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Membership 101

Session 2: Making the case for membership to your potential members

Nov. 6, 2020

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Think like a member

Name an organization of which you’re a member and answer the following questions:

Why did you join?
Why is this membership valuable to you?
What keeps you around?

@membershippzzle

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How the course will go

Sessions are recorded
Ask questions with the “Ask a question” button in bottom-right
Office hours every Tuesday from 2 to 3 p.m. ET.
Homework is optional, but helpful
Add membership@lenfestinstitute.org to your contacts
Show respect for classmates’ questions and time
Online learning has glitches sometimes!
You can always read more at MembershipGuide.org

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Your questions, answered

(well, some of them)

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Identify your gaps

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Conducting audience research

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Why does audience research matter?

It helps you use your resources more effectively.
It helps you make things people actually want.
It can reduce the number of things you have to try before you get it right.
It makes this work less of a guessing game.
It’s the simplest form of audience participation you can offer.

@membershippzzle

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The human-centered design framework

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Audience research helps you determine whether you’re building something that is desirable. Useful, desirable products build habit and loyalty – and it’s habit and loyalty that will bring your audience members closer to your newsroom and eventually turn some of them into members. Audience research will be your tool to collect feedback, assess member satisfaction, and adapt to changing needs along the way.

Without audience research, newsroom decisions are made based on flawed premises such as newsroom hierarchy – i.e. the highest ranking person in the conversation’s opinion – and the personal life experiences of the journalists in the room. We are not representative of our readers – not in our race, not in our access to information or our information needs, nor in our news habits and literacy.

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Your recent Qs that audience research can answer

Can you share examples of content essential for membership conversion?
My marketing brain is wondering on a psychological level what resonates more with people? Subscription with a loyalty program or membership?
How can we continue to involve our community if they are not the ones most likely to be financially supporting us?

@membershippzzle

When I say that audience research makes this less of a guessing game, here’s what i mean. On the screen are three questions from last week’s session where I was asked to guess what your audience members will respond to. I did not, because when you do audience research, you don’t have to guess. One of the hardest things for newsrooms trying to become member-driven to do is shift from acting on hunches about their audience members to turning those hunches into hypothese they can test through audience research. You’ll learn the basics of doing that today.

For example, this question about whether a loyalty program or membership program would resonate more. Audience research can tell you this if you survey people about what benefits they would value most. If discounts rank high, then maybe a loyalty program is your best bet. If they value the inside scoop and opportunities to engage more deeply with your journalism, it sounds like they want to be members. You don’t have to guess!

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Best practices for audience research

Always do it in connection with an organizational goal
Recruit thoughtfully and inclusively, design with accessibility in mind
Own your assumptions – and then set them aside
Keep cultural context in mind
Collect responses until clear patterns emerge
Be clear about how you will store and use the data
Don’t skimp on time for synthesis

@membershippzzle

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When you shouldn’t do audience research

When A/B tests would work better (such as choosing a send time for your newsletter)
When what you’re really looking for is praise. That’s when you ask for testimonials!
When you don’t have a plan or capacity to use the findings
When you’re having trouble making cross-departmental decisions (don’t use your audience members as tie breakers)

@membershippzzle

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Choosing an audience research method

Choose surveys when...

A large or geographically distributed sample is more important than detail.
You need quick, specific feedback on a work-in-progress
You need quantitative data.

Choose focus groups & interviews when...

You need to understand habits, motivations, or attitudes.
You need new ideas.
You need to be very intentional about who you get feedback from.

@membershippzzle

Sometimes, you might do these in tandem. You could use a survey to determine which line of inquiry to dig in on, and to recruit focus group and interview participants by asking at the end of the survey “Sometimes we like to follow up to learn more about your answers. Can we contact you again for an interview?” Survey results can tell you what to spend that interview digging in on.

If you are struggling to figure out where exactly to focus your questions, interviews and focus groups might be a good starting point. Open-ended questions can direct you to habits, attitudes, and opportunities that weren’t on your radar, and then you can use a survey to ask a broader swatch of your audience about those ideas. Maybe an open-ended series of interviews reveals to you that your audience members want help keeping on top of the flood of information they get about life in your city every day. Sounds like a good premise for a newsletter. You can then send a survey to your audience about what content they would appreciate in a newsletter, and how often they would want to get it.

