Section: Launching Membership

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 launched in 2014 with a bang. It raised $1.38 million from 17,000 individuals via a crowdfunding campaign. They considered those supporters its first members. 

But after that exciting launch came reality: In order for its business to succeed, Krautreporter needed to keep those supporters for a second year – but it lost 70 percent of them when that time came around. The team chalked that up to two things: not asking crowdfunding contributors to become recurring members from the start, and a gap between what crowdfund supporters thought Krautreporter would be and what they got once it started publishing.  

“That turned out to be a big problem one year later… we had to come up with a new value proposition, and that’s the one that works for us [now],” said Sebastian Esser, the founding publisher who now leads the membership platform Steady. 

In its second year, Krautreporter revamped its strategy to prioritize retention over growth, introducing a paywall and refining its focus on engagement. It’s continued to make retention a priority since by adding features to encourage sharing, and prioritizing annual renewals.

Today, the organization has 13,676 members and a rolling annual retention rate of 54.8 percent. 

Why this is important

It is less labor intensive and more cost effective to retain members than to gain new ones – and the longer someone is a member, the more value they bring as a financial contributor and brand ambassador. 

This is especially true at organizations like Krautreporter that provide a distinct news experience. But when you offer something a bit different than people are used to, you also have to be incredibly clear about your value proposition. That gap between expectations and reality can make retention a challenge, especially in a newsroom’s first year.

“Some of the things we’ve been doing in the membership with regards to community work and engagement are not things that people are used to if they have a subscription to The New York Times or the German newspaper Der Spiegel,” said Krautreporter publisher Leon Fryszer. “You expect a transactional (approach) — money for text. We don’t know what to expect if suddenly we have this community driven journalism approach where we engage you in our reporting. Fundamentally, that is not something they know what it means. We always say that engagement doesn’t sell because people don’t know what it is.”

What they did

As Krautreporter entered its second year, 70 percent of its initial supporters chose not to sign on as members.

Some of that was because members who joined through the crowdfunding campaign only made one-time contribution. Without automated recurring payments in place, one of the most foundational ways to support retention, Krautreporter struggled to encourage renewals.

They also had a hard time telling their story.

“People weren’t really sure what we were. They could tell we were different, but before us telling them and being very explicit about this is what we do and this is what you get, they were a little bit confused. Just putting our stories out there in the different formats didn’t explain what we do,” Esser said. 

As Krautreporter moved through its second year — and beyond — it made a couple key changes to improve its retention:

  • It refined its value proposition so there was less of a chance of new members canceling because of misplaced expectations
  • It introduced a paywall and a benefit that allowed members to share their membership with others
  • It studied the link between survey participation and retention (surveys are at the core of Krautreporter’s engagement model)
  • It made annual payments the default membership option and implemented small nudges to incentivize people to renew annually

Krautreporter began to emphasize the explainer nature of its coverage. It doesn’t publish a ton of stories, instead focusing on helping its members better make sense of the world. The team worked on making that value proposition clear to both members and potential members. 

Krautreporter also introduced its paywall, as well as a shared login benefit that allows members to extend their membership to others. “I don’t think we would have survived without adding that paywall,” Esser said.  

The paywall is key to that because it is what makes the membership sharing benefit viable, and Krautreporter learned through user research that members are less likely to cancel if they know that others are dependent on them for access. (This is also one of the reasons that Netflix has not worked hard to crack down on password sharing.)

Krautreporter was heavily invested in surveying its audience members regularly from the beginning, but it wasn’t until the second year that the team began paying close attention to how participation affected retention. Krautrerporter learned that on average, readers who participate in at least one survey remain members for roughly four months longer than a non-survey taker. 

Krautreporter also decided to prioritize annual memberships after realizing that many of their monthly members joined just to read a specific article or articles and soon canceled. They did so by making annual the default option — with increasing price tiers that allow for members to add additional accounts. Krautreporter offers monthly subscriptions, but users need to take an extra click to sign up for them and they cost more over the course of a year.

Krautreporter’s membership landing page, with the annual default (Courtesy of Krautreporter)

In recent months Krautreporter has also introduced new email newsletters and other features, such as categorizing articles by length and telling readers how long it’ll take them to finish a story. They launched these time management features after hearing through audience research that members found Krautreporter “time expensive.”

“By giving Krautreporter some money in 2014 meant you’re on the team of the progressive journalism crowd,” Esser said. “So I mean, that makes you feel better. Also, it’s a statement to your community… But it’s completely different today. I mean, we had to build a product that works. But now people have no idea that we are crowdfunded and what the backstory is and all that. Actually, we start telling people now because we can’t take it for granted that they know this stuff.”

The results

Encouraging annual recurring payments has helped. Sixty percent of its new annual members stay on for the second year, but retention among monthly members only reaches 60 percent retention after their third month of membership. In others words, a significant portion drop off after only a couple months. (This is one of the challenges that organizations with paywalls face – sometimes people pay to be able to access a set of stories for a certain period of time.)

