Section: Developing Memberful Routines

Newsroom overview

Who They Are
The Bristol Cable is a community-owned cooperative news organization in Bristol, U.K.
Location
Bristol, U.K.
Founded
2014
Membership program launched
2014
Monthly unique visitors
50,000
Number of members
2,700
Percentage of revenue coming from membership
35%

The Bristol Cable is a British member-owned cooperative news organization. As a cooperative, community members are the owners of the Cable, not its staff or a company – and as owners, members are legal shareholders and therefore must be consulted when making certain strategic decisions that affect the organization. 

But just because members can weigh in doesn’t mean they will. The Cable team puts significant time and effort into making the process of participating in strategic decisions easy to understand, accessible, and enjoyable.

In the beginning the Cable mainly involved member-owners in decisions through its Annual General Meeting (AGM), which brings together staff and members to report on the accomplishments and challenges of the past year, review finances, discuss key questions, define strategy for the year ahead, and elect voluntary non-executive board members. 

Over time, based on member-owner feedback, they’ve added more frequent, lower-effort ways to weigh in on the Cable’s decisions as well, which made it possible for a greater number of members to play a role. This case study will walk you through how they involve members at different stages, based on the level of involvement they want.

Why this is important

The AGM is the principal way that the Cable’s members can influence the strategy and policies of the newspaper. Although the number of news organizations making their community members their owners is small, a growing number of newsrooms are exploring ways to involve  community members in newsroom decision-making. The Cable’s AGM offers one way to do that. 

The meeting also allows staff members to share their thinking about the paper’s work and respond to member feedback in a regular way that is manageable and is respectful of members’ time. 

But if you only offer one way to participate in decision-making, you’ll exclude many of your members. Over time, the Cable developed a participation ladder that expanded the number of ways members could weigh in, offering opportunities to participate that matched the level of involvement each member wanted. 

What they did

As a member-owned cooperative, anyone who becomes a member of the Cable has a say in the direction of the organization. Every year members elect a non-executive board of directors, which plays an advisory role, while the Cable’s staff run its day-to-day operations 

Other than serving on the board of directors, participating in the Annual General Meeting is the key way that members participate in strategic decision making. Each year members vote on the Cable’s budget and elect the board of directors. They also offer input on two to three strategic decisions that the staff wants feedback on that year. 

For example, in 2020 they discussed the Cable’s five-year strategic plan, which focused on topics such as whether the Cable should expand the geographic footprint of its coverage around Bristol and how it can create additional partnerships with local organizations. The goal is to have a wide-ranging discussion that gives the Cable a sense of their members’ values and how they feel about the decisions at hand.

“More often than not we’re trying to get more textured or graded understanding — a temperature check or a steer on things for the team to take away and turn into a project rather than this quite limiting concept of yes/no votes,” said Adam Cantwell-Corn, the Cable’s co-founder and coordinator. 

The AGM, which lasts 2 to 2.5 hours, is critical to the Cable’s mission, so they spend months preparing for it. Historically the Cable has held the AGMs at a local community center or sports hall, although the 2020 AGM was held on Zoom due to the pandemic.

A couple months before the AGM, the Cable staff narrows down the topics it wants to ask the members to weigh in on. They try to focus on larger strategic topics that will yield insights that will help inform how the staff approaches its day-to-day decision making, such as the Ethical Advertising Charter that they drafted at the 2016 AGM. They then share the topics with members in advance of the meeting. 

Then the staff turn to the logistics of the meeting, such as renting tables and chairs and lining up catering from a local restaurant. The Cable also recruits members to help out with tasks such as checking in attendees and confirming they’re actually members who are eligible to vote.

In addition to the logistics, the Cable team undertakes a month-long promotional campaign via their newsletter and social media to both encourage non-members to become members so they can attend and encourage existing members to come.

At the meeting itself, the team plays music, offers food and drinks, and hosts ice breakers to make people feel welcome and encourage them to participate. “One of the overwhelming bits of feedback we received [in previous years] was that it didn’t feel like an AGM, it felt like a community meeting,” Cantwell-Corn said. 

Attendees sit in small groups around tables, and Cable staffers and volunteers facilitate group discussions on the main topics of the evening. They document the conversations on big pieces of paper in the middle of each table to make the process more accessible to everyone. 

Photo via The Bristol Cable

The AGM was moved fully online in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But even before the pandemic, as its membership grew, the Cable took steps to ensure the meetings were more accessible by allowing people to ask questions and offer feedback asynchronously and vote virtually.

The Cable has invested in building custom ‘Community Relationship Manager’ software, where members can respond to polls, participate in exercises, and manage their membership through a single login. (This product, called ‘Beabee’, is currently under development with German newsroom Correctiv.) Allowing online participation made the decision-making process more accessible since not all of its members are able to attend an event on a weeknight. 

The results

The Cable has about 2,700 members, and more than 90 attended the most recent virtual AGM in November 2020. But more than 270 participated asynchronously by voting for the board of directors or submitting questions for staff to answer. In previous years, when they met in-person, about 100 members attended the AGMs each year. 

The strategic discussions at the AGMs have gone from being the beginning and end of the collaborative decisions to the start of a whole series of smaller decisions.  

For example, at the 2017 meeting, the team facilitated a discussion with members about the boundaries between advocacy and journalism, and whether members wanted to see the Cable take a stand on certain local issues. They had small tables of about six people and did exercises such as dotmocracy to collect feedback, such as how members define advocacy. They then asked members to vote on whether the Cable should campaign on certain issues. Most people felt the Cable should pursue campaign journalism. (See full results)

With the affirmative vote in place, the Cable staff began identifying issues that it could take a stand on and build a campaign around.  

It brought some of those specific campaign ideas back to the members for further discussion via one of their monthly membership meetings, which are part meeting, part social event. 

“Okay, here’s what the whole organization as represented by the AGM has said about how we should do campaign journalism as a concept. Now let’s bring it down a level to ‘What should we do in terms of topics?’ What’s pertinent in the city and how can we interact with that as a journalism organization?,” Cantwell-Corn summarized. 

In collaboration with the members, the Cable identified two topics that they could campaign on that year: air pollution in Bristol and safe injection sites for people fighting addiction. They then presented the two topics to all members via an online forum and invited all members to vote on which topic they wanted to see the Cable campaign for. 

More than 600 members voted and engaged in the online conversation, compared with 30 people at the meeting who helped identify potential topics and 12 0people who attended the AGM and decided whether the Cable should engage in advocacy journalism. Air pollution received the most votes and in January 2019 the Cable launched its editorial campaign, Fight for Fair Air, which included investigative stories, editorials, commentary, and more. 

“It went from the AGM to being actually realized as an editorial product,” Cantwell-Corn said.

What they learned

You need to evolve as you grow. When the Cable had its first Annual General Meeting in 2015, it had fewer than 200 members. 

“It’s much easier to manage cooperative decisions when you have 30 people in the room rather than when you have 2,000 members,” said Lucas Batt, the Cable’s membership coordinator. That’s why they first turned to Loomi and later to developing a CRM.

The initial AGMs focused on the constitutional founding and key principles and norms — such as whether and how the Cable should accept advertising. But members’ interest in participating in decisions didn’t wane after those foundational decisions were made, and the Cable didn’t stop involving members either. More recent AGMs have focused on topics such as how to reach new readers and what the Cable can do to be an anti-racist organization. The platforms and topics evolved to fit the needs of the organization as it matured. 

How much involvement members want will vary. So should their options for getting involved. Even as committed cooperative owners, there’s still variation in how much members want or are able to participate. Members often have other commitments and priorities and only so much bandwidth.

The Cable has made it easier to participate by taking some decisions online via voting platforms, providing regular updates to members outside of the AGM, and making fewer open-ended asks, such as asking for feedback about how the Cable should approach editorial decision making. (There’s no single editor — The Cable editorial team operates democratically but independent of the membership on a day-to-day basis.) 

“We now do a lot more work of crafting genuine options for the membership to engage with: this is the scenario, here are a couple of options, and here are pros/cons,” said Cantwell-Corn.

The Cable has also gotten clearer about what each avenue for feedback is for.

The AGM is for big-picture strategic discussions and beginning the feedback loop with members, such as what kind of advertising the Cable will accept and whether the Cable should begin taking stances on some local issues, as detailed above. 

