resources 

Startup (less than 5 years old) National Digital native Single-subject Single-Person Making the Business Case for Membership Developing Membership Metrics Growing our Membership WTFJHT

Newsroom overview

Who They Are
A local news organization that covers public education in Chicago, Colorado, Detroit, Indiana, New York, Newark, Philadelphia, and Tennessee
Location
Multiple locations in the U.S.
Founded
2014
Membership program launched
2018
Monthly unique visitors
743,000
Number of members
1,100+
Percentage of revenue from membership
1 percent

From the beginning Chalkbeat has had a way for readers to financially support their work, but it was a straightforward donations strategy. They first flagged membership as something to consider in 2014, but didn’t have the capacity to pursue a full membership program at the time. 

In the years following, they continued to grow in readership and revenue, but it wasn’t until 2018 that they had the bandwidth to answer key questions about membership: What would it be at Chalkbeat? Why would they do it? And how significant of an investment would it be to launch and maintain?

Most importantly, they needed to identify the organizational goal for membership: what does success look and feel like, and how could we measure it?

Building on what Chalkbeat knew from years of receiving reader donations, Chief Strategy Officer Alison Go spent two months looking across the organization to develop a framework for determining whether membership was worthwhile and identifying milestones that would tell them if they were on the right track. They launched their membership program in November 2018. 

Why this is important

When assessing whether they’re ready for membership, news organizations spend months choosing their tech stack and designing their membership program. But they often miss a critical step before that: getting specific about what it will look like if membership “works” for them. 

Membership is not a brand campaign that you can toggle on and off when you need a revenue boost or have a bit of extra time. It is both a new relationship with your supporters and a product that you need to manage. Setting off on this path without defining success makes it difficult to assess whether membership is having a positive enough effect on your organization to be worth the significant investment it requires. 

Chalkbeat’s effort to distill its membership experiment into four hypotheses that could be tested and measured within a year of launching a membership program is instructive for news organizations trying to come up with their own definition of success. 

What they did

The first thing the Chalkbeat team established was that membership was not going to be a quick experiment that it could try and fail and then wind down. There would be significant staff, technological, marketing and editorial investment, and the commitments made in the course of a membership program would need to be fulfilled well beyond the end of an end-of-year or spring campaign, said Go.

For two months in 2018, Go was focused full-time on answering a key question: what would it look like for Chalkbeat if membership works? And almost as important, they identified what it would like for membership to not work, and the steps they would take to phase it out. 

“It was not anything technical, it wasn’t like a physical thing or resource, it was the confidence that we would at minimum learn something from this,” Go said.

They identified four hypotheses that they could test by launching membership:

  • Acquisition: Framing small donations as “membership” will drive the highest possible revenue from small donors.
  • Retention: The membership program will have the lowest churn of all small-donor programs.
  • Knowledge community: The membership program will be a critical pillar for a robust editorial knowledge community, ultimately improving the journalism itself and increasing our impact on the community.
  • Costs: The overhead to maintain a membership program will be offset by the benefits. 

They then distilled each hypothesis into a question that data could answer, and identified a “learning time frame” for answering the question, using data from previous donation drives as a baseline. 

  • Acquisition: Does this convert better than our previous campaigns? (1 month)
  • Retention: Do people cancel recurring contributions at a slower rate? If yes, what about the membership program causes this change in behavior? Is it the “membership” framing or specific initiatives within the membership? (3 to 12 months)
  • Knowledge community: Have membership initiatives increased our interaction with our community? Has the quality of our stories improved as a result? Has the reach and impact of our stories increased as a result? (1 year)
  • Costs: What is needed to maintain a membership program and how much does it cost, now and at scale? (1 year)

They decided that if membership did not create incremental revenue but “enabled us to create a feedback loop that we weren’t able to have without it, it was valuable.” 

They also identified revenue milestones that would tell them the role membership would play in the larger financial model. For instance, if membership took 50 percent of an employee’s time to administer and maintain, did it actually pay for itself? And if not at the time, at what size audience would it begin to make sense?

The results

Almost two years after launch, they have more than 1,100 members across the U.S., have generated insights into their four hypotheses, and added one more after launch. This bolstered the case for hiring a dedicated person to support membership. 

Acquisition: They did not see a significant spike in member/donor acquisition in the first two months. Membership grew at about the same rates as their newsletters did.

Retention: Member/donor retention started in the high 90th percentile, and it has remained high since. 