“The conclusion from this was that, of course, for us business-wise it makes sense for us to make annual memberships cheaper, but it’s also a fair move to tell people that we see this is a long-term commitment for you, and you’ll be [spending] more money with us anyway, so we make the annual memberships cheaper because it’s a commitment on your side,” Fryszer said. 

The membership renewals — both annual and monthly — are processed through Steady, the membership platform that Krautreporter founder Esser co-founded, and which it uses for the business end of membership. And they are automatically renewed, which is essential for retention. Members are also reminded that their membership is going to renew just before they are charged again. 

“That’s one of the key things to keep in mind when you start off with membership: You want that long-term commitment in the sense of automatic renewal from the start,” Fryszer said. “What you don’t really want to happen is that a year later you have to ask everyone for their credit card again because that’s basically another crowdfunding, and that’s probably going to break your neck.”

What they learned

Doing something new requires a lot of explanation. It takes time for members to fully understand what they’re getting from Krautreporter and its engagement-heavy style of journalism. That’s one of the reasons why the site prefers annual memberships — it affords it the opportunity to introduce readers to its surveys and its journalism. 

“Annual membership gives yourself more time to actually show them the work that you do,” Fryszer said. “Frankly, people probably won’t engage with the first things that you do. After a while, they’ll realize how things work…The longer you’re a member, the more likely you are to at some point see something that you’re super interested in and to pick up the engagement offers that we give you. I think that’s also why you want to give yourself some time with a membership model.”

Onboarding helps with that. One way Krautreporter has tried to nudge members along is via a four-email onboarding series that introduces them to its survey-based engagement strategy, asks members to share information such as their expertise, and more. 

Retention starts early. Krautreporter offers non-members some articles and surveys for free so readers can sample its approach to engagement. This helps the site identify potential candidates for membership. “It filters out people who are not engaged and would not stay on longer,” said Fryszer.

Time is money. The most common reason Krautreporter members cancel their membership is because they say they don’t have enough time. Fryszer said that feedback has made the site realize that it needs to give members more structure to help them fit Krautreporter’s journalism into their lives. 

It already started adjusting with new features mentioned above, including telling readers how long it will take them to read a story and another feature that is still under development that groups stories by length. Krautreporter also plans to develop new products that are more finite and give readers an experience they can finish and feel caught up to the news. 

Key takeaways and cautionary notes

Showing what you’re about is hard work, especially in the beginning. Newsrooms need to be regularly reminding members of the value proposition they’re offering their audiences. This is especially important upon launching from scratch, when readers will have all sorts of preconceptions about what the newsroom is offering.

“Disappointing lots of people along the way, is probably the most stressful phase of my life,” Esser said. “And I never want to do it again. But you should definitely be aware when you start something like that, that this is coming your way. Because it happens to every project that I know that starts from zero. You first have to find out within your team and you know, coworkers and all that, what you actually want to do. And then of course, you need a business model and an audience and members while you do that.. And that creates all kinds of misunderstandings, disappointments, and membership is always emotional, it’s about relationships. For me, that created a lot of stress.” 

Pay attention to why your readers are canceling. Krautreporter was able to identify two common reasons and it came up with potential solutions to both. The first, that many people who joined monthly did so to access a specific article, they attempted to address by making annual memberships more valuable and making them the default.

The second, that engaging with Krautreporter was too time consuming, they are focusing now on providing products that are finishable and don’t take as long to read. 

Consider taking advantage of canceling members’ attention one last time by including a one-sentence survey on your cancellation page asking why they are canceling, or following up personally. Keep track of the answers you receive, and think about how you can make changes that could solve some of those pain points.

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

Other resources

National Digital native Discovering our Value Proposition Designing our Membership Program Launching Membership Krautreporter Retaining our Members

Newsroom overview

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

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

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

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

Why this is important

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

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

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

What they did

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The results

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

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

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

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

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

What they learned

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Key takeaways and cautionary notes

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

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

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

Other resources

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

Newsroom overview

Who They Are
A nonprofit digital local news organization covering Hawaii
Location
Honolulu, Hawaii, U.S.
Founded
2010
Membership program launched
2016
Monthly unique visitors
650,000
number of Members
5,500

Honolulu Civil Beat began in 2010 as a for-profit subscription publication. With the transition to a nonprofit member-supported organization in 2016, the messaging went from “Become a subscriber at $5 a month” to “This is Civil Beat, this is who we are. If you trust us and value our reporting, please make a $5 monthly gift,” as Vice President of Operations and Philanthropy Ben Nishimoto summed it up.

For that second message to resonate, Civil Beat had to re-introduce themselves to readers as a friendlier, more accessible news organization.

At the time, one of their bumper stickers read, “Smart, disruptive, never sorry” – a nod to their hard-hitting reporting and their status as a disrupter to traditional media. They realized that messaging that held Civil Beat at arm’s length from the community was a poor fit for where they were headed – a member-supported news organization. 

In the process of rebranding, they made changes to everything from their onboarding campaign to their events strategy to bring their brand in line with the relationship they wanted to have with audience members, especially potential members. 