The monthly membership meetings are slightly less involved than the AGM. Although the Cable team originally used them for more nitty-gritty decision-making with members, members said they didn’t need that level of involvement. Now the Cable uses them to keep members up-to-date on the implementation of decisions made at the AGM, help prepare for upcoming AGMs, involve them in specific editorial projects, and hold social events. (However, the monthly meetings have been on pause during the pandemic.) 

When the Cable needs members to weigh in on an ongoing issue, they’ll conduct the discussion and/or vote via the online voting platform to maximize the number of people who can participate. 

At every stage, the Cable takes great care to appropriately frame the discussions and give members a clear sense of the scope of the decision they’re being asked to make. 

Key takeaways and cautionary notes

Not everyone wants to be highly involved. When the Cable began offering online voting, the total number of members who participated in decision-making went up, from the 100 or so people at an AGM to the hundreds that participated in various ways online. Although members’ valued the Cable’s commitment to cooperative decision-making, that didn’t mean they all wanted to attend a multi-hour Annual General Meeting. The stages of decision-making the Cable offers to members is a great example of what MPP calls the “participation ladder.” You need to offer flexible ways to participate if you want to attract a diverse group of participants. 

Always close the loop. If you’re going to ask members to take the time to weigh in on important decisions, you need to show them what you did with their feedback. If you don’t, they’re less likely to weigh in next time you ask for it. When the Cable produced its editorial campaign on air pollution, it showed the AGM attendees who approved the idea of campaigns that the staff not just listened, but was able to act on what it heard. 

Other resources

Local/Regional Investigative Digital native Developing Memberful Routines Bristol Cable

Newsroom overview

Who They Are
The Bristol Cable is a member-owned cooperative news organization in Bristol, U.K.
Location
Bristol, U.K.
Founded
2014
Membership program launched
2014
Monthly unique visitors
50,000
Number of members
2,700
Percentage of revenue coming from membership
35%

The Bristol Cable is a British member-owned cooperative news organization. As owners, members are legal shareholders and therefore must be consulted when making certain strategic decisions that affect the organization. One such decision is what kind of advertising the Cable will accept.

Initially the Cable decided to address that with an “Ethical Advertising Charter” that included types of companies and organizations from whom it would accept advertising from. But that ended up being too restrictive, so in 2017 they worked with members to amend the charter, focusing instead on criteria for what kind of advertising the paper would accept and how it would be presented to ensure that it aligned with the Cable’s values. 

The revised Ethical Advertising Charter helped the Cable balance the need to include its members in the decision-making process with the need to make daily operational decisions in an efficient manner that also isn’t burdensome for members. This case study outlines the process of developing the charter and applying it to advertising decisions.

Why this is important

Like any news organization, the Bristol Cable wants to ensure diversified revenue streams to support and sustain its journalism – and with a dedicated local audience for its print newspaper, the Cable sees advertising as a necessary part of its revenue pie. 

But as a member-owned cooperative, the Cable must ensure that its member-owners have a voice in decision-making – and that includes ensuring that any advertising it accepts is in line with its values as an organization and supported by the majority of its members. 

Previously the Cable had a list of organizational types that member-owners had approved accepting advertising from, but the staff found that relying on a list was too limiting and prescriptive, while also not capturing all factors. 

The Ethical Advertising Charter was amended to instead lay out guidelines for making advertising decisions, which the Cable team can then apply to each individual decision.

Although few news organizations are owned by their members and therefore must invite them into decision-making, more newsrooms are choosing to invite members into decision-making. The Bristol Cable’s solution for balancing the need to make individual decisions quickly while still honoring its member-owners’ values is instructive for any newsroom. 

What they did

From the outset, The Bristol Cable recognized the importance of diversifying its revenue streams, which is why it decided to accept advertising. 

However, they put strong guidelines in place for advertising: advertisements only run in the Cable’s quarterly print newspaper, not online or on any digital platforms, and are limited to only five pages for every 40 that the Cable publishes. 

Today the majority of the Cable’s funding comes from grants, but about 35 percent of its revenue comes from membership and another 5 percent or so comes from advertising, according to Adam Cantwell-Corn, the Cable’s co-founder and coordinator.

As a mission-driven publisher, Cable wanted to ensure that the ads it accepted were in line with its editorial values. So at the Cable’s 2016 Annual General Meeting, the Cable’s member-owners voted to put in place a list of organizational categories that they found acceptable and from which the Cable would be able to take advertising. (The Annual General Meeting is a yearly gathering where member-owners elect a board of directors, approve a budget, and weigh in on key organizational decisions.)

But it quickly became apparent that the 2016 policy was too specific, and the list was not serving its purpose. 

So the Cable team brought the issue back to its owners at the Annual General Meeting in 2017, the following year. Together, they decided to draw up a principle-based advertising policy that the Cable staff could apply to individual advertising decisions as they arose. Cantwell-Corn said the message from members was clear: they trusted the operations team to apply those principles to decisions the way that members intended.

The result was the Ethical Advertising Charter, which publicly explained Cable’s policies toward advertising. The charter has three primary sections: editorial integrity, advertisements, and decision making. 

The editorial integrity section explains that all advertising will be clearly labeled and separated from editorial coverage. It notes that the Cable will “ensure that its editorial content is not influenced by advertisers.” 

The advertisements section of the charter details what kind of ads the Cable will accept. The charter states that the paper will seek to run advertisements that: 

  • “promote social and cultural events and activities that may be of interest to its general readership;
  • products and services that are of direct benefit to local citizens and the city’s economy and environment;
  • such other adverts as are considered to be in line with the Cable’s ethical stance especially those from independent local businesses and third sector organisations.” 

The decision-making section explains that all determinations about advertising are delegated to the Cable’s advertising team to make in line with the member-approved guidelines. 

The results

The Cable staff has found the charter easy to apply, even when tough decisions arise. 

In early 2020 Bristol Water, the city’s public water utility, reached out to the Cable about placing an ad. The Cable’s advertising coordinator flagged it for the leadership team because of “excessive executive pay, dubious tax practises and unacceptable price increases,” and they assessed the company against the Ethical Advertising Charter. 

The editorial staff pulled Bristol Water’s annual financial reports and tax filings. They thought that high rates of executive pay and repeated attempts to raise water prices violated the Cable’s cooperative values, and thus were in conflict with the charter. 

“We believed this would compromise us,” said Lucas Batt, the Cable’s membership coordinator. 

The staff felt comfortable making this decision without consulting members because they had the principles outlined in the charter to guide them. 

Then, in November 2020, Cantwell-Corn published a story about the utility’s attempts to repeatedly raise water prices in Bristol. 

Along with the story, the Cable explained to readers that they had rejected an ad from Bristol Water. The charter stipulates that when the advertising team decides not to proceed with an advertisement, it must provide an explanation to the advertiser and to the public “where appropriate.” 

The Cable also turned it into a membership appeal. 

Cantwell-Corn said the appeal attracted “a number of people” to join, but he noted that it was “part of the overall sweep of communications that we’re doing that are trying to persuade people to convert members.”

The Cable has rarely had to invoke the charter since 2017. Cantwell-Corn attributed that to two key reasons: 

  1. The Ethical Advertising Charter is listed on the Cable’s website, so that helps filter out organizations who think they wouldn’t fit the bill. 
  2. There are lots of places where local organizations can advertise their goods or services — as all legacy news organizations know, it’s often cheaper and more effective to advertise via Facebook or Google where you can target specific audiences.

Cable members support the publication because they believe in what it stands for, and Cantwell-Corn said members were generally supportive of the decisions, such as the decision to take advertising that aligns with their values. 

 “We’re living in an imperfect world,” he said. “We have to have strong ethical principles, but we also make the compromises we need.” 

What they learned

Principles can be better than specifics. The 2016 Ethical Advertising Charter was just a list of organizational categories that the Cable was approved to accept advertising from, which didn’t do the Cable team much good when a company approached them that wasn’t on the list or was in a grey area. The revised charter instead outlines “principles and parameters” that can be applied to any company. This has given the document much broader applicability and removed the need to go back to members on the same issue repeatedly.  

The advertising charter can be a selling point. While the Ethical Advertising Charter does provide some limitations, including potential revenue opportunities, it also is a “mark of quality,” Cantwell-Corn said. And the Cable leans into mission alignment when they pitch advertisers.

