Fri Sept 14, 2018 - ONA18
Table Talk 3: How to link engagement to revenue
Jennifer Brandel - host
https://ona18.journalists.org/sessions/tabletalksaudience/
#ONA18TableTalks
Ideas to discuss:
- How do you balance your readership’s wants/needs with what’s viable for you as a company?
- Are engaged users more loyal subscribers? What is the relationship between loyalty and subscriptions?
- How do you link engagement to revenue and make the case to the newsroom that you can do?
- How do you make the pivot to a metered model?
- How do you find revenue opportunities by engaging with loyalists who are not subscribers?
- How do you ask readers for money without seeming creepy, desperate or just too transactional?
- How do you strengthen relationship with readers who are already engaged?
- How do you move engaged non-members to become members?
- How you use social to get readers more engaged?
- How do you make sure investigative findings connect with people on a regular basis?
- How do you drive engagement by building more flexibility in a payball?
- How do you show your newsroom the relationship between new hires and engagement?
- How do you use crowdfunding effectively?
- How do you best monetize your base?
- How you make a non-tracky hard sell (ie Wirecutter)?
- What are the best metrics to use?
Subthemes:
- Culture: Does your newsroom value engagement, and if not, at what level does engagement stop?
- What’s your business model?
- Tactics: What’s working and what’s not?
- What are the best ways to think about measurement and proof?
CULTURE
“If you don’t have the culture, you don’t have anything.”
Familiarize everyone on leadership team with the idea of a engagement funnel; goals are set along the engagement funnel.
Multi-functional teams .Institute an audience engagement team in the revenue that is connected at the hip to the revenue-focused teams. (Importance of having a manager with an editorial background.) Think about how to engage readers without dumbing down the journalism. Make sure people on staff know this is not about trying to influence the journalism but how to sell that journalism.
Build trust between journalists and the business side.
Make sure everyone know that this is question of survival. If we’re not doing it with advertising, we need to work together to build a sustainable model.
Journalists appreciate honesty and transparency. Make sure everyone is clear on organization goals. You can approach from position of fear (“look at this plummeting numbers”) or a position of opportunity (“we have a chance to build a community.”)
Lunch and learns can be really valuable. This is marketing 101; editorial teaching business how they do what they do.
Have strategic discussions about goals — and post-mortems on results.
Important to discuss concrete examples. Work with reporters and editors who are already on board with importance of engagement and create success stories.
Try a rotation. Have staff shadow others to get a sense of how they do their job.
Identify “new heroes.” ie an internal newsletter that highlights what’s working.
BUSINESS MODELS
A Kickstarter campaign drew support from large audience that was not previously engaged and may not have known brand. (Appeal is for support for a specific project.) Sponsorships also available.
Think about having different types of membership programs.
A/B testing in newsletters to get people to become members. Incorporate that language used in newsletters into other mediums.
With Facebook, use information you have collected from readers to create targeted audience and build a specific campaign.
Top 3-5 Ideas from Sept 14 session 1
Culture-building
- Build cross-functional teams that are led by someone from editorial background (E.g., editorial, marketing, revenue team)
- Have lunch and learns between departments to get to know the jargon, the needs and the humans behind them
- Be intentional and scientific when doing experiments - write down what you expect will happen, document it, and share the successes and learnings
- Use case studies to help make concrete the things you want people to try
- Shout out in all-staff or all-team when you have engagement and revenue wins. Create heroes out of the people doing the work
- Support a culture of transparency and honesty so that editorial can see the mission aspects of the revenue / sales / marketing side
- Talk about the metrics that will drive audience needs, editorial and business wins
- All-staff emails that have business and editorial wins and priorities
- Create a shared vocabulary / glossary
- Create a dashboard / scoring system that shows how things are performing in context. Need to shift that sense that reporters know best
- Monthly editorial meetings w/ biz teams - share big projects and then seeing if revenue potential after the idea has been started (¾ baked ideas, then letting sales in)
- Create spreadsheets to track the engagement and the metrics and impact wins as you go (not just at the end of the process)
Top 3-5 Ideas from Sept 14 session 2
Questions/ideas:
- How do you incorporate personal/personality-driven engagement into a larger a newsroom like USA TODAY?