Why this is important

Branding is about more than logos and taglines. It’s the experience that audience members have with you. So when Civil Beat rebranded, they didn’t just change up surface level items. They implemented an extensive onboarding campaign to help readers understand how they worked, they pivoted their events strategy, and made sure that members showed up in their work much more prominently. They worked hard to reduce the barriers between their newsroom and the community, and made sure that their communications reflected that. 

“We did a lot more explaining, a lot less telling, and embraced a more nuanced approach to messaging. Over time we told readers pieces of our story in digestible bits in a much more detailed way,” Nishimoto said. 

If your organization is preparing to launch a membership program, or your program is struggling to grow, it’s worth taking a look at your branding and making sure that it aligns with your value proposition and that it sends the signal that members are a part of that value proposition. 

What they did

In 2016, as it prepared for the transition, Honolulu Civil Beat hired a local branding and marketing firm to guide the newsroom through a branding process. Staff answered questions such as what Civil Beat means to them and how they fit into its mission. The only problem was that audience members weren’t a central part of that process – and Civil Beat was about to begin asking them for support. 

At the time, Civil Beat’s branding and messaging “aggressively positioned Civil Beat as outliers in the media landscape. Being an outlier without establishing reader trust can be a bad combination,” n Nishimoto said. He had just joined Civil Beat.

A Civil Beat bumper sticker prior to the rebranding campaign (Courtesy of Civil Beat)

“If you’re disrupting the status quo but people have no idea what you are, what you stand for… it grows suspicion, not trust. That was the disconnect I found and that we quickly realized.”

Civil Beat already had a strong in-person events strategy at the time, but events were largely about current events and called “Beat Ups.” Inspired by the Voice of San Diego, they began inviting the community into their newsroom regularly for morning coffee, which they still do today.

These gatherings have no agenda. They’re just an opportunity for supporters and readers to chat, ask questions, and share concerns, and sometimes what journalists hear in those chats ends up shaping Civil Beat’s reporting. Those morning coffees remain a core part of their events strategy (although they’re on pause because of the COVID-19 pandemic).

They also put a drip campaign, or onboarding series, in place for their main newsletter. When they started it the series had just three or four emails, but today it has more than a dozen emails, including: 

  • Why local journalism is important and what journalism should be to Hawaii
  • How Civil Beat exposes wrongdoing and pushes for accountability
  • What nonprofit journalism is and how that differs from legacy media
  • Who their supporters are and how they make money (including what their relationship is with Pierre Omidyar,* the founder of eBay and their largest donor) 
  • Why they push for transparency and list all of their donors on their site
  • Why they’re committed to in-person engagement 

Through a process like that, “the message naturally pivots to something less in your face, a lot more explanatory. It becomes, “Civil Beat is aggressive for a reason. We’re outliers because we’ve done this, this, and this,” Nishimoto sums up.

The drip campaign and events reduced the barriers between readers and journalists, Nishimoto said. They also focused on getting their reporters out in front of the community and making them more comfortable interacting with readers in a casual way. 

As Civil Beat began gaining supporters, they also adapted their marketing strategy as well, by featuring member testimonials on the homepage, said audience development editor Landess Cole. They made sure to integrate audience members into their visuals, making the website less cold and impersonal. 

*Pierre Omidyar also established Luminate, one of Membership Puzzle Project’s funders.

The results

Cole is constantly adopting things she hears from members in Civil Beat’s messaging, as she did in this winter 2019 membership campaign email and this Facebook post in 2018. This means the brand messaging is constantly evolving with members’ understanding of their work.

A “friendlier” Civil Beat bumper sticker, after the rebranding campaign (Courtesy of Civil Beat)

Their donations page includes a place where supporters can explain why they chose to become a supporter. Cole says that 85 to 90 percent of supporters take the time to fill it out. The answers are a reflection of what supporters value about them. 

Those answers automatically post to a channel on the newsroom’s internal Slack workspace so the whole newsroom can hear how the community sees them. Cole incorporates many of those comments in future fundraising materials. When someone wrote that they supported Civil Beat because it’s “Strong, independent, and ad-free,” she knew to include that in their next email pitch.

“The one thing that hasn’t changed is the work that the reporters do – editorial strategy – all of those things we worked around. We’re packaging it differently now. We wanted to make sure the reporters understood that what they’re doing now and in the future is important and we don’t want to meddle with it too much. We just want to position it in a more digestible way,” Nishimoto said.

What they learned

Different branding resonates with different people. The older Civil Beat branding – encapsulated in the bumper sticker “Smart, disruptive, never sorry” – worked with a certain type of audience member, someone who was already really into local journalism, Cole said. But that segment of potential readers is quite small. Civil Beat wasn’t worried they would lose those readers if they softened their tone a bit.  “By expanding that brand and taking away the aggressiveness of that branding campaign, we expanded our audience appeal immensely,” Cole adds. It can be hard to abandon a brand identity you’ve had for awhile, but audience research can help you understand if it’s time to move forward.

Key takeaways and cautionary tales

Your audience members should be a central part of your branding process. Civil Beat hired a branding agency to support them in their branding process, but the real changes happened after they began actively soliciting feedback from the community about how they felt about Civil Beat and what they needed to know about it. Audience research is a crucial part of any branding exercise, but especially one with the end goal of increasing audience member support for your organization. 