The Cable has become a go-to for companies and organizations that are trying to present themselves as more ethical to their consumers, such as green energy suppliers, NGOs, and local businesses. 

“That means we can say to them as a value proposition to the advertisers that, within the boundaries we have set…, your advert will have prominence and will have quality pieces of editorial around it. The other adverts that are present also are validating the quality and the brand validity of your own company by being in The Cable,” Cantwell-Corn said. 

Key takeaways and cautionary notes

The core values you hold could limit existing revenue opportunities, but if you lean into them, they can also open up new ones. There’s a good chance there are companies and organizations out there who have similar values and want to ensure their advertising dollars go to like-minded organizations. By refocusing your pitch to advertisers on what you stand for and why it could be beneficial to align themselves with you, you might attract advertisers that a more transactional pitch might not have.

Establishing trust is not a one-time action. Inviting member-owners to co-write the Ethical Advertising Charter was a smart way to establish or strengthen trust in the Cable’s decision-making. But if the Cable hadn’t consistently applied the charter after it was approved, owners’ role in the drafting wouldn’t have made a difference. Each time the Cable properly applies the charter to an advertising decision, it is giving member-owners yet another reason to trust the Cable. 

Other resources 

Local/Regional Investigative Digital native Developing Memberful Routines Making the Business Case for Membership Bristol Cable

Newsroom overview

Who They Are
A progressive, legacy Argentine news organization focused on politics and human rights
Location
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Founded
1987
Membership program launched
2018
Monthly unique visitors
15 million
Percentage of revenue coming from membership
10 percent

Overview

When Página/12 launched in 1987, four years after Argentina emerged from a military dictatorship, it presented itself as the newspaper of democracy and human rights. Hoping to offer a different perspective to readers, it included a mix of news, investigative journalism, opinion, and in-depth analysis – all with a fresh hint of irony, which became their signature.

But by 2016, Página/12 faced two existential challenges: that of making digital journalism profitable and a change of government that put it in a disadvantaged position for government advertising, a key revenue source for media in Argentina. (Each administration tends to favor the outlets they feel more comfortable with. When the conservative Macri government came to power in 2016, it put most of its advertising with other media.) 

So when Página/12 redesigned its website in 2016, it also leaned into its slogan “The Other Look,” a nod to its status as an “opposition” newspaper. The new slogan was part of its effort to build stronger identification with readers seeking a place for critical coverage of the Macri administration. 

Página/12 found its earliest members among those readers. This case study shows how they leveraged an intellectually engaged readership to cultivate an online community built on comments. Today they average 3,000 comments a week, and while they would not share their exact membership numbers, Chief Digital Officer Mariano Blejman confirms that membership contributes more revenue than any single digital advertising contract. In other words, “the membership program is the main digital advertiser.” 

Why this is important

When Página/12 launched its new website, it chose not to implement a paywall because leaders didn’t want to limit access.  That meant they had to figure out how to make membership valuable in other ways. They decided to focus on building a community worth paying to join. 

News organizations are increasingly focused on building communities, but they often do so off-platform, in places like Facebook Groups and Slack. That’s risky, because companies can change the rules at any point. 

Building community on site, as Página/12 has, gives news organizations a more complete picture of their loyal audience members because they can see connections between reading and commenting behavior, as well as other factors such as newsletter subscriptions. It also reduces the risk that an algorithm change could sever their relationship.  

But a membership program can only thrive when a news organization gets to know its members well enough to offer desirable member benefits, and a community can only develop when you invest in it. Página/12 did both.

What they did

Before launching membership, Página/12 surveyed audience members, asking questions such as how often they visited the website, whether they read the print edition, and whether they would be willing to financially support Página/12 to help ensure its economic and editorial independence. Seventy-three percent of the surveyed members said “Yes” to the question about financial support.

Asked what kind of benefits they would pay for, members chose options such as discounts to cultural and educational events, exclusive audiovisual content, and the possibility to contribute to stories. Página/12 also learned that they typically had a high educational level, and that many of them were academics or had similar “intellectual” jobs.  

So they decided to offer two benefits: a variety of cultural offerings such as talks with reporters and online classes, and membership to an online space where this intellectual audience could engage with each other and contribute their knowledge.

The opportunity to have their voice heard is at the core of the membership value proposition. When Página/12 launched the membership program with Coral’s tool to moderate and manage comments, they made commenting member-only and appealed to loyal readers to join to “defend” their voice in the Argentinian media ecosystem, according to Celeste González, the engagement editor. 

To act on that, Página/12 offered members – who they call “partners” – the opportunity to exercise their voice on their platform. Comments are called “contributions” and likes are called “respects.” 

But offering the ability to comment and creating a community are two different things. When Página/12 launched its membership program, there wasn’t a person focused on nurturing the community. That changed when González joined as engagement editor a year later. 

Her first challenge was bringing some order to a disorganized program so that they could actually fulfill their promise to members. At that time, there was no regular delivery of newsletters, monthly talks with reporters, or someone systematically responding to comments either. 

González quickly took a few key steps: 

  • For the first few months, she read and responded to every single comment. If they commented on typos, grammar mistakes or asked questions, they would get an answer from Página/12 thanking them.
  • To spark conversation and identify opportunities for engagement, she flagged articles with a high number of comments to relevant reporters, encouraging them to respond. 
  • She wrote and published monthly profiles of members, inviting them to share how they became a Página/12 reader and their motivation for becoming a member. Her goal was to show who the people behind commenting pseudonyms were. To do that, she chose the ones who participated the most, aiming to offer a variety of profiles and maintaining a gender balance.  
  • She encouraged members to share their experience with different topics, which feeds the newspaper coverage of those issues.

The results

González undertook all the steps above because she didn’t just want comments from the same few members over and over. She wanted to have more people commenting, and she wanted them to feel a part of a real community. As the number of members has grown, so has the number of comments.

Today, members recognize each other in the comments. According to González, they already know what other people might comment or even anticipate if a member will like a given story or article. Here’s an example of one member (“canaria”) asking a member whose opinion they respect (“liliana47”) to share their thoughts. 

Last December, members asked in the comments for an in-person gathering, so Página/12 organized a holiday party. Seeing those who had met in the comments section celebrating in person was a big success for González.  

This effort to build an online community especially paid off when Buenos Aires went into lockdown at the outset of the coronavirus pandemic – one of the strictest lockdowns in the world at the time. While some news organizations scrambled to adapt to online community building, Página/12 had already been doing that for a couple of years.

Daniel Paz, the newspaper’s illustrator, began publishing daily illustrations of life in lockdown. Members started commenting, so he started to reply. It’s become a daily routine – he uploads a new diary entry every day, and then begins a conversation with members about their lockdown experience.

The COVID-19 pandemic also allowed the organization to expand the ways it works with members. After reading a reader comment asking about how coronavirus spreads, a member offered to analyze for Página/12 how the virus spread in each country. 

Some of that member’s colleagues joined him in that work. They already knew each other from the scientific community in Bariloche, in the southern region of Patagonia, and were used to science communication. Using WhatsApp and Google Docs, they put together a comparative analysis on how different countries responded to the crisis.  The result was a collaborative article that ended up being published on Página/12 and received more than 130,000 unique visits. As González put it, “the mutual exchange is the axis of the membership program and what makes it different.”

González also encourages the staff to participate in these conversations, but, despite a few internal training sessions on engagement, she usually still has to initiate reporter participation in the comments.

What they learned

The right indicators are crucial. When Página/12 first started tracking commenting analytics, it did it in absolute numbers: the total number of contributions and respects, regardless of who was commenting on or reacting to other members’ posts. But González didn’t want to just grow the number of comments, she wanted to grow the number of people contributing comments. So she changed how she paid attention to commenting activity. Now she is tracking the number of active commenters in any given month, as well as the total number of comments, so she can assess whether comments and the number of participants leaving them are both growing. For example, in April 2020, they had 1,256 active commenters who left 25,487 comments.

Courtesy of Página/12

One person can’t do it all. There’s only so much one engagement editor can do to create a vibrant online community. The rest of the newsroom needs to get involved, too. To encourage this, González pays attention to which articles are sparking conversations, and reaches out to the reporters directly asking them to join the conversation. Often, they don’t know how to get started, so she suggests some possible replies. She’s learned that the easiest comments for reporters to engage with are those that ask specific questions about the article.