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Audience data that can inform your membership strategy

Their willingness and ability to support you financially
What they value about your work
How they access your work
Their unmet information and community needs
What would make membership valuable for them
Other causes and communities they support

@membershippzzle

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The membership viability assessment

Goal: Assess whether your audience members are willing to give you financial support and, if yes, why
Questions you could ask:

What work of ours do you find most valuable?
Would you be willing to support us on a recurring basis?
If so, how much would you be willing to give?
What other causes and organizations do you support?

Another option: a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey

An NPS score of 7 or higher indicates strong membership opportunity

@membershippzzle

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Daily Maverick’s membership viability assessment

How long did you read us prior to donating?
What content most influenced your decision to donate?
What was your primary reason for donating to the Daily Maverick?
Why did you donate? (open-ended question)
We’re launching a membership plan for readers who want to contribute to the cause and engage with DM staff and other members. Is this a community you would be interested in being a part of?
What benefits would motivate you to join our membership plan?

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The member satisfaction assessment

Goal: Assess members’ satisfaction with their membership experience
Use a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey: “On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend membership to [newsroom] to a friend or colleague?”

Offer an option to elaborate on their score
Ask those who score you below 7 to find out what you can do better

Assess what benefits are most impactful by asking members which benefit they value most and which they value least

@membershippzzle

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The member motivations assessment

Goal: Understand your most invested members’ underlying motivations, which helps you identify appropriate participation opportunities
Could include questions such as:

Which organizations do you participate in?
Are you involved with news organizations as a participant? How do you participate? (I comment, I share stories, I’ve been a source, I’ve contributed tips or story ideas, I donate)
What do you value in your memberships? (You can adapt MPP’s member values survey)

@membershippzzle

If you’ve got a membership program already and member satisfaction is strong, that doesn’t mean you can stop learning about your members! It means you have some time and headspace to think about how to leverage their enthusiasm for your organization to expand your scope and impact.

Think back to the audience member motivations I spoke about last week, and how Zetland identified a passion to promote Zetland and turned that into a powerful ambassador campaign. This type of assessment can reveal opportunities for powerful campaigns like that. We’ll talk more about how to leverage motivations to participate in next week’s session on memberful routines.

Here is more on member motivations.

If you’re just getting started with audience research, it can be hard to identify what you need to know and what questions will surface that for you. Our researcher Emily Roseman, who wrote the audience research section of the Membership Guide, created the Audience Research Compass – a choose-your-own-adventure style questionnaire that can guide you to the right audience research approach for your stage of development. Rodney’s dropping it into the chat now. We made it for this course, and we’re curious to hear if it;s helpful. There’s a two-question survey when you get to the end, and we’d love if you filled thst out after you use the exercise.

Audience research compass

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Turning your data into actionable insights

Synthesis: the process of identifying patterns in your audience research data that you can act on.
Skip this step and you’ll be swimming in “noisy” data.
Start by returning to your original audience questions and identifying what type of data will give you an answer.
Cluster similar responses as you move through interviews and survey responses until you see patterns emerge

@membershippzzle

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Daily Maverick’s actionable insights

One-time donors were enthusiastic about offering recurring support, and becoming a part of the community in exchange
Mission-aligned benefits such as an “insider” newsletter and the chance to get to know the journalists were more appealing than special offers and discounts
Their investigative reporting was the strongest driver of financial support
Swag was unlikely to entice people to join
They could expect at least an average of R100 a month

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Questions?

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Learnings from beyond news

There is deep value in listening, testing, and being fascinated with what members value.
Inspiring organizations sell more than a product or a cause. They connect individuals to a shared larger purpose.
Membership is one way to restore what feels broken.
Offer flexible means of participation.
Grow at human scale.

@membershippzzle

Membership in news is a fairly young concept outside the public radio space. So early on, MPP studied spaces beyond news – open-source software development, faith-based communities, environmental cooperatives, even Burning Man. We wanted to understand what motivated people to give their money and time to causes. Find that report here.

I want to draw your attention to three of the five takeaways from that research that are highly applicable to membership in news.

The first is that there is deep value in listening, testing, and being fascinated with what members value. This is a mindset shift. Instead of just assuming what members want, successful membership organizations have developed ways of listening, fresh thinking about what their members actually want, and strong feedback loops to get it right. They’re empathetic and open to learning. They frequently adopt more agile approaches than they may have used to in the past. As journalists, we are obsessed with the politicians we cover, and we spend hours analyzing their motivations and actions. We need to apply that same curiosity to our audience members.