Other resources

Local/Regional Digital native Discovering our Value Proposition Designing our Membership Program Launching Membership Honolulu Civil Beat

Newsroom overview

Who They Are
An independent media startup in Myanmar covering current affairs and business in English and Burmese
Location
Yangon, Myanmar
Founded
2015
Membership program launched
2020
Monthly unique visitors
120,000
Number of members
421 (plus 147 print subscribers grandfathered in)
Percentage of revenue from membership
25 percent

By 2018, media startup Frontier Myanmar knew they needed to diversify their revenue streams to continue resisting government and commercial pressure and maintain editorial independence. But they knew that putting up a paywall and launching a subscription would shut access off to the overwhelming majority of readers in Myanmar. 

They decided a membership program was the right way forward. But visiting other newsrooms in Asia with membership gave them little insight into what a membership program in Myanmar should look like. So they took the question back to their readers instead, identifying their target users, hosting focus groups, and sharing prototypes along the way. 

Why this is important

Frontier Myanmar had no experience with audience research or design thinking when they decided that a membership model was the right next step. Guided by Asian media consultancy Splice Media, they undertook a several-month audience research and product design process. 

Although they received guidance from Splice, Frontier’s team did most of the research themselves. MPP offers this overview of the steps they took to show that a fairly simple audience research process can yield incredibly useful results if you have an engaged audience already and you know what information you need from them. The focus groups challenged several of Frontier’s assumptions about what types of member-only products would resonate, and gave them confidence that their message of paying to keep Frontier’s journalism free for everyone would resonate.

What they did

Frontier Myanmar began the process in spring 2019, after receiving a Google Digital News Innovation grant. They started simple: a landing page announcing that they were building a community to support Frontier, and asking people to sign up for updates if they wanted to learn more.  They promoted it on Twitter, Facebook, with a banner ad on their site, and in their biweekly newsletter to digital magazine subscribers. Six hundred people signed up almost immediately, and by the end of the audience research phase, which took about a month, there were more than 1,000 people on their beta list. 

At the same time, they identified five target users, which they assessed based on two factors: those who relied on Frontier’s continued existence and saw it as a critical player in Myanmar’s transition to a democracy and who would be willing and able to support it financially. They identified diplomats, journalists, NGO workers, academics, and businesses, then used their personal networks to bring in representatives of each for focus groups (one focus group for each persona, usually with about five people). They also did some targeted 1:1 interviews. They did all this over a month. 

The five personas Frontier designed for (Courtesy of Splice Media)

During those conversations, they asked those users “What do you need for your life? What do you need in order to do business?” (See Slides 22-27 in this presentation from Splice Media to see the types of questions they asked.)

They thought they might hear requests for comments or a members-only Slack. They didn’t. Frontier also assumed that roundtables and panels with politicians, academics, and other experts would be a key component, but they heard from participants that existing organizations like the chambers of commerce already did this well, that there were already more events than people could attend, and users didn’t think Frontier would offer a particularly good event product, Digital Editor Clare Hammond said. Frontier still plans to experiment with casual events, featuring a brief Q&A with a Frontier journalist, followed by drinks, but the coronavirus pandemic interrupted those plans after just one such event (which went well).

Their target users wanted two things: help monitoring Burmese-language media and a daily news briefing that would bring the top headlines together for them. At the time their target users relied heavily on Burmese colleagues to tell them what to pay attention to and many organizations spent a significant amount of money on getting local news translated into English. 

Frontier realized that if they took that responsibility on, they could solve a key problem for thousands of entities and individuals, and save them money. A Frontier membership would be cheaper than individual translation services. 

From there, they designed prototypes of two member-only newsletters:

  • A daily current affairs email newsletter that rounds up the top things to know, including government statements, company statements, top headlines, and other bits of information their reporters hear that don’t rise to the level of full stories
  • A daily media monitoring report that translates the top headlines from the six biggest Burmese newspapers, and fully translates a couple top stories 

They sent those to a beta list for free for two months while they worked out the other details, such as pricing and tiers, which they also surveyed the beta list about. Frontier also regularly surveyed the beta newsletter recipients for feedback on the tone, design, and length. 

The results

The process, from the receipt of the GNI grant, allowing them to begin their work with Splice, to the membership launch, took about seven months.

They launched their membership program in January 2020, just before coronavirus began dominating headlines in the region, with the following tiers:

Frontier Myanmar’s membership tiers (Courtesy of Frontier Myanmar)

They also provided the option to join as an individual (1 login), small institution (5 logins per membership), and large institution (20 logins per membership). Most of their members are individual members, but as of July 2020, they had 16 small institution members with 93 logins total, and three large institution members with another 60 logins. 

About 80 percent of their members are expatriates, which Frontier expected and designed for – their membership products are in English, the pricing is comparable to media products in the U.S. and Europe and they can handle payments in credit cards. They have gotten comfortable with the fact that designing elite newsletter products is what will bring in the revenue they need to keep their journalism work free for anyone to access. 