Key takeaways and cautionary tales

Dedicated staff are essential for online community building to work. Even when a newsroom uses a tool like Coral that is designed for community management, it needs to know how to use it well. An engagement editor who identifies opportunities for conversations is an indispensable role. That person can not only feed the discussion, but share insights with the newsroom to encourage their participation. 

The right technology is, too. For Página/12, which went from having an online version of the print edition to an in-platform community in four years, that has been a major challenge. Although it has the commenting section covered, other aspects of digital membership haven’t been resolved, such as having a landing page for members. “We’re still resolving a tech debt that in terms of UX means that Página/12 still isn’t providing the user experience that we would like to provide,” González said.

Old habits die hard. Members and reporters need help understanding this new way to interact. González has had to invest time not just in encouraging members to engage, but teaching reporters the most effective way to engage back and how to incorporate that into their workflow.

To build a community, you need to know who your community members are. Página/12’s members share an ideological affinity and many of them have an intellectual or academic background. They are motivated by opportunities to share that knowledge. So Página/12 developed a member benefit – the ability to offer comments – that meets their desire to engage intellectually with others. The more you understand about what your members value, the easier it is to develop a membership program that will resonate. 

Other resources

Disclosure: Membership Puzzle Project has provided support to Página/12 through the Membership in News Fund. Aldana Vales, the author of this case study, occasionally freelances for Página/12.

National Legacy Conducting Audience Research Developing Memberful Routines Designing our Membership Program Página/12

Jay Rosen and KPCC on developing memberful routines

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.
Location
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Founded
2013
Membership program launched
2013
Monthly unique visitors
550,000
Number of members
69,340
Percentage of revenue coming from members
53.8 percent*

De Correspondent built a member-financed newsroom from the ground up. Building a company that retains members is something they’ve long practiced across internal teams. But they’ve of course encountered challenges, including in scaling the model globally. The organization has demonstrated the importance of intentionality and organization-wide methods for meeting members where they are at.

The research team explored the daily newsroom routines and external member engagement activities that they’ve found most powerful for keeping members front of mind. Mayke Blok, membership strategist at De Correspondent and The Correspondent, told MPP that “the fact that we started off as a member focused organization really, really helps. So it’s in the DNA. But I think we did stray a bit from what our members thought and wanted for a while and resolved that by getting more in touch with them.” See how they’re doing this now.

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

Why this is important

De Correspondent Managing Editor Maaike Goslinga and Conversation Editor Gwen Martèl have both worked at the publication since its early days. In reflecting on what has worked in collaborating with members, they noted, “The most important lesson throughout the years to build a membership-focused newsroom is: don’t consider members as an afterthought, but include them in your daily thinking.”

Editorially, this entails taking the suggestions of members seriously and increasingly responding to member requests for specific information. But that becomes a huge task when your membership program approaches almost 70,000 members.

In its seven years of publishing, De Correspondent has found that it isn’t enough to chase competitors in the Netherlands and around the world and relentlessly publish stories. Among their core principles are “we are your antidote to the daily news grind” and “we collaborate with you, our knowledgeable members.”

The two principles are closely tied. Articles need to reflect correspondents’ unique vantage points and offer members new ways of understanding contemporary problems, often including their expertise. Strategically, this combination helps De Correspondent focus on member retention (as opposed to acquiring new members), with a current organizational goal of maintaining 70,000 De Correspondent members.

What they did

In practice, editorial and membership teams realize the “don’t consider members as an afterthought” goal in a number of forms, starting with strategic staffing or identifying appropriate point people internally. De Correspondent co-founder and CEO Ernst Pfauth identified a trend that’s common in many newsrooms: for organizations with relatively flat hierarchies, it’s easy for responsibilities that seem like everyone’s shared concern to not move forward in the shuffle of day-to-day work.

In response they created a conversation editor role held by Gwen Martèl. Members tell staff that De Correspondent actually feels more personal than when there were fewer members on the platform, thanks in part to the introduction of this role. 

As detailed in this post, the conversation editor role involves coaching staff on how to work with members, including:

Efforts to build a member-focused culture from inside the newsroom, such as:

  • Transforming lessons learned about member participation into new features for a “member rolodex” and the wider platform.
  • Helping correspondents enrich their reporting with members’ knowledge and experiences. Martèl said that for each article or new pitch, “We ask: how can we involve members? It all boils down to the simple realization that members have a lot of knowledge and experience that can be useful for our journalism.”

Improving conversations with members, and their experiences overall, by:

  • Bringing more diverse voices to the on-platform comments section
  • Inviting members to take part in discussions they’re knowledgeable about
  • Organizing dissent

Martèl works closely with Pfauth, who is serving as product owner for De Correspondent’s site and new mobile app. They’re working to ensure that their design and development of features don’t deliver on only a small group of members’ requests. They’re stepping back to see which member voices they’re taking into account when making decisions (and recently have begun other staff projects focused on improving service for specific groups of members, including new members and people whose engagement on the platform have waned). 

This is all part of more direct communication practices between staff and members as part of developing “a continuing story with them,” said chief engagement and campaign leader Lena Bril. In the past members have shared their experiences on De Correspondent podcasts and in articles on the platform too, and they’re asked to pose their questions to correspondents and podcast guests in advance of interviews.

More recently, one frequent member request for an audio app with stories read by correspondents crossed the threshold of being potentially useful to many members. The request was included in development of the audio app and the conversation between members and correspondents will feature prominently.

In September 2020 members were notified of the new audio app via email: “The world’s a busy place, but independent journalism that cuts through the noise is more important than ever.”

The results

In order to stay member-focused while scaling, De Correspondent has

  • Created substantive routines for keeping members in mind throughout a story’s life cycle.
  • Started surveying members regularly about their experiences and ideas.
  • Added a full time conversation editor whose job it is to enrich the site’s journalism with the knowledge and experience of members (including ensuring that the online comments section is an open and safe space).
  • Created a weekly membership metrics and engagement report for all staff and more broadly published member sentiments through all-company Slack channels.

Initiatives that are keeping De Correspondent member-centered are highly grounded in listening to members and reporting insights to colleagues. Bril said the organization is in the habit of talking directly to individual members whenever that feels logical. In general, members are the first to know when there is important organizational news, including new features and correspondents. For the latter, the daily newsletter to members will include a note explaining that the staff would like to introduce members to their new correspondent. Members are regularly thanked in that newsletter for their support and contribution to De Correspondent’s journalism, and they’re encouraged to respond with their feedback. 

As detailed in this case study on how De Correspondent refreshed its member insights, De Correspondent surveys its members quarterly in addition to soliciting their thoughts at the beginning and renewal phases of their memberships. The membership team then shares updates on what members have told them, which ultimately helps the rest of the organization understand what is preoccupying their membership at any given time. 

Internally, the membership team’s introduction of a weekly membership metrics and engagement report for all staff has been successful. In a monthly presentation to staff the membership team presents the most insightful information from traffic data (pageviews, growth, engagement, requests, and more). The information is also helpful for story sourcing. Recently De Correspondent received many member questions about the workings of 5G connections that resulted in publication of a “super explainer” about the technology. The report was useful in helping identify member interest in 5G that led to the explainer, and when the story was published, members were informed that their request was heard and acted on. 

Instead of forwarding individual pieces of member communication only to the most relevant correspondent, engagement staff are now sharing more broadly on relevant general Slack channels. To improve transparency and visibility into members’ reasons for cancelling their memberships, there’s also now a real-time “cancel channel” that’s available to the wider company to watch.

What they learned

The portion of members who care about on-site comments doesn’t represent all readership. Pfauth said that early in De Correspondent’s operations, he was highly focused on the communications that staff, members, and non-members could see: their on-site comments. (The comments sections below correspondents’ articles are accessible for posting by members only, though all readers can see the comments.)

Pfauth has since learned through member research how little many of the organization’s members cared about those comments. Because only a percentage of members said they valued comments on their own, the team now serves a curatorial role in directing members’ attention to those individual comments that are especially meaningful, including through emails to members. Today the engagement team regularly organizes Q&As with relevant invited guests whose contributions may have otherwise been buried deep within the comments.