- How do we change engagement from a “nice to have” to a “need to have”? (to convince management engagement is a priority)
- How do you pitch engagement to management (or anyone who holds the change purses)?
- Solution: Reporters are a good group to get engaged. Add this into your workflow. Talk to them about options to expand their audience and incorporate it into your beat.
- What does success look like for audience development and staff in charge of those roles?
- What is the revenue opportunity on third-party platforms?
- How do you tie engagement between digital and on-air?
- How do you get engagement (and bringing readers back to your website) in a very saturated market.
If you don’t have a culture inside your organization that allows marketing, editorial and product to collaborate, it’s hard to get all of this work.
Successes for the above point:
- From Norway: Their newsroom is building a cross-functional team. It’s being led by editorial. She didn’t think it would work if businesspeople led this team.
- Lunch-and-learn to educate about their vocabulary and goals.
- Take 10 minutes to make sure you talk about why you’re embarking on an engagement venture like Facebook Live.
- If it works, share your results.
- Create heroes to the people who are doing the work.
- Talk about the metrics that are going to drive audience needs first, then editorial, then business.
What is an audience metric vs. an editorial metric?
- Did the audience get exactly what they needed to be an informed citizen (example)?
- Audience: Did they get the answer they needed.
- Newsroom: Metrics
How do you connect people to other content they would like?
- If someone is interested in your healthcare coverage how do you expose them to broader content around that coverage vs. just one newsletter or one article.
Data can be used to change culture within a newsroom. It starts with creating a shared vocabulary between editorial and business. It can also involve how editorial views the success of content vs. how it actually performed among different audiences.
Collaboration between marketing and editorial about series.
- It should be driven by editorial first and then marketing can try to figure out ways to monetize it.
Golden-metric that everyone can agree on?
Engaged time/time spent.
Quality metric: Page views divided by quantity of content
- The idea behind this is convincing sales that a publication is getting more engagement over quality of content
American Press Institute Metrics for News
- Has a tool that allows different departments to get the information they need (Jennifer will link in documents)
Who has been successful monetizing engagement?
- Vox has found success with its “Borders” series. There is a huge engagement aspect to the series. The reporter asks for help when he visits different regions. The community-aspect of this made a network that made it easier for other products.
- Lesson learned: Doing it a few times and showing it has worked has laid the foundation for the future.
- When there are big feature projects Vox wants to monetize, someone works with the sales department to explain the project so they can go out and sell it.
Is the group comfortable with sponsorship?
- I don’t think so. People are so comfortable with NPR.
- For audience engagement at an NPR station, people assume sponsors have more pull with editorial than they do.
Has anyone surveyed audiences to find out how they feel about sponsorships?
- Maybe the Trusting News Project.
Has anyone delved into content that looks like editorial but is, in fact, ads?
- Buzzfeed, Quartz and Vox.
- One publication does them but they separate them. (the key is to making sure it looks like branded content, rather than similar in feel and format to editorial content)
The various ways your newsroom may or may not be thinking about revenue. Dot-connector studio:

Vox collects spreadsheets that collect Google Forms and tracks new responses coming in.
So much of doing engagement work is being your own champion and shouting it from the rooftops.
They track everything piece of engagement that tracks it as you go.
It’s really helpful to spell out engagement to people. One example: Write a paragraph that gets sent throughout the newsroom that spells out success.
USA TODAY has had a lot of success with events. At a local level, they thought about what they’re really good at it. Food, drinks, high school sports, and storytelling. Created events around those. Food and wine events around different cities. Tiered systems. Those events bring in a large amount of money.
Storytellers. Surveys.
High school sports. Created a banquet for high school athletes that have become pretty popular. Awards for students and athletes and coaches. Red carpet. Professional athletes that give pep talks etc.
Dedicated staff for that?
Local level. Support for that. Also partner with an events company.
Articles / resources to check out:
Below - a few resources from Hearken (will publish soon)


(Images via Hearken, Jennifer Brandel)