Knowledge community: They have found that it’s easier to engage with members than it was to engage with donors because of the ongoing communication with them, but they are struggling to build local knowledge communities because the membership program is run centrally, at the national level. Kary Perez, who runs their membership program today, says: “As our national team grows, we can continue testing what a national-level knowledge community might look like.” 

Costs: “Our [newsletter] subscriber to member conversion numbers are average. Even at average, we know we can do better. The membership program conclusively pays for itself – the ROI isn’t super high, but it pays for itself. …Even at the launch of the membership program, it was clear it was worth the investment,” Perez wrote in an email. Their launch year, they brought in $53,000 from members, not quite hitting their $60,000 goal – but the following year they brought in $80,000, exceeding their new $55,000 goal.

Synergies with other initiatives: Chalkbeat uses the end-of-year membership campaign to bolster major donor giving and vice versa, such as having a major donor offer a match to motivate readers to become members. Plus, the development team can reuse membership assets and content in their outreach to major donors. 

After their successful launch and end-of-year campaign in 2018, they knew they should invest in a grander version of individual donations, and that they needed a more dedicated resource to do that. In 2019 they hired Perez as the senior marketing manager to manage the membership program.

What they learned

Membership has proven to have both revenue and engagement impact for Chalkbeat. That’s why Perez, the organizational point person for membership, sits between the revenue and editorial teams. They’re still trying to understand which is the primary role it plays, she says. The $80,000 membership brought in for 2019-20 is substantial, but that was only 1 percent of their budget due to their foundation and major donor support. For this reason, it might end up being more critical as a mechanism for greater engagement.

Having membership raises questions about inclusivity. Member benefits are inherently exclusive, and Chalkbeat is asking itself whether it’s possible to square special experiences for members with their organizational commitment to equity and inclusion. “The whole point of our model is that everyone should have access to our work. The questions we ask ourselves are: How does any nonprofit have a membership program? How are we meant to be accessible for everyone while also offering member benefits? How can we create a truly inclusive membership program?” Perez says. 

So far, they have decided that they won’t limit access to anything that’s useful for creating educational outcomes, and they’re exploring how they might create pathways to membership that don’t require a monetary exchange. 

Key takeaways and cautionary tales

A membership program needs measurable goals. Setting off on a path to membership without defining success makes it difficult to assess whether membership is having a positive enough effect on your organization to be worth the significant investment it requires. As Go noted, membership isn’t a quick experiment that can be wound down if it doesn’t “work.” Chalkbeat’s effort to distill its membership experiment into four hypotheses that could be tested and measured within a year of launching a membership program is instructive for news organizations trying to come up with their own definition of success.

Other resources

Local/Regional National How to Know if We're Ready for Membership Digital native Single-subject Chalkbeat Adopting a Product Mindset Developing Membership Metrics

Newsroom overview

Who They Are
A nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization, providing Michigan readers with daily, fact-driven journalism covering the state's issues, including diverse people, politics, and economics
Location
Ann Arbor, Detroit, and Lansing, Michigan
Founded
2011
Launched membership
2019
Monthly unique visitors
About 1,000,000*
Number of members
7,414
Percentage of revenue from membership
11 percent

In just two years, Michigan’s Bridge Michigan increased reader donations by 66%, increased the number of monthly donors by 54%, and grew its email list by 114% by enacting strategies. 

Bridge did this by running a series of targeted experiments at each level of the audience funnel. It set clear goals and targets for how it would define success at each level, and then enacted strategies around SEO, email newsletter growth, and more to meet those goals.

The test-and-learn mindset allowed Bridge Michigan to experiment with new content formats by expanding its email newsletters and making its coverage more search friendly, which drew in new regular audiences and attracted new members.

*Pre-coronavirus pandemic, Bridge Michigan averaged around 300,000 monthly unique page visitors.

Why this is important

Bridge Michigan’s strategies weren’t revolutionary. They were simple and straightforward. By focusing on bite-size tests focused on audience growth through SEO and audience habituation through email newsletters, Bridge was able to turn small, individual successes into a larger strategic win through increased revenue and increased membership.

Newsrooms looking to implement test-and-learn strategies for membership should start by focusing on small experiments. 

“You don’t need every unique visitor to give you money, but you need to find ways to get people to do that at each level,” Bridge Michigan’s growth strategist Bill Emkow said during a presentation at ONA19 in partnership with the Facebook Journalism Project. Bridge was a participant in the 2019 Facebook Membership Accelerator. (The Lenfest Institute partners with Facebook to administer the program and share best practices from its participants.) 