The team has also learned the value in being flexible around hosting live gatherings. One form of listening that De Correspondent regularly practiced — meeting its members live at in-person events — started to change even before the 2020 coronavirus pandemic kept members at home. The organization previously hosted large live events several times annually, partially to remind staff that they exist because of their members’ financial support and participation. While it created goodwill and community between members and staff, it wasn’t financially viable to keep ticket costs low and host events without sponsorship.

They’ve since had experts join smaller groups of members for 40 or 50 person gatherings (sometimes taking the form of small events and panels at the newsroom) and hosted smaller hackathons that are more focused around De Correspondent’s journalism itself. Pfauth said that with the changing strategy around live events, members see less of staff in real life but that the decision helped the organization be more resource considerate, particularly around use of staff time.

Key takeaways and cautionary tales

Keep members top of mind takes work in a mature member-driven newsroom. When your membership program reaches the size of De Correspondent’s, it can be easy to let it run on autopilot. Instead, De Correspondent hired a conversation editor and implemented several new newsroom processes, including a real time “cancel channel,” to ensure the whole newsroom continues to keep members on their mind.

Other resources

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

National Digital native Developing Memberful Routines Staffing our Membership Strategy De Correspondent Retaining our Members

Newsroom overview

Who They Are
A digital media and consumer analytics company that inspires black women to realize how they can change their world through every click they make and every conversation they have
Location
London, U.K.
Founded
2014
Membership program launched
2017
Number of members
About 1,000
Percentage of revenue from membership
60 percent

Black Ballad aims to be the leading digital and physical space for creating economic empowerment for Black British women. In pursuit of that, they publish stories about Black women’s experiences, host events, support a vibrant member-only Slack community, and survey their audience members formally and informally. Their relationship with their readers and members is strong.

All of this has helped Black Ballad position itself as an organization that reaches, serves, and knows the 25 to 45-year-old British Black professional woman better than almost anyone else. They had a hunch that knowing this community would not just help them grow their membership program – it would help them unlock other revenue opportunities, too. 

In 2020, they tested that hypothesis by packaging their insights and journalism into an editorial campaign about Black motherhood. They used informal feedback from their Slack group to design a survey on the topic, distributed that survey to more than 2,000 women, and used the results to guide editorial coverage, add new knowledge to the conversation around Black motherhood, and secure a paid partnership to bring the conversation to mainstream media.

Why this is important

When people talk about membership revenue, they stop their calculations at the revenue from membership fees. But if you have a strong feedback loop with your members, that relationship can be the genesis of other mission-aligned revenue opportunities.

“Learning about what audiences care about and what they find important are more important data points than just surface-level statistics that capture general population behaviour,” co-founder and publisher Bola Awoniyi says. “If you’ve done a good job defining who your publication is for… then you can craft a business that’s based less on your scale and more on your understanding.”

But gaining the level of member engagement you need for that work requires mutual trust. A core part of Black Ballad’s mission is to create a space online where Black women can feel safe and thrive. By continually fulfilling that mission, they are making deposits on the trust that they draw on every time they ask their members to take time and energy to share personal insights. 

While few organizations have an audience as specifically defined as Black Ballad, these same principles can be applied to specific audience segments for organizations with larger audiences.

What they did

Black Ballad knew motherhood was an important topic for their members because it was consistently one of the top three topics members expressed interest in in the member onboarding survey. But the catalyst for the editorial campaign was new, critical statistics on Black women’s material experiences and Serena Williams’ and Beyoncé’s decisions to share their stories, both of which launched the topic into the mainstream. 

Black Ballad already had a strong sense of how their members felt about the topic. In May 2018 they created a #motherhood channel in their members-only Slack group. A year and a half later, they used those informal insights to begin designing an editorial campaign around Black motherhood, which they launched in January 2020 with a letter from editor-in-chief Tobi Oredein. (Disclosure: Membership Puzzle Project supported this editorial campaign with a grant from its Membership in News Fund.)

They began that project with a 100+ question survey, which asked questions such as:

  • For biological mothers, how prepared did you feel for your most recent child’s arrival?
  • For biological mothers, in what ways did you look into your own and your partner’s fertility prior to pregnancy? 
  • How long were you trying to conceive your first child?
  • For biological mothers, during your current pregnancy, how would you rate the care you received from the following NHS [National Health Service] healthcare professionals?
  • For foster parents, how long did the process take in being assessed for adoption/fostering from the start of the process, to child placement?
  • How different has the reality of motherhood been from your expectation?
  • Overall, how would you rate the support postpartum you have received?
  • For stepmothers, how involved would you say you are in decisions related to your stepchildren’s upbringing?
  • In what ways do you anticipate becoming a mother impacting your career, or in what ways did becoming a mother impact your career?
  • To what extent does/did money feature as a factor when thinking about having a family and how big your family should be?

They used facts about the Black motherhood experience as hooks to help the survey spread on social media, beyond their existing audience. 

That survey had a 60 percent completion rate and 2,600 respondents, with 40 percent of responses coming from outside London, where Black Ballad is just beginning to grow its membership. 

For the next several months they published on the topic continuously, using the survey data to add immediacy and depth to stories on topics like infertility. They continued to drive conversation and gather additional insights for months after by resurfacing data points and quotes via atomic social media posts. 

The results

Amid the Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020, Black Ballad secured a partnership with HuffPost UK to talk about Black motherhood. For a week in August they took over HuffPost’s lifestyle section, parts of their homepage, their politics podcast, and several other owned assets. HuffPost is also paying the Black Ballad freelancers commissioned to do stories for HuffPost. They also secured a deal with the podcast company Acast based on the motherhood survey results and editorial work that will be coming out in fall 2020.

Black Ballad also fielded inquiries from a university that wanted to license access to the Black motherhood survey data for use in their sociology program and talked to several brands about partnerships. Although the pandemic disrupted both, Black Ballad sees them as indications of future opportunities, which were picking back up at the time of publication. 

Awoniyi now thinks of the Black motherhood project as a case study they can use to pitch future projects. He sees opportunities to monetize via sponsorships and grant underwriting, paid media partnerships, membership drives, and partnerships with academia and other institutions who find this type of data useful. They will use the steady stream of feedback from their onboarding survey and the Slack group to identify future high-interest topics worthy of this level of coverage. 

Each “package” is likely to have the following elements:

  • A detailed kick-off survey to gather quantitative and qualitative insights from Black women
  • Editorial commissions based on the survey results (sometimes a specific result was the genesis of a story, but more often the responses pointed to something interesting in the data for Black Ballad to explore more broadly, Awoniyi says)
  • Events 
  • Media partnerships and takeovers 
  • The packaging of data for other organizations who can use it in their work

Informed by their experience with the Black motherhood project, in May 2020 Black Ballad launched the Great Black British Women’s survey, a 100-question survey aiming to find out what issues most influence Black women’s lives. “We don’t want to repeat the mistakes of mainstream media and have one overly dominant voice, but claim to represent an entire demographic of people,” they wrote. 

Awoniyi anticipates that revenue opportunities connected to audience insights will “make up the lion’s share of Black Ballad’s revenue” in a couple years. “It’s much easier to rely on a £35,000-a-year deal from a university to license the data than however many thousand users it would take to replicate that in membership fees,” he says.

That doesn’t mean the members are any less central to their mission. Although other revenue streams remove some of the financial pressure to relentlessly grow the membership program, Black Ballad still sees member growth as a key indicator that they’re continuing to create editorial content and experiences worth paying for, and they know they need to continue serving their existing members well for this model to work.

Awoniyi foresees Black Ballad collecting a wide range of data points via surveys, from how much Black women spend on a certain item a month to how Black women in different parts of Britain feel about hiring nannies. Their goal is to build a database that individuals and companies can subscribe to in order to access survey response data stripped of any personal information – particularly appealing amid the move to first-party data.

What they learned

You need to know more about your members than their newsletter open rates.  Black Ballad has a multi-layered picture of who a Black Ballad member is – and that makes it much easier to design high-interest, high-impact editorial campaigns. She is:

  • A Black woman, typically 25 to 45 years old
  • A “socializing young renter” or mother with a young family 
  • Likely part of an educated family (85 percent of their paying audience has a university degree, 45 percent have a master’s degree, and 10 percent have above a master’s degree) 
  • Online a lot, especially on her smartphone
  • Highly social, likely active on Black Twitter
One of the questions asked in Black Ballad’s onboarding survey (Courtesy of Black Ballad)

“We call her professionally ambitious, culturally curious and socially conscious. … She wants to experience the fullness of life and figure out the best way to avoid the pitfalls that systemic racism and systemic sexism have laid before her. Black Ballad’s job is to help her figure out how to live her best life and how to maximize her life with every click she makes and conversation she has,” Awoniyi says. “She is in pursuit of how she can become her best self.”