“Frontier is a bridge between local journalism and international reporting on Myanmar. It’s read by a lot of expats, and [the five target users they identified] pretty much is all the expats in Myanmar,” Hammond said, noting that Burmese speakers are able to access for free what expats needed Frontier to package for them. She added that they do receive support from Burmese readers, but for them it’s more about supporting the mission of independent journalism in Myanmar. 

In January they also launched a “Frontier Fridays” newsletter, a free weekly news roundup that anyone can sign up for. Their goal is to give people a taste of what they could get daily if they became a paying member, and to build a relationship with those for whom a daily news briefing is more than they need. They have 3,800 people on that list.

By July, the revenue brought in from membership already exceeded advertising revenue, which had cratered due to coronavirus. 

Frontier is now forming its first sales team, which will focus on pitching institutional memberships and working with the editorial team to design products that they can find sponsors for, as well as more typical advertising responsibilities. They’ll also soon be sending out a six-month survey to newsletter recipients. 

What they learned

You can’t copy someone else’s model. During the planning stages, Frontier founder and publisher Sonny Swe visited Malaysiakini in Malaysia and Rappler in the Philippines, which both have membership programs. But it didn’t do much to help him figure out what membership should look like for Frontier. That only came when the team sat down with their biggest fans, their readers in Yangon. “You can’t just copy and paste someone else’s model. We live in a different country, different landscape, different spending power,” Swe said. “It has to be tailor-made based on our audience, based on this media landscape.”

Membership is a hospitality business. Swe realized early on that customer service is a critical component of success, so they hired a membership manager who had previously worked at one of the foreign chambers of commerce in Yangon.

Engagement matters more than scale. Swe knew this, in theory. But what really drove it home for him was what happened when a daily newspaper in Myanmar with 22 million followers on Facebook launched a membership program 1.5 months before Frontier launched theirs. The core component was asking people to give 3,000 kyat a week (about $2.25 in July 2020) to access previously free video streams. It’s gained little traction. Swe says that showed him that, “No matter how big your audience is, the most important thing is who your real audience is, who is the hardcore follower. We have only a few hundred thousand, but they feel that Frontier is part of their life and their community.”

Don’t assume you know your audience until you’ve talked to them. Premesh Chandran, co-founder of Malaysiakini, hammered this point with Swe. “Do you know your audience?” he kept asking. Swe says he thought he did because he had been writing for them for years, but accepting that this was not the same as knowing their audiences was a key moment for Frontier. 

Design thinking is a muscle. Going through this cycle of audience research and product design has taught Frontier a new way of designing journalism products. They’ll use these skills again and again. They’re considering applying this approach to future journalism products that they expect they can get underwritten, opening up new revenue streams. 

Key takeaways and cautionary tales

There is no copy-and-paste for membership. While there are a few almost universal truths about what motivates people to become members, what that looks like in practice is highly individualized. The audience research process Frontier undertook was a significant up-front investment, but the return on investment has been equally significant. Building in time to co-design with your engaged readers is likely to help you design more desirable products that gain traction more quickly. This is applicable to all kinds of journalism products, not just membership. 

Other resources

Editor’s note: This case study was edited after publication to correct the year that Frontier Myanmar launched its membership program.

National How to Know if We're Ready for Membership Digital native Discovering our Value Proposition Designing our Membership Program Frontier Myanmar Launching Membership

Newsroom overview

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

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

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

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

Why this is important

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

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

What they did

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The results

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What they learned

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

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

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

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

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

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

Key takeaways and cautionary notes

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

Other resources 

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

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Launching Membership

Launching your membership program can be scary. Months of work lead up to the moment when your membership landing page goes live and you send that first appeal. 

Your membership launch moment is about more than the launch of a new product. It is a strategic opportunity not to be missed. Making the most of your launch requires a strong value proposition – for your newsroom and for your membership program – and a brand strategy that you can weave into all your launch communications. 

If you have a strong value proposition and branding strategy in place, your membership launch can be a moment of heightened attention to tell your newsroom’s story at a whole new level – maybe in a new way that audience members haven’t heard before – and explain to potential members how they can be a part of it.

But for your story to stay front-and-center during a membership launch, there are a lot of details you need to get right behind the scenes. 

For example, you need to make sure members have a smooth signup process. If you can’t process their payment on the day you grab their attention, it might be hard to get their attention a second time. Anticipating potential members questions is also key, as is staffing customer service support accordingly. Treat this section as a practical checklist to help prevent hiccups at launch and “missed opportunity” realizations in the weeks after.

If your membership program growth is slower than you hoped, you can also use this section as a checklist of things to make sure you’re doing behind the scenes so you’re not losing potential members for reasons that are easy to fix. For example, if you haven’t optimized your checkout process, you might be losing members that you could keep just by shortening your registration process. 

This section will tackle what you need to have in place before launch, including the key components of an effective membership landing page, smooth payment process, and welcoming onboarding series.

What belongs on our launch checklist?

This list of 15 things to have in place before you launch is sourced from dozens of newsrooms interviewed for the Membership Guide. Take this tearsheet back to your newsroom to make sure you’re ready for launch.