What they did

Bridge entered the Facebook Journalism Project’s Accelerator Program with some financial support from readers, but no formal strategy for growing its membership program.

The first thing Bridge Michigan had to do was define its audience funnel. Broadly, a funnel stars with occasional users and filters down to regular users and ultimately contributors.

Here’s how Bridge defined its funnel based on its reader habits and audience analytics: 

Underpinning every stage of the funnel is regular publication of high-quality coverage. Bridge publishes about 3-5 news stories per weekday. Here’s a breakdown of Bridge’s strategy at each level: 

Unique visitors to repeat visitors

At this stage, Bridge focused on SEO-friendly headlines that could get their stories in front of new audiences. 

“The most effective way to build the unique visitor base is by having more stories and more posts on the topics the audience cares about,” Emkow said. 

The next step is getting unique visitors to come back at least five times a month. 

Bridge pays close attention to its audience analytics, and if it recognizes that a particular topic is attracting a consistent audience, it will double down on that coverage. Emkow uses Google Search Console to identify which search terms are leading people to Bridge. He sends a weekly memo to the staff with the specific terms readers are using to reach the site via search.

In 2018, Michigan voters legalized recreational marijuana. Bridge noticed that the topic began trending on Google and attracting social media attention the next year, as the law was about to go into effect. 

So Bridge increased its coverage and then optimized past coverage for SEO as well. The site assigned one of its politics reporters to dive into marijuana. 

FJP’s David Grant explained how they did it:

Following SEO best practices, they linked every new marijuana story to old marijuana stories and wrote keyword-rich page titles and headlines. In the article below, notice how (circled in red) there’s a list of previously published stories before you start reading the article itself. The story’s first sentence includes the term “marijuana in Michigan.” The entire story is optimized for SEO.

However, a handful of their stories didn’t generate much readership, so the team assumed the topic was dead. 

Though Emkow argues that they ultimately pulled coverage too soon. 

“I argue that we just had three stories that didn’t connect,” he said over email. “We should’ve kept chipping away, IMHO. I think that lessons we learned from marijuana were applied during coronavirus. We just keep hammering away, and we’ve been rewarded by readers.”

Growing its email list

Email is a powerful tool for developing habit with readers, a prerequisite for converting them to members. 

“It’s letting you into their lives more,” Emkow said. “Once they let you in, you can have a conversation with them.” 

Bridge has a daily newsletter, and it encourages readers to sign up with non-intrusive sliders that pop-up after the reader has spent a few seconds on the page. It has also added a week-in-review newsletter and RSS-automated health and environment newsletters that are sent automatically the day after the site publishes a story on that topic. 

Bridge tweaks the language on the email calls-to-action depending on the source of where the reader is coming from, or the news of the moment. It previously targeted CTAs to a reader who clicked on a link via Facebook with an email sign up encouraging them to become less reliant on the social giant’s algorithms while someone who came by typing bridgemi.com into their browser will get a more general CTA.

The lefthand image is a message for a reader who arrived at Bridge after typing it into their browser. On the right is a visitor who arrived via Facebook.

Tools such as OptInMonster, which Bridge Michigan uses to power its lead generation, offer A/B testing capabilities, so you can test out different calls to action to see which is most effective based on. 

Bridge has also used Facebook lead generation ads to grow its email list. 

Conversion oriented

Your owned-and-operated platforms, such as your website, are the most important place to ask for donations. Bridge made the donation button more prominent and added a stronger call-to-action. 

The original “Donate” button

The more prominent “Donate” button Bridge uses today

It also added pop-ups to news stories and modules at the bottom of articles that encourage support. By seeing how users respond to these different call-outs, Bridge has been able to grow its donations. 

Most Bridge readers only read one story, so Bridge has three different CTAs per story to encourage membership. 

“Yes, be mission oriented, but to create sustainability be conversion oriented,” Emkow told me in an email. “To paraphrase Eminem, if you have only one shot to turn a casual reader into a paying member, what do you do?”

Sustaining members

Bridge realized that its donations page was not set up to encourage recurring contributions even though its ultimate goal was  to encourage one-time donors to contribute on a recurring basis and provide stable, predictable revenue. So they defaulted their donation pages to a monthly ask.