Conversations are data too. The Slack group began as a safe place for Black women to gather online and build community, and that remains its primary goal. But, Awoniyi says, it has also evolved into “a pipeline of data for Black women who want to talk about issues most important to them.” Although anecdotal, when systematically collected, that data can be used to shape surveys, events, and editorial campaigns with stronger traction.

Monetizing these insights requires deep trust. Awoniyi knows that these editorial campaigns are only possible because they have their members’ trust. In their Black motherhood survey, they asked deeply personal questions about tough topics such as fertility and miscarriages. If Black Ballad takes steps toward becoming a true consumer insights platform, they’ll have to be explicit with their users about how Black Ballad uses their data.

Key takeaways and cautionary tales

It’s all about knowing your community. “The superpower of digital businesses is that they have the power to really understand their audience. More than anyone else, media businesses do very well when they focus on the community they serve and the topics that trickle down from it,” Awoniyi says. “I would definitely encourage other media brands to go back to first principles of ‘What does this audience need to fulfill whatever objectives they have and what do the people who want to reach this audience need to fill the objectives they have? If you’re able to do that, a bunch of revenue opportunities that are specific to the people you’re experts in should come your way.”

And having their trust. The other thing Awoniyi mentions as critical to the success of this approach is trust. Black Ballad is asking women to share their lived experiences with them (albeit in an aggregated, anonymized way) so that they can package that information and monetize it. “Because we built our brand on putting Black women first, trust is implicit. Black Ballad isn’t going to violate any trust that the audience has in them. We want to take a more robust approach in how we sign off usage of that data as we figure out how to use it commercially. But it’s not just that people pay for membership and trust us. In order to make it successful, trust is not just necessary, it’s table stakes.”

Make your onboarding survey work for you. Many of Black Ballad’s ideas originate with their onboarding survey, which includes the question “What three topics are you most interested in?” That survey has a 55 percent completion rate, with a mini incentive to encourage participation: you have to fill it out in order to get your coveted Black Ballad member pin. They use the onboarding survey data to inform everything from what channels to offer in their member-only Slack to what they should focus on in future editorial campaigns. And because its distribution is automated, it’s a form of always-on audience research.

Other resources

Startup (less than 5 years old) National Black Ballad Digital native Discovering our Value Proposition Conducting Audience Research Developing Memberful Routines Small Newsroom (fewer than 10 people) Making the Business Case for Membership

Newsroom overview

Who They Are
A Spanish-language narrative storytelling podcast distributed by NPR
Location
Global
Founded
2011
Membership program launched
2019
Weekly unique listeners
90,000
Number of members
1,325
Percentage of revenue coming from membership
10 to 15 percent

Narrative podcast Radio Ambulante gets 90,000 listeners a week who listen to an average of 80 percent of every episode. When you ask listeners what they love about it, they’re likely to say that it feels like the hosts are telling their story and that they feel like they’re part of a true community. 

Most listeners will never meet because they’re spread across at least three continents – South America, North America, and Europe. But Radio Ambulante knew if it was going to build a sustainable media organization with a loyal audience, it needed to find a way to help their listeners feel each other’s presence – and it needed to be able to offer that consistently.

They provide that sense of community through the podcast by including stories from listeners; through listening clubs, where people gather in person to listen to episodes; and through a corresponding Facebook group. All of these are initiatives that they’ve been able to make routine, so that they’re always there for listeners. 

All that work has not just created a strong community around Radio Ambulante – it’s created a community of people willing to support it financially. In September 2019 they launched membership – still a nascent concept in Latin America – and a year later they have 1,300 members.

Why this is important

One of the main reasons people become a member of a news organization is to be a part of something bigger than themselves. If your members don’t feel each other’s presence, you’re not offering them one of the most common motivations for membership: community. 

But a community can only flourish when it is consistently there for its members. By cultivating community in a few targeted ways, Radio Ambulante has been able to routinize that work and consistently deliver. 

As your community grows, it can be hard to find the resources to support it. By making it easy for their biggest fans to host listening clubs themselves, Radio Ambulante was able to grow that community without spreading the team any thinner. They found the intersection between audience members’ motivations and their needs that MPP has found lies at the heart of memberful routines. 

What they did

Before the listening clubs, there was the Club de Podcast Facebook group. Radio Ambulante launched the group in January 2018 so that listeners could gather to talk about the podcast, much like a book club. Growth Editor Jorge Caraballo said they wanted to make it possible for listeners to talk to each other, without Radio Ambulante staff as the go-between. 

The Facebook group took off. Listeners dropped in every week to talk about what episodes made them feel and ask questions about where the season was headed. The community grew so much that other listeners often beat Caraballo to answering listeners’ questions. 

“When you listen to Radio Ambulante, you become a character of Radio Ambulante,” Caraballo says. “The episodes take you deep into subjects or things that make you feel, that make you want to understand them through your experience. So you have to share your own experience to be able to talk about the episodes.”

It was the way the community supported itself that made Radio Ambulante realize there was potential for creating listening clubs. By the time they decided to launch the clubs, the Facebook group had 7,500 members. (Today the group has 9,500 people.) 

Staff members hosted 20 pilot listening clubs across the U.S. and Latin America from February to May 2019 (the team is fully remote, and is spread across the regions). The format was pretty simple: help participants get to know each other, listen to a 30 or 40-minute episode together, discuss the episode afterward, and then take a photo together, as Nieman Lab reported. The feedback in post-club surveys was overwhelmingly positive.

Survey results from the listening club pilots (Courtesy of Radio Ambulante)

They began having staff members host the clubs, but Radio Ambulante soon realized that they had many listeners who were eager to be hosts themselves. To support those volunteers, they created a guide that includes advice on everything from how many hours to book a venue to how to guide a discussion (Spanish guide, English guide). It even includes coloring sheets to help break the ice and help listeners focus on the podcast. 

“From the beginning the idea was to connect listeners with themselves,” Caraballo said. “We want them to take responsibility and ownership of the community.”

The results

Today, at least 3,000 people have participated in a listening club, and at least 118 people have hosted one (it’s hard for Radio Ambulante to be certain, because you don’t have to register with them to host or attend). Some listening clubs gather every week during a podcast season, from Panama City to Paris. A Colombian-Argentinian listening club host living in New York recently reached out to Caraballo to thank Radio Ambulante for helping him find friends that feel like family. They get messages like that all the time.

But the vibrancy of the community has made another channel much harder to manage: WhatsApp. Radio Ambulante has more than 3,000 on its WhatsApp list, and unlike the listening clubs, Caraballo has no choice but to be the only host. Last season, Caraballo experimented with posting a link to the latest episode each week, but some weeks he got back as many as 200 1:1 messages from fans. Sometimes it would take him a whole day to reply to all of them, which was unsustainable.

As they prepare to launch a new season for the fall, Caraballo plans to be very clear with people in the WhatsApp group that it’s just one person on the other end of the line, and he won’t be able to answer all of them. 

This intentional community building has cultivated a loyal audience willing to support Radio Ambulante financially. In their annual survey in spring 2019, Radio Ambulante asked respondents if they would be willing to support the podcast with a monthly contribution. Sixty percent of the 6,100 people who responded to the survey said yes. Radio Ambulante launched their membership program in September 2019, and a year later, they have about 1,300 members. 

Caraballo’s had to be careful about making it clear that Radio Ambulante values all of their community members, particularly as the membership program – and the tasks associated with supporting it – continues to grow. When they first launched the membership program, many worried listeners reached out to the Facebook group, wondering if it would soon be a member-only discussion. 

Radio Ambulante has no plans of putting that community – or any Radio Ambulante community – behind a paywall. So far, one of the only things limited to members is a biweekly coffee chat over Zoom with members of the team. “We don’t want the membership program to be seen as fundraising in the worst meaning of the word. We want it to be a consequence of the engagement. We don’t want it to be something for the money,” he said. 

