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The Digital Revenue Playbook for Local News Publishers
Welcome! This playbook explores digital revenue opportunities for local
publishers, whether you represent a legacy print newspaper looking to generate
more digital revenue or startup digital-only news outlet trying to build a
sustainable business.
The content is based on my experience as a local publisher , digital
transformation coach, lab director of the GNI Transformation Tech program and
executive director of the Association of Alternative Newsmedia .
I'm publishing in this format to offer a living playbook that features
foundational building blocks, strategies to take you closer to sustainability,
and tactics to help you build your publication's revenue so you can pay your
people and serve your local community with quality news and information. I'm
also embedding and linking content from experts, vendors and thought leaders in
the local news ecosystem.
Please let me know if you have any questions, find anything missing or
out-of-date, or if there's a topic you'd like me to explore in more detail.
Enjoy!
Ta


by Todd Stauffer

Last edited 1 day ago



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published as part of the Digital Revenue Playbook for Local News Publishers.

Introduction:
Print Dollars and Digital Dimes
Not everyone reading this playbook will be from a print media background, but
that's my background. In 2002, I co-founded the Jackson Free Press in Jackson,
Miss. with Donna Ladd and Stephen Barnette . I served as its publisher and
president for nearly 20 years until 2023, when its journalism assets were bought
by the non-profit, statewide Mississippi Free Press , co-founded by Donna Ladd
and Kimberly Griffin in 2021.
The JFP launched as an alternative newsweekly to serve Jacksonians in a way that
the local daily newspaper didn't, with important stories and context about the
state of the city, the people who run it, and the powers that be. We also sought
to be an organizing and informational source for rallying people to local arts
and music, events, locally-owned businesses and important causes. As time passed
and the daily shrunk, sometimes JFP reporters were the only reporters in city
and county meetings, following important stories for our readers.
(Oh, and we had epic Best of Jackson awards ceremonies and dance parties every
year.)
Today, the staff members of local weeklies (or bi-weeklies or monthlies) are
doggedly attending city council meetings and providing calendars of upcoming
concerts and festivals. At the same time, a whole generation of online-only
publications have come along to serve similar roles at the neighborhood, town,
city, regional or state level.
For revenue, our newspaper did the same thing that social media companies do
today: We curated a loyal audience and then rented access to them to local
businesses and organizations. That's essentially what advertising is. And, in
print, that could generate a sustaining amount of revenue.
Our publication had to change with the digital times as much as possible. When
we launched in 2002, we did have a website, but we generally posted new stories
weekly. (We did some blogging more frequently.) Later, we moved to a daily
cadence of web-first reporting and listings, a daily email newsletter, digital
ad and sponsorship packages for local organizations, and eventually, even the
Best of Jackson balloting was all done online. In many ways, publishing
digitally was more convenient and affordable.
But compared to print, it was much more difficult to monetize. At that time, a
common refrain in the news publishing business was "we're trading print dollars
for digital dimes." And "dimes" might have been optimistic.
For publishers today, whether you come from a print background or you launched
straight to digital, your strategy will most likely involve cobbling together a
few different stacks of "digital dimes" to make your publication sustainable.
My goal is to see if I can help you and your team make a good living while
fulfilling the role of local publisher. I believe in the free press—our work is
so important to democracy in the United States (and worldwide) that the press'
role is codified in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Now, we need to make it sustainable.

Revenue Playbook Topics
So let's dig in. Listed here are the types of revenue I'd like to cover in this
playbook:
The concept of "True Fans" and how it can affect your publication's revenue
strategy

The "reader funnel" and the long-term value of a reader

Selling display advertising direct to local business and organizations

Exploring programmatic advertising for your publication

Publishing newsletters and newsletter advertising

Native advertising and sponsored content

Reader revenue via donations and memberships

Paid subscriptions

"Best of" ballots and other contesting

Throwing events for marketing and profit

Getting grants to further your work

Be an agency! Audience extension, content marketing and more

Since I'm publishing this playbook online and it can be easily updated, I'll add
any revenue topics that surfaces in a lab or a consultation that I find
interesting. I welcome your ideas for topics, suggestions for content I can link
to, or questions about any of the material.