It also raised their default membership option. Bridge wanted to set its default membership option to $10/month, but Tim Griggs, its accelerator coach, encouraged the site to set it at $15/month. In his post, Grant explained how behavioral economics informed that decision: people are most likely to choose the default price, followed by the cheapest option. 

Griggs suggested Bridge Michigan make their default $15 per month, $10 as a second option, and any amount as a third. “It worked,” Emkow says. “We saw an immediate increase in overall monthly donations, but specifically $10 and $15 per month.”

Setting defaults is essential — you need to tell your audience what you want from them. 

“A blank field leads to confusion,” Emkow said via email. ‘How much should I give? How much do they want? What’s a lot, what’s too little?’ Eliminate confusion. The $15/month suggestion was basic behavior economics: people tend to choose the default, but the second most popular option is the second-highest price option.”

Bridge has also started re-sending fundraising emails to readers who didn’t open them. It started as a small experiment: Two days after sending a fundraising email it sent it again, and it made nearly the same amount as the first email. 

A quick note: Though many news organizations, including Bridge Michigan, use donations and membership interchangeably, we consider them two distinct engagement and revenue models with different relationships between supporters and the newsrooms

The results

Bridge has seen growth at every stage of the audience funnel. 

In 2019, toward the top of the funnel, these strategies grew its overall unique users by 35 percent to 2.4 million and its email subscribers skyrocketed by 59 percent to 13,374. 

The site generated nearly $300,000 from 3,600 members — a 45 percent increase in revenue and 54 percent increase in total members. The growth has continued in 2020. As of early September, it has 7,414 members who have contributed $436,724.

Emkow also recently launched a Facebook lead gen campaign to attract new email addresses. The ad targeted users who were similar to Bridge’s most loyal email subscribers and who resided in Michigan, the site’s target audience. It used an image from its COVID-19 tracker, and removed the words and numbers because Facebook dings images that are text heavy.

In the first two days, the ad netted Bridge 331 new email addresses with a $0.29 CPA. Over three weeks, he was able to add 2,180 new email subscribers at a cost of $.64 per email. 

Emkow initially spent $606, but raised the budget to $3,000. “I don’t want to lose the opportunity at this cost,” he said. 

What they learned

Keep track of costs. Facebook can be a valuable lead-generation tool — but the juice has to be worth the squeeze. Emkow said he’ll boost posts or use Facebook’s email lead generation tool, and then meticulously watch costs to make sure that they are staying below targeted CPAs. 

You don’t need to be an analytics expert.: Emkow is the first to admit that he’s not an expert at Google Analytics. While there are many sophisticated analytics tools, Emkow was able to glean insights by look at each level of the funnel individually and then seeing how they correlated. For example, he’d look first at overall traffic levels and then at the number of email newsletter subscribers. If he saw growth in both categories, then it would be safe to assume that readers were moving down the audience engagement funnel. 

“I’m just looking at correlations. If you’re seeing big growth in one spot and not correlating growth in other spots, there’s something you need to check out,” Emkow said. 

Pick your spots. Most membership-driven newsrooms, including Bridge, have limited resources. The site uses a combination of editorial judgment and its analytics insights to make decisions about what to test and which areas to focus on that will move its audience down the funnel. Newsrooms should 

“Be the authority on certain topics that matter to both your audience and your editorial judgment,” Emkow said. 

• Put user experience first. You don’t want to overwhelm your audience, and you should be careful about how intrusive your CTAs are. Let the data be your guide. For example, Bridge noticed that its conversion rate on on-site email pop-ups didn’t change when it changed its frequency from every one day to every three days. So users saw the pop-ups less, and Bridge still was able to grow its email list. 

Key takeaways and cautionary notes

Focus on each step of the funnel. By breaking its strategy down by steps in the funnel, Bridge was able to run concentrated experiments that focused on growing its overall audience and increasing its email list, which ultimately moved the needle on Bridge’s overall goal — growing its membership base. 

By keeping its experiments small and manageable, Bridge was able to make incremental progress that ultimately resulted in significant growth. 

Let the data guide you: It’s important to be data literate and understand what your audience analytics are telling you, but membership-driven publications need to have strong values and editorial judgement. Don’t let the data lead you to pursue audiences and stories that aren’t in line with the core membership value proposition. 

Other resources

Local/Regional Digital native Bridge Michigan Adopting a Product Mindset Developing Membership Metrics Growing our Membership

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 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.

National Investigative Digital native Daily Maverick Adopting a Product Mindset Developing Membership Metrics Growing our Membership