Inspiring membership-driven organizations connect individuals’ passions to a shared larger purpose. They sell more than a product. Successful membership organizations recognize and celebrate the individual while making them feel connected to something bigger than themselves. They get the ratio right between the individual and the group. This is neither a product pitch (“get 20% off exclusive content!”) nor a traditional “cause” (“save the whales!”). Instead, it’s a unique hybrid of both. Getting that ratio or recipe right (which is hard because it often defies typical marketing approaches or advice) feels like a secret sauce for many of the successful movements we looked at, in terms of how they think about the member mission, “social contract,” and pitch. This goes beyond offering plentiful member perks and relies on studying members’ motivations.

Membership is one way to restore what feels broken. Many people told our team that they join as members because they feel something fundamental in the world and/or in themselves is broken. In membership they seek a way to feel part of a solution. Successful membership programs don’t shy away from connecting to the larger state of the world. They connect to the present zeitgeist in which something crucial is broken or out of balance — and then offer membership as credible grounds for optimism.

Keep these three concepts in mind as Jay Allred of the Richland Source joins us to talk about how the Richland Source tells its story.

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Guy in charge, Source Media

A life around news
A career in digital tech
Six startups in news and tech
500k users / mo, 3M pageviews
Fifteen employees
One wife, two kids, two dogs

WHO IS THIS GUY?

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Nearly Everyone

Loves a Great Story

#waitwhat

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Nearly Everyone

Loves a Great Story

BIG HUGE QUESTION:

ARE YOU THE HERO

OR THE GUIDE?

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Your reader asks,

“Why should I support your local journalism with my hard-earned dollars?”

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“Why, because our reporting has won seven AP awards and we are the foremost newspaper in our region, and...”

You answer,

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“First amendment!”

Or,

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“We’ll close if you don’t!”

Or,

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A thought to consider...

What if your answer sounded like this:

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Our community deserves to hear the whole story. We uncover through our journalism effective responses to problems that hold us back from our true potential. In supporting us, you help us guide our community to a better future.

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BIG HUGE ANSWER:

YOU ARE NOT THE HERO

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A HERO

WITH A PROBLEM

MEETS A GUIDE

WHO PROVIDES A PLAN

THAT EXPLAINS THE STAKES & CALLS HIM TO ACTION

SUCCESS

FAILURE

A weak character. Beset by problems. Unsure of the path forward.

The guide is a strong character. COMPETENT & EMPATHETIC. She listens. She seeks to understand the hero, learn his weaknesses.

The specific problem or challenge faced by the hero.

Shows a way past the problem including steps, benefits & pitfalls

STAKES. What happens if the hero fails to act? Who stands to lose if the hero fails?

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A HERO

WITH A PROBLEM

MEETS A GUIDE

WHO PROVIDES A PLAN

THAT EXPLAINS THE STAKES & CALLS HIM TO ACTION

SUCCESS

FAILURE

A person or organization that cares deeply about Mansfield area.

That’s us. Competent and empathetic reporters and staff who help the hero see ways to address tough social problems.

The news about their city feels unbalanced, negative, and problem-focused. It damages civic life, hurts growth. No connection.

An independent, locally funded, sustainable newsroom that tells the whole story and focuses on solutions.

ACTION: We (the guide) need the hero (the funder) to enable this work to happen. To chart a new path for news.

Credit: https://storybrand.com/

STAKES: The story of your city and its people.

The hero and his city are better informed, thinking about solutions, and moving forward.

City’s story at risk. No local control. Back to the LCD of crime, drugs, and blood to drive clicks.

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Questions?

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Identifying your membership value proposition

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A value proposition helps you...

Define what you stand for consistently and clearly
Decide what not to do when you can’t do it all
Articulate why people should choose you
Distinguish yourself from competitors and collaborators
Develop a brand strategy
Hire the right people

@membershippzzle

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Your need two value propositions

Newsroom value proposition

Your newsroom value proposition guides your organization’s overall strategy and direction, forcing your newsroom to focus on what it does well. It articulates what your newsroom exists to do, and why you are the one who does it best.

Membership value proposition

Your membership value proposition articulates how supporting you also creates value for your members. It articulates the membership social contract. It gives them a reason to join, and gives them a clear picture of what they’re opting into.