What they learned

Just because you produce journalism, doesn’t mean you have to do journalism all the time. Radio Ambulante builds community by providing connection and joy. Their listening clubs include coloring sheets. They share illustrations and WhatsApp stickers tied to the podcast with their members. In July 2020, with in-person listening clubs on hold, Radio Ambulante hosted a multi-hour online dance party on Zoom. They hired a popular DJ. At least 700 people were on the line at any point between 8 p.m. and midnight (with hundreds staying on until 3 a.m.). The free event raised more than $1,000 in donations. As the main video cycled through attendees, participants toasted, danced, and held up flags and signs letting everyone know where they were listening from. 

This is particularly important in today’s grueling news cycle, when your audience members need something more than information. As Caraballo told MPP, “It can be rewarding to go beyond journalism and open up creative spaces to participate. I think of ‘Listening Clubs’ or ‘Radio Ambulante Zoom parties’ as rituals that connect our community to us (and among themselves) in a deep way. …Memberful routines shouldn’t be restricted to the practice of journalism.” 

Like the listening clubs and biweekly Zoom coffee chats, Radio Ambulante  plans to make this a more regular offering for the community. “This is only a prototype of something that can become much more organized and much more sustainable,” Caraballo said.

Key takeaways and cautionary tales

Members aren’t just the people who support you financially. Radio Ambulante listeners do all kinds of things to support the growth of the podcast, from sending the team voice messages to use in episodes to organizing listening clubs in their community. Like many member-driven organizations, Radio Ambulante is thinking very carefully about how to make sure they continue to feel valued. “They are members. They’re investing resources to help grow the network and the community,” Caraballo said. 

His advice for other organizations trying to strike that balance: “Whatever you do very, very well, keep doing it, keep improving it. That’s why they’re there. And then just imagine, ‘What would you like to receive from an organization that shares your mission? That is aligned with your principles? And that you think makes the world better and makes your life better?’ And then just give them the opportunity to enjoy that and to have that and to be part of it.”

Empowering your members can be powerful for you, too. Radio Ambulante is a small team powering a podcast with global reach. They’ve been able to support the community that has grown around the podcast by finding that critical intersection between audience members’ motivations – in this case, being a part of a community – and their needs – for others to become informal hosts of the community. 

When someone asks a question in the Facebook group and another listener answers it before Caraballo can, that’s a sign that it’s working – and when Radio Ambulante helps people make new friends through listening clubs, that’s a slam dunk. 

Other resources 

Discovering our Value Proposition Public media Developing Memberful Routines Designing our Membership Program Radio Ambulante

Newsroom overview

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

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

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

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

Why this is important

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

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

What they did

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The results

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

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

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

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

What they learned

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

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

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

Key takeaways and cautionary notes

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

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

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

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

Other resources

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Newsroom overview

Who They Are
A digital magazine based in Berlin that focuses on explanatory journalism and collaborations with readers
Location
Berlin, Germany
Founded
2014
Launched membership
2015
Monthly unique visitors
474,755
Number of members
13,676
Percentage of revenue from membership
86 percent

Krautreporter editor-in-chief Rico Grimm and publisher Leon Fryszer are often called “the survey guys.” That’s because surveys are baked into almost everything the newsroom does, from asking for story ideas, to gathering feedback on a product, to sourcing the crowd’s knowledge and finding experts on certain topics. Everyone in the newsroom is responsible for writing and using surveys, and has been trained in basic synthesis and segmentation to inform their editorial work. 

In 2019, Grimm and Fryszer mapped out their entire surveying framework, from what types of surveys they do to what kind of outcomes each achieves. They’ve probed how surveys can be used as a growth tactic, and even identified what surveys can’t do for them. And then they put all of that into a playbook, which MPP discusses here.

Why this is important

Krautreporter has taken the guesswork out of designing surveys.

When done well, surveys provide an abundance of knowledge and resources, including leads on stories, expertise from members, and feedback on products.

But incorporating audience member feedback as extensively as Krautreporter has can quickly overwhelm a newsroom if the process isn’t templated. Krautreporter’s survey practices are notable not just for the quality of the information they provide to the reporters, but how systematically and regularly they are done. As MPP has found, what gets routinized is what becomes culture – and if you want to become member-centric, you need a process for regularly serving them.

From the members’ perspective, filling out a survey is one of the simplest forms of participation by members. It’s valuable on its own, but it might also be the first step on a path to greater participation. You always need people to help you out by taking a survey or sitting for an interview. If someone asks you, “What can I do other than give money?”, the easiest answer is usually “Tell us what you think about this” or “Fill out this survey.”

What they did

At any point in time, Krautreporter might be running 3 to 5 surveys to collect everything from feedback on products to their members’ expertise on a specific topic. With eight reporters on payroll, this means half the newsroom is asking their audiences questions at any given time. They keep it simple, using survey templates they created in Typeform. In 2019, they took a step back and mapped out every type of survey they conduct, identifying why and how of each. 

The result was the Engaged Journalism Playbook, supported by the European Journalism Centre, which shares how they do everything from designing their surveys to evaluating the results. Krautreporter’s preferred surveying tool is Typeform mainly because it can be easily completed on mobile and integrates well with their other tools like Airtable. MPP has pulled some of the highlights below.

Vote on topics: Use surveys to ask your audience to vote on the topic they are most interested in. The results of this survey will help guide editorial coverage and the ensuring engagement tactics around the most-popular topic. A Krautreporter “topic vote” survey includes five options for topics that they could cover, and invites audience members to tell Krautreporter which they’re most interested in. When Krautreporter publishes a story on the most popular topic, there’s a built in engagement cycle: We asked, here’s how you responded, and here’s how we delivered. 

Example: Reporter Susan Mücke writes a column “A Manual For Everyday Life.” For each piece, she creates two surveys: one where she collects questions that readers want answered, and the second where she lets readers vote on the questions she collected.

Ask about the spin: Sometimes, staff will simply ask readers: what questions do you have about topic X? The answers can help them figure out what angle to take on a broad topic.

Example: Grimm did this when researching Bitcoin. He received several specific questions from audiences, but also comments like, “I don’t even know where to start,” which showed Grimm that audiences felt overwhelmed and confused by cryptocurrency as a topic generally. This feedback showed him he should first write a piece explaining Bitcoin. 

Ask about experiences and knowledge: Reporters often struggle to identify people who can humanize a story. Kautreporter asks members if they’ve had any experiences with a topic they are covering. 

Example: In response to a post in the Krautreporter Facebook group soliciting story ideas, a member wrote, “I want to understand why people eat meat even if they know animals are suffering.” Theresa Bäuerlein, the editor-in-chief, asked her newsletter subscribers (each Krautreporter journalist has their own newsletter) that question with a Typeform survey.  Bäuerlein received about 200 responses, and categorized them, which is how Krautreporter typically synthesizes survey responses. She noticed five answers come up repeatedly, so she focused on those five reasons for eating meat in her article. (Read more about this particular story in Nieman Lab.) 

Source the crowd’s knowledge: Your audience might reach out to your newsroom and ask for advice on the best way to do something, such as finding a job or studying for a test. Krautreporter will solicit their members for answers to other members’ questions, and then round up a fact-checked list of the best responses. 

Example: Their member-curated list of female authors

Ask what matters. Krautreporter is honest that they don’t always know what the most relevant information is for their readers. Sometimes they survey members to find out if they care about a particular topic. 

Example: Before the 2019 European Union election, they surveyed members about which five policy areas they wanted to learn candidates’ stances on. The results gave them a clear roadmap for their election coverage: analyze each party’s position on the five top topics. They disclosed this process to readers.

The results

In addition to answering story-specific questions and informing immediate editorial decisions, surveys also help Krautreporter develop a general sense on their members’ interests and why they read or support the newsroom, which helps them understand them as segments, rather than a monolith. 

In an interview with the research team, Grimm and Fryszer described the audience segments like this: 

Very engaged: The top 1 percent, the power members who “comment on the article, fill out every survey… we know them by name.”

Somewhat engaged: About 9 percent of their audience; the people who “join a conversation when they have something to say.” Grimm said these readers rarely comment online because “they don’t want their names out there… they have no interest in fighting.” But when they find themselves in a safe space, like a survey, and they know something about the topic, they will engage. 