Launch Checklist
Download

Launch Timing

Getting launch timing right can be difficult because the news cycle can shift so quickly. But MPP recommends being as proactive as you can in setting a launch date, fixing a campaign timeline and clearing conflicts with internal and external stakeholders. Here are the questions to ask.

Have you checked your calendar? First, look outward. What will be happening around the time that you plan to launch your membership program? There are two ways to think about timing a launch. You can aim for a time when it will be easy to attract people’s attention because there’s nothing competing for it, or you can latch onto a mission-aligned news moment. In the U.S., many nonprofit newsrooms have launched membership to coincide with NewsMatch, for example. Then, look inward. Will you have internal capacity around that time? If you have a special series launching around that time, or if your tech stack is slated for major technical work, you may want to choose another time to launch.

How long will your launch last? How long will you drum up your new membership program? Your launch campaign should have a manageable beginning, middle, and end. Membership Puzzle Project recommends no more than three weeks for any membership marketing campaign. You can use this demo membership campaign calendar as a starting point for planning your own.

Membership Campaign Calendar
Download

Telling your story

A membership launch campaign is an unparalleled moment to communicate the value of your newsroom and the value of membership. It’s vitally important that your campaign communications clearly articulate your value, have an integrated look and feel with your overall branding strategy, and hang together in a cohesive way. Here are the questions to ask.

Have you identified a membership value proposition? Before launch, be sure you test your proposition with a few of your loyal audience members to make sure it resonates and that your membership ask is clear. (Jump to “Discovering our value proposition” if you still need to identify yours.)

Is your value proposition integrated into all your campaign assets? Before launch, line up all of your launch campaign assets (logos, web copy, email copy, social media promotions, onboard series, etc.) and double check that your membership value proposition is accurately reflected in each. You don’t need to copy your value proposition word-for-word in each piece of communication, but you should ensure that your communications reflect the audience segments you’re serving, the member motivations you’re drawing on, and the benefits you’re offering. 

Do you have a membership landing page, and does it include the essential components? It should be easy to find on your homepage, reflect your overall branding, have a straightforward URL that can be placed on social media assets (such as www.newsroomname.com/join), and provide a succinct, powerful overview of your membership program. Then it should get to the point: payment. MPP recommends asking people from outside your organization to review it before launch for clarity and the strength of your pitch.  Jump to “What makes for a good membership landing page?” for more recommendations on how to design a strong landing page. 

Managing customer service

MPP has found that strong membership programs run on strong customer service. Customer service means handling the problems your members and potential members encounter in your program with responsiveness, grace, and practicality. Because customer service is so important to the membership experience, MPP recommends setting up and staffing for customer service protocols from the first moment of launch. When something goes wrong for a member (as it inevitably will), having a customer service plan in place will be your best insurance that small issues don’t blow up into major launch-sinking (and eventually program-sinking) problems. Here are the questions to ask.

Do you have an “if this, then that” protocol in place? Your team should do its best to list all the scenarios that could come up with processing membership transactions and decide on a standardized response for each. An example: “If someone says they don’t want to opt in to recurring payments, then the membership manager will reach out to them personally to explain why we’re asking for recurring payments and explain how to do a one-time donation if they still don’t want to opt in to recurring payments.” 

Do you have an FAQ? Spend some time with your team anticipating what your most frequently asked questions might be and turn them into a public FAQ that can be quickly shared with members who write in with those questions. Here’s an example from The Devil Strip. 

Do you have someone on standby for customer support? A cornerstone of good customer service is resolving issues promptly. A twenty-four hour turnaround is the longest it should take to respond to a member about an issue under normal circumstances, but you should aim for a much faster turnaround at launch. The person responsible for member support should have their calendar cleared of other demands as much as possible during launch week.

Do you have a plan in place for delivering member benefits and perks? Whether the benefits are digital or physical, you should be ready to consistently provide them. If you can’t automate the delivery through your onboarding series, you should add reminders to your calendar to manage fulfillment.

Is your checkout process easy? You should test it on mobile and desktop, preferably with someone not on staff who you are confident would join anyways. Have them use a company credit card or offer a perk as a thank you, such as the opportunity to gift a membership to someone. If you can, observe them going through the full signup process via a screen share or ask them to document their observations about the process. Jump to “What does a good checkout process look like?“

Because you won’t be able to forecast all the ways in which membership transactions and member experiences will go sideways, make a plan for how the person or team handling membership customer service will document the issues that come up and the resolutions that work best. When your launch is over, review the lessons learned and adjust your protocols, FAQs, and program management accordingly. Documentation over time is vital for building a strong customer service practice to support your membership program. Start that habit at launch and keep it going.

Managing technical issues 

Technical issues are almost inevitable at launch, but you can minimize them by thinking ahead about what could go wrong and testing your tools and checkout flow in advance of launch. And as with customer service, identifying in advance who will be on-call for solving technical issues and when will help you have a smooth launch. It is also important to ensure that you have set up your tools properly so that you are collecting the information you need from members as they sign up. Here are some questions to ask as you test your tools.

Have you accounted for different currencies? If you are using a payment processor developed in another country/for a different currency, check that it will process credit cards from your country properly. 