@membershippzzle

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Identify your strengths

We are the first ones to…
We are the only ones to…
We are the best at…

@membershippzzle

You might already know this if you have a newsroom value proposition. If you don’t, MPP suggests a simple “First, Best, Only” exercise.

Bring all your membership-concerned stakeholders together, and invite each person to complete the following sentences.

We are the first ones to…
We are the only ones who…
We are the best at…

We recommend each participant write each answer on a separate post-it note. Once everyone is done, you can present your answers. Synthesize the answers by clustering those that are similar. Those that show up multiple times across all the participants are a starting point for defining your special capabilities.

Save these in a list you can come back to. They will help you craft the specifics of your membership program later on. Now you can turn to understanding your audience.

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Richland Source’s strengths

We are the first ones to deliver a free, all digital alternative to legacy news organizations for our community.
We are the only ones who consistently engage and invite readers into the journalistic process.
We are the best at delivering a news product which has a solutions orientation and dedication to community at its center.

@membershippzzle

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2. Identify your value proposition

Newsroom/membership program

Readers/loyal readers/members

Motivations

How it works

@membershippzzle

The next step is writing your value proposition. There are a number of ways to do this, but MPP prefers to use the Strategyzer template. For our purposes, the product/service is your journalism or your membership program. The user segment is your general audience, or your members. The motivations are what needs your product services, and the “by” is how you do it, or how it works. This is where the value proposition becomes a strategy statement, rather than just a mission statement.

You might not know these motivations or “how it works” now, but audience research can point you in the right direction. We have put together a basic survey that can help reveal motivations and ideas for “how it works” that you can adapt to suit your audience and editorial focus. It will be in the post-session resources.

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Deconstructing member motivations

A sense of affiliation or belonging
Feeling my concerns are heard by the organization
Offering the world something that I think should exist
Advocacy for important issues on my behalf
A sense of uniqueness
Being connected to other like-minded people
Being connected to other like-minded organizations
Ease of use

@membershippzzle

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Deconstructing “how it works”

Ability to interact with reporters
Exclusive access
Events/opportunities to connect
Merchandise/swag
A good user experience, such as easy site navigability or lack of ads

@membershippzzle

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Tips for identifying your value proposition

Focus on what you do well
Avoid journalism jargon and buzzwords.
Consider how your membership can be a way to restore something that feels broken.
Think about how you can connect individuals and their passions to a shared larger purpose.

@membershippzzle

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Richland Source’s value proposition

Our solutions-focused local journalism helps readers who want to understand the whole story of the community by eliminating the news fatigue caused by just covering what’s wrong and replacing it with a more holistic and nourishing local news experience that helps our city reach its full potential.

@membershippzzle

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Richland Source’s membership value proposition

Our membership program helps members who want to make their city a better place by bridging the gap between them and the newsroom that covers their lives, and by forming a vital partnership that fosters trust, togetherness and growth through community-funded journalism.

@membershippzzle

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Our community deserves to hear the whole story. We uncover through our journalism effective responses to problems that hold us back from our true potential. In supporting us, you help us guide our community to a better future.

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The Richland Source value proposition in action: Crime coverage

Standard Operating Procedure

Fact: Crime coverage sells.
Fact: It’s part of any community’s story, therefore reportable.
Fact: Crime (all types) occupy disproportionate mindshare for local media.

Our approach

Tie % coverage more closely crime rate, insert solutions-focus and engage readers where possible.

@membershippzzle

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Questions?

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What’s next

Office hours, Nov. 17, 2 p.m. and 2:30 p.m.

Sign-up form will go out Monday morning via email

Assignment: Draft your newsroom and membership value propositions using the Strategyzer ad-lib template
Bonus assignment: Identify a question you have about your members or potential members and how you would use audience research to answer that question
Yossi will send post-session slides and additional resources

@membershippzzle

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What’s next

Nov. 6: Assessing your membership readiness
Nov. 13: Making the case for membership to potential members (1.5 hrs)
Nov. 20: Setting objectives and memberful routines (1.5 hrs)

Identifying your membership objectives, how Chalkbeat sets membership goals, and developing memberful routines

Dec. 4: Designing your membership program (1 hr)
Dec. 11: Getting operationally ready for membership (1.5hr)

@membershippzzle