The rest: The remaining 90 percent of their audience; the people who have an attachment to the brand, but are members mostly to get access to the journalism (Krautreporter has a paywall). There’s also a group of members who rarely read and “just want to be around.” 

What they learned

Surveys lead to an engagement boost with members. Krautreporter found that in the four weeks after a survey was conducted, members who participated in a survey tended to increase their reading frequency. This outperformed the newsroom’s other engagement efforts. 

Surveys are a retention tactic. Krautrerporter found that readers who participate in at least 1 survey stay on as a member for roughly four months longer than a non-survey taker. Other touchpoints show similar, but weaker, patterns. 

Surveying can fill in gaps in analytics. As many online publishers know, it’s difficult to develop a holistic sense of your audiences using metrics and analytics alone. Surveys allow the team to fill in their understanding of their different audience segments, while also allowing the reporters to test assumptions about what those segments of readers want. 

Key takeaways and cautionary notes

Surveys can be incorporated across all stages of an editorial process. At Krautreporter, reporters are asked about their plans to conduct surveys with members before they even start working on a piece. 

Surveys are great for engaging shier audience members. Most audience members don’t want to engage in comments or in public forums, but would welcome opportunities to be a part of the process less prominently. Remember to design for the less vocal audience segments, too. 

Assume you’re not reaching non-engaged members with surveys. It’s hard to get surveys in front of people who aren’t already engaged, at least through your own channels. Krautreporter acknowledges that this is a major information gap. To do that, you’ll need to get creative about your distribution, perhaps by asking another organization to share the survey or posting it to other public forums, such as a neighborhood group. 

Other resources 

Disclosure: Membership Puzzle Project supported a separate Krautreporter project in 2019 through the Membership in News Fund.

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Newsroom overview

Who They Are
A nonprofit, statewide newsroom that does watchdog reporting on state government, politics, consumer affairs, business and public policy
Location
Vermont, U.S.
Founded
2009
Launched membership
2016
Monthly unique visitors
725,000
Number of members
8,400
Percentage of revenue from membership
22 percent

VTDigger is known for its strong, investigative journalism and its diversified business model. Today, they have a staff of around 25 full-time employees, with Florencio Terra, Membership Coordinator, Libbie Pattison, Campaign Coordinator, and Stacey Peters, full-stack web developer, leading the charge on the newsroom’s membership and audience-input work.   

Underpinning that success is their system of systematically asking for audience feedback and input and using it to refine what they offer readers and members. As Peters put it: “We pride ourselves on asking for little chunks of information wherever we can.” 

This case study shows how a few straightforward surveys, including an automated one running in the background, can be used to continually add to your understanding of your audience segments and help you take steps to serve them better.

Why this is important

Audience research can be a big, daunting survey – or it can be short requests for audience input during a brief moment when you have their full attention. There isn’t anything unusual about VTDigger’s approach to audience research. But their suite of surveys and their commitment to always following up with respondents give the staff a highly useful picture of their audience needs and reassure the audience that they’re being heard, which makes them more likely to respond again in the future.

MPP offers this case study as an example of how a newsroom can begin conducting audience research in a low-effort, high-impact way. 

What they did

VTDigger’s audience research can be divided into three parts: 

  • Its annual, comprehensive reader survey, which focuses on reader’s attitudes toward VTDigger and it coverage, 
  • One-off surveys soliciting feedback on specific products, and
  • Small, quick opportunities for audiences to give input. 

Annual reader survey: VTDigger sends out a reader survey in SurveyMonkey once a year. They began this practice in 2013, a few years after their launch. They distribute the survey by posting it on their site and sharing it via their newsletter list. In order to increase survey participation, they also resend the survey email to anyone who hasn’t opened it after a week. Their goals for the most recent annual survey were to identify the other channels and types of news readers use and pay for, to check their understanding of audience demographic information, and to see how satisfied their current audiences are with their coverage and products.  In other words, this survey mainly serves as competitive landscape research to help them identify coverage and distribution gaps they could fill.  The survey also includes several explicit questions related to VTDigger’s membership program (see example below). Here’s their 2019 survey. 

Courtesy of VTDigger

Survey for product: When VTDigger is refining or about to launch a new product for their readers, they’ll seek audience input on that specific product. Prior to launching their 2020 Election Guide (a roundup for Vemonters about the candidates, how they can vote during COVID, and the latest election news), they wanted to know how to frame reporter’s interviews and write-ups with candidates. They sent out a survey asking readers if what they wanted to hear about from the candidates, and what issues mattered the most to them. Here’s their reader survey for VTDigger’s election guide. 

Courtesy of VTDigger

Small, quick inputs: VTDigger credits Rebekah Monson, co-founder and COO of WhereBy.Us for this one: when people unsubscribe from your newsletter list, ask them why. VTDigger added a field to their newsletter unsubscribe confirmation page asking “Please let us know why you unsubscribed” to gather feedback in real-time. Since their newsletter is a primary driver of membership growth and engagement, they see feedback on this product as a vital temperature check on their membership strategy writ large. 

Courtesy of VTDigger

The results

Annual reader survey:  In total in 2019, VTDigger received 1,747 survey responses from their audience members. Their 2019 survey revealed a big increase in their readers’ interest in local news – in the past, statewide news, especially governance and legislature, was the top interest.

Based on two data points from the annual survey (the high percentage of readers who wanted to see more newsletters, and the topics most of those readers were interested in) VTDigger created new weekly email newsletters based on particular beats: education, environment, criminal justice, health care, and politics. The team then added calls-to-action on stories within those beats, asking the reader to subscribe to the related topical newsletter. Within four months, VTDigger gained between 5,000 and 8,000 subscribers to each of these new email newsletter lists — a clear indicator that they successfully delivered on incorporating feedback from their audiences.

The “unsubscribe” survey: Their single-question unsubscribe question revealed that the most common reason people unsubscribe was “I just get too many emails.” Newsletters are the best way VTDigger gains new members, so they wanted to keep them in some way. They updated the unsubscribe page with an option for users to instead downgrade to weekly summaries.  They have not yet measured the success of this, but plan on reviewing in the coming months.

What they learned

From their “unsubscribe” survey, the team collected data that allowed them to prioritize newsletter reader preferences. VTDigger learned they have a lot of seasonal residents and second-home owners, so they often get unsubscribe messages like this one: “I am away from VT for a while and have so many emails!” Eventually, they would like to be able to offer a “restart” date for their newsletter, to allow these folks to freeze their subscription for a certain period of time. But they haven’t reached a point where the potential impact of this change is worth the effort and cost to implement it. They’re okay with losing newsletter subscribers over this type of complaint for now. 

For their annual survey, VTDigger learned the importance of offering small incentives to bring in more responses from readers. This past year, they offered all respondents a chance to enter a raffle for a $100 gift card to Bear Pond Books, a local bookstore based in Montpelier, Vermont. This helped the team recruit a large set of survey participants. 

VTDigger learned the importance of incorporating new types of survey questions into their annual survey year after year. Instead of keeping the survey format the same, they add new questions depending on their product and membership goals for the upcoming year. For example, this upcoming year they are considering launching a member-only or paid newsletter. They plan on adding a few specific questions to their 2020 Annual Survey that will help them determine if this is a viable product to offer, and if so, how they can cater the product to their members information needs and ideal user experience. 

Key takeaways and cautionary notes

Look for high-attention moments when you can collect small bits of feedback. Even though it was a negative circumstance, asking readers why they’re unsubscribing as they unsubscribe works because you have their full attention. Look for similar opportunities when readers are highly focused on your site and you can ask related questions. 

Audience research is a cultural mindset. VTDigger has prioritized feedback from the beginning. When it launched, it had a way for readers to submit a tip, report an error, or upload documents at the bottom of every story. Today, the newsroom gets between 50 and 100 tips every month and the VTDigger team reads and follows up on every tip that comes in. Some people complain that they spent too much time at the DMV, while others submit tips that lead to VTDigger breaking news. Getting tips like those requires a cultural commitment to always be listening to readers so that they feel comfortable coming to you when they have something to share. 

Audience research needs a clear workflow to be actionable. Over the years, VTDigger has developed clear workflows for creating and acting on audience research findings. For example, every submission via the bottom-of-story tips request gets emailed to their four-member edit desk and logged in a spreadsheet, where editors log their follow ups. The spreadsheet also allows the team an overview so that it can identify patterns across the state. 

Other resources 

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