Is your payment processor “talking” to your CRM? Check that the person who tested your checkout process is now in your customer relationship management system as a member. This is important for suppressing membership appeals and tracking other member behavior. 

Is your CRM linked to your email service provider? This will help you do things like suppress membership appeals to existing members and trigger your onboarding series. This is especially important if you plan to ask aggressively for a couple weeks. 

For more detailed advice on technical needs, jump to “Building our membership tech stack” and read about the challenges WTFJHT still faces today, almost four years after launch, because of a pre-launch tech decision he made.

 

What WTFJHT learned from a bad membership tech choice

WTFJHT founder Matt Kiser is on his fourth payment processor since launching in 2017.

Setting the foundation for future growth and retention 

Membership launch is the perfect time to set up good habits that will support retention and the future growth of your program. Onboarding members, thanking members, and learning about where members come from and how they navigate the sign-up process will all help you to nurture your program over time. Here are the questions to ask. 

Do you have a plan for identifying your best opportunities for future growth? Your launch will give you valuable information about where new members come from and what types of appeals resonate the most – if you take the time to set up a tracking system before launch. Jump to “Growing our membership” for detailed advice on setting up a tracking system, and find a template for that in previous MPP research on data-informed decision making. 

Have you set up your onboarding series? This is the beginning of your effort to retain your new members. Jump to “How should we onboard our members?” for advice on crafting an onboarding series.

Do you have a plan for thanking your founding members? Your founding members are your biggest fans. A personal thank you will go a long way toward keeping them. Leverage that love for your organization by making it easy for your founding members to flaunt their membership.

You might want to give them visual assets they can share on social media to celebrate their membership. Consider offering them their own unique URL for the landing page so they can find out if they drive any new memberships. For more ideas, check out Zetland’s members-getting-members campaign or MPP’s study of The Correspondent’s crowdfunding campaign.

 

How Zetland turned its members into powerful ambassadors

In 2019, Zetland faced a hard truth: they still weren’t profitable, and they were running out of time. Could their members help?

How do we tell a good launch story?

While your membership value proposition will speak to the broader state of the world, your launch is a chance to speak to the moment. It can also be a moment to redescribe what you do in a powerful way that’s become clearer to you over time.Your membership launch communications should draw on your membership value proposition and should also lean into events happening around you and how they affect your organization. This is how you will make your launch feel timely and relevant, while also unique to you. 

As you make your membership launch communications, keep in mind this MPP finding: the most inspiring and sustainable membership-driven organizations connect individuals to a shared larger purpose. They frame membership as a way to restore what feels broken in the world. They speak to the present zeitgeist in which something feels out of balance – and offer membership in their organization as credible grounds for optimism. And they give members a way to feel like they are part of the solution. 

Drawing on those elements, a strong membership launch story includes: 

  • The newsroom value proposition and corresponding membership value proposition 
  • Transparency about why you need your fans to become supporters, including any financial challenges you are facing 
  • A rousing articulation of what it means to be a member and what their support will make possible
  • A connection to current events that make your work imperative for audience members

You should lean on your brand strategy and identity to tell this launch story in a way that feels like a continuation of the journalism you do. 

You can repackage parts of this launch story for email appeals, for your membership landing page, social media posts, and anywhere else you invite people to join your cause. Ahead of your launch date, you should have multiple membership appeals ready that tell some version of this story. 

Don’t be afraid to tell your launch story loudly and clearly. You want to over-communicate in the launch campaign and in the future so that your message really gets through. As Chris Horne, founder and publisher of the Devil Strip in Ohio, shared, “You will overestimate how much people are paying attention to you when you talk about your membership program. Don’t be shy about educating and publicizing your membership program all the time.” 

An extreme example of a captivating (re)launch story comes from Tiempo Argentino in Argentina. In 2015, faced with declining profits, the businessman owner of Tiempo stopped paying salaries, then stopped printing the newspaper. Soon after, he threatened to shut down the newspaper completely. Tiempo’s journalists occupied the newsroom, vowing not to leave until they got paid. They ended up sleeping on mattresses in the office for 10 months. 

Meanwhile, Tiempo’s team organized music festivals to raise money and marches to tell Argentinians what was happening. They continued to publish online and leveraged social networks in a way they hadn’t when they were printing a newspaper. They had more readers than ever before – and those readers all knew Tiempo’s story, not just the journalism being produced. 

Tiempo organized a concert to raise money for the newspaper (Courtesy of Javier Borelli)

The Tiempo team raised enough money to publish a special print edition in 2016, four months after receiving their last payroll, to mark the anniversary of Argentina’s last coup. It was also a way to meet readers, find out how to reach them directly (by collecting email addresses), and learn how much support they had. 

The supplement sold out. Tiempo gained hundreds of email addresses. Soon after, they re-launched as a worker-owned cooperative with a membership model. Argentineans responded to Tiempo’s call to help them stay independent and keep their journalism free to access. Today membership makes up 70 percent of Tiempo’s revenue. 

Tiempo’s re-launch as a member-supported, independent news organization included all of the elements above: a strong membership value proposition, transparency about their challenges, a compelling pitch to become a member, and a connection to the events of the moment (this video captures the whole story). And with many member-driven startups being born out of the dissolution or atrophying of legacy publications, Tiempo’s story might not be that far off from yours.  Remember: there is deep dissatisfaction with “the media” in many parts of the world. You’re providing a better way. Your membership launch can tell that story.

