Lessons on Solving the Media Membership Puzzle

1. A membership program is no longer a “nice to have” for media orgs. Now is the time to invest in yours.

Membership programs are in a state of rapid evolution as more organizations see them as an imperative way to diversify revenue. Some organizations are investing in their membership programs as a growing portion of their overall pie, which has been heavy on advertising to date (Gimlet, El Diario, The Guardian).

Others are launching with membership as their main means to support their reporting, with some highly interactive approaches emerging (The Ferret in Scotland, The Bristol Cable in England). There are drawbacks to both approaches: it isn’t easy to try to strike a balance or to rely exclusively on members. Yet we’re encouraged by the high levels of interest we’re seeing in meaningful membership that improves storytelling and the bottom line.

2. Two complicating factors for news sites in launching or revamping membership: internal resource constraints and limits on potential members’ attention.

In this evolution process, internal resource constraints can slow change. Taegan Goddard, founder of Political Wire, told us that maintaining a membership program is a constant challenge for a one-man news operation, requiring significant effort and time to maintain. Still, after trying other revenue models, he feels committed to keeping members from being tracked around the web by advertisers on his site. He calls membership “the most honest model you can have.” In an era of declining trust for journalism, this is a crucial insight.

We’ve found that larger newsrooms can often lack incentive structures and useful systems for journalists to be in efficient touch with their audience members. This is a long-standing problem as innovation work has been focused elsewhere.

Yet people who work on membership efforts within news frequently tell us that they need better systems for identifying which audience members they might engage with for best returns, as well as for testing and tracking communications to different audience segments.

Andras Petho said that managing membership is highly complex for the investigative site he edits, Direkt36 in Hungary. “We don’t have digital software to keep the database, so we do everything manually and it takes a lot of time.”

New Revenue Hub offers consulting services in this space based on founder Mary Walter Brown’s experiences with Voice of San Diego’s membership program, and De Correspondent is working on a software solution to help address the communications management gap. We’ll be watching for additional approaches.

Also, news companies tell us unsurprisingly that their prospective members are bombarded with competing demands for their attention. Simultaneously, most online news consumers aren’t used to underwriting journalism, which leads to more complicated and time-consuming crowdfunding efforts than media entrepreneurs say they expected.

Chris Faraone from the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism said that “people are just not used to funding journalism directly.” Inherent in this is the fact that the vast majority of the media that we news consumers encounter is subsidized, whether it be by advertisers, funders or the journalists themselves. Yet at the same time, Faraone has found that “people want to be involved with journalism, especially at the local and community level.”

Even for members who are highly supportive of the sites they support (to the point of participating in member forums and closely reviewing story source material), there is an understandable expectation that they will get added value or skills in exchange for their time. Peter Geoghegan from The Ferret says that when it comes to his publication’s events, members are much more likely to want to participate in workshops to learn about fact-checking, investigating and video editing. “Meet The Ferret”-type gatherings to encourage informal team and audience member interactions are less well attended.

Stateside, Rebekah Monson said her team at WhereByUs (a company she co-founded which runs The New Tropic in Miami and The Evergrey in Seattle) considered traditional online fundraising for media to be unnecessarily difficult, from determining pricing to managing resource-intensive fulfillment.

“Fundraising is ‘expensive money’ because of all of the marketing and campaign management time that’s required,” she told us. WhereByUs chose a nontraditional approach of pursuing seed investment from its readers, but there’s no easy way to know your audience without a major time investment. “To have a great membership program is something you have to work on. It can’t just grow like weeds.”

The New Tropic recently offered space for 10 members to join hardhat tours of Miami’s science museum, which served as a chance for staff to talk to members about what they care about. Reporters learned that there was a great amount of interest in the topic of the museum budget and complications that resulted in a delayed museum opening, and this led the team to extend coverage more than they might have otherwise. In inviting members to join the tour and “by putting out the call, we got high responses and knew it was of interest. And we had people to call [on] once the stories ran,” Monson said.