What makes for a good membership program landing page?

Building a strong landing page for your membership program is like creating a welcoming front door to your supporters. A membership landing page is where your potential members begin the checkout process. Our advice for what makes a good landing page assumes that you have a membership FAQ page for handling common questions. Some organizations don’t, but the Membership Puzzle Project recommends making FAQ pages to reduce the number of questions your membership support staff has to field and reduce the amount of information a potential member has to wade through before signing up. 

A membership program landing page should: 

Reflect your overall branding. It should be obvious to members that they are still within the same organization when they land on this page. 

Reiterate your value proposition. What does their membership make possible? This is your chance to make members feel like the superheroes they are. 

Get to the point. If you get people to your payment page, it means they’re interested. You don’t need to sell them all over again, especially if you have a separate membership FAQ page. Reiterate your value proposition, and then get to the point – payment. The details (i.e. the benefits) and FAQ can go after that. 

Defaults matter. Whether you have tiers or a pay-what-you-want model, you should know at what support level you need the bulk of your members to contribute in order to hit your financial targets. Consider making that support level your default/preset payment option, either by preselecting it or by making it the most prominent option.

Some news organizations MPP interviewed worked hard to encourage members to become annual recurring members, reasoning that monthly members are presented with the opportunity to cancel every month. Others have said the cost of an annual membership is too big an ask and prefer monthly, both because it’s less daunting for members and because the cash flow can be more predictable. Although MPP does not have a strong recommendation in this case, the research team has seen growing evidence that those who opt for monthly recurring payments have higher retention rates. Jump to “Retaining our members” for insight into how defaults can affect member retention.

For an example of the use of defaults, observe Krautreporter in Germany’s payment page. Krautreporter determined it needs most people to become members at €9 a month or €108 a year. They prefer annual members because the paywalled organization found that many monthly members joined for a month in order to access a few articles and then canceled soon after.

Placing that option in the middle plays into a behavioral psychology phenomenon called “the decoy effect.” It’s a form of nudging.

Courtesy of Krautreporter

Pay-what-you-want models often pre-fill the payment box, or set a specific benefit to kick in at a certain level of contribution. 

The Daily Maverick in South Africa wants members to join at R150 (about $8.75 at the time of writing) a month or R1,800 a year if they can afford it, so that is the preset amount on their membership landing page. They also make a popular Uber voucher available at that level to nudge members toward that level. 

Courtesy of the Daily Maverick

Jump to “Designing our membership program” for additional advice on setting a price.

What does a good checkout process look like?

A good check-out process is an often overlooked but critically important component of a membership program. You can get all the other elements of a membership program right, and still undermine your success with a shoddy check-out process. 

Why is this? Styli Charalambous, CEO of the Daily Maverick in South Africa, says that membership is also an e-commerce business. He’s right. If payment is a precondition of membership in your membership program, you have to execute on payment. “Cart abandonment” (or drop-offs on the payment page) is a huge problem across e-commerce. That’s why your checkout flow matters. E-commerce expert Kunle Campbell shared the essential steps to a smooth checkout process with the Facebook Journalism Project.

Get the email address first – If the person “abandons their cart” (leaves the page without paying), you’ll be able to follow up with them by email.

Don’t require users to create a login until they’ve paid – The key is to introduce as little friction as possible until a user has joined. Especially if someone is signing up on mobile, making the user create and save a password might be enough to stop the user from completing the process. Alternatively, you can give the user the option of logging in with a social or Google account.

Ask for as little information as possible until after payment – Few credit card processors require anything more than a zip code to process payment, so don’t ask for more payment information than you have to. If you are a print publication and need to collect physical addresses, enable autocomplete and use an address finder if you can. If you want a person’s address for swag fulfillment, collect it on the screen immediately after payment or in one of the onboarding emails. Consider integrating one-click payment options such as PayPal or ApplePay. If you offer multiple payment options, it’s worth paying attention to which ones are used the most often.

Make sure it’s easy to join on mobile. Turn off pop-ups on your payment pages, or at least make sure they are mobile responsive and potential members can easily get past them to pay. One-click payment options will be particularly valuable on mobile. Again, if you offer multiple payment options, it’s worth paying attention to which ones are used the most often – and how this differs between desktop and mobile.

You can find more details, including screenshots of well-designed checkout flows, at the Facebook Journalism Project. Memberkit 1.0 also offers advice on how to find out when and why potential members are quitting the signup process. 

MPP will add two more items to Campbell’s list: 

Do user testing. Before the page is public, ask a couple of potential members to go through your full sign up process, making sure that some do it on desktop and some do it on mobile. You can do this by having them use your company credit card or by offering some kind of incentive for them to join early, using their own card. 

Make sure members get an email receipt. All this email needs to do is confirm that their payment went through. If you can personalize it a little bit by adding your logo and making sure the tone of the message matches your brand, that’s great. But save the details about your membership value proposition for the welcome email.