Two Definitions for this Playbook
Before we discuss revenue, I need to define some basic terms.
Even if you're not into math or finance, I promise this won't hurt.
Let's start with two definitions I repeatedly refer to when thinking about
revenue from publishing. They are:
eCPM - Effective Cost Per Thousand

ROI - Return on Investment

Defining eCPM
eCPM is based on the concept of CPM, cost per thousand (the M comes from mille
in Latin), which is a common way to price advertising. The idea is that there's
a certain dollar amount that you can attach to reaching an audience of 1,000
people.
For example, you might decide to charge a $10 CPM for a banner advertisement on
your website. If the buyer agrees to buy 50,000 impressions of that ad, then
you'd charge them $10 × 50 = $500.
You'll then manage and track the ad on your website using ad manager tools.
You'll report success in displaying the ad at least 50,000 times (I encourage a
little over-delivery) and you'll you send the invoice at the end of the month
That's how it works when you charge based on CPM.
Effective CPM (eCPM) is the revenue you're generating per thousand readers when
you're charging a flat rate for something. It's good for comparison purposes.
Say I charge $500 for an ad to run on my website for a month — but instead of
50,000 impressions, I deliver 100,000 impressions of that ad. The eCPM for that
sale is $5.
Knowing the eCPM may help me decide if my monthly fixed price is too low or if I
might want to figure out how to switch things up and charge based on CPM.
Defining ROI
Return on Investment is easy to figure out: it's net profit divided by what it
costs to generate that profit (and then multiplied by 100 to get a percentage).
Say you make $500 by selling five days worth of digital advertising in your
daily newsletter, and it costs you $400 to produce that newsletter. In that
case, your net profit is $100. Divide that $100 by $400 and you get 0.25.
Multiply by 100 and you've got 25% ROI.
Net Profit (Revenue - Costs)
$500 - $400 = $100
ROI Calculation (Net Profit / Costs)
$100 ÷ $400 = 0.25
ROI Percentage
0.25 × 100 = 25%

A 25% ROI might be a healthy return on investment for a given publication (trust
me, I've seen much lower) or for a given revenue project, like a newsletter.
More importantly, it's useful when planning your revenue initiatives because you
can compare the projected ROI on your different ideas for generating digital
revenue.
These two numbers - eCPM and ROI - can go a long way toward helping you decide
how much time and energy to spend on your publication's digital revenue strategy
and which "legs of the stool" you'll focus more of your time on as you build out
that revenue.

ToddTip:
"Legs of the Stool"
I say this a lot when I'm coaching publishers. What I mean by "legs of the
stool" is that any revenue strategy—if it's meant to lead to sustainability for
your organization— will require more than one tactic.
For instance, legacy for-profit media might have these five tactics as part of
their overall revenue strategy:
print advertising

digital display (web and newsletter) advertising

paid content

reader revenue

events revenue

grants to pay for reporting projects

A non-profit media startup might focus on a different mix of revenues such as:
digital display ads

newsletter advertising

reader donations and VIP membership

grants and philanthropy for staff and operations

grants for reporting projects

If your goal is sustainability, you should think in terms of multiple streams of
revenue (tactics or legs) as you build our your revenue plan (strategy or
stool).


'True Fans': A Unifying Theory for Monetizing Local Media Web Traffic
There was a time when a primary revenue goal of a news-focused site was to
create a gazillion pageviews in order to increase the amount of digital
advertise you could sell. If you had enough traffic, you could sell advertising
directly to clients or agencies, or you could use automated "real-time-bidding"
services to fill the inventory, pocketing millions.
For independent local media outlets, however, this never really did succeed.
(These days, it really doesn't work for national media , either, although
programmatic can be a leg of the stool for the largest properties.)
And even if the "tons-of-traffic" strategy worked in the past, it relied on
referral traffic from social media and search engines that simply doesn't happen
these days at the same volume it once did.
1,000 True Fans
Today, successful local media outlets are better served by the 1,000 True Fans
principle first articulated by Kevin Kelly.
Put simply, this principle allows a creator to think in terms of building a fan
base of 1,000 people who each pay you $100 a year in revenue, resulting in
$100,000, which might be a decent living for an individual professional.
As Kelly notes, "1,000 fans" isn't an absolute, but more of an
order-of-magnitude calculation. (And it doesn't have to be exactly $100/year,
obviously. I like $120/year or $10/month as a baseline.) The number of True Fans
your publication has might depend on how much revenue you can honestly average
per fan and how much of your organization's overall revenues you want to
generate from digital sources.
Let's take a look at this by doing a little more math. What I want to do is very
broadly (and with some simple examples) talk about what sort of money you can
make from the people who visit your site, and why the True Fan concept is huge
part of that.
Digital Advertising Math: Value of a "Visitor"
We'll start by taking a look at digital advertising revenue for the visitors to
your site.
In this example we're looking at a website that has five ads on every page that
are sold at a $10 CPM. That's $50 in revenue per thousand pageviews, or about
$.05 per pageview. If our analytics tell us that we get 1.2 pageviews per
session, that makes a session worth $0.06. If we have 1 million sessions per
year from 375,000 users, then the value of a user is $0.12 per year.
eCPM for 1000 pageviews
$10 × 5 ads = $50 eCPM
Value of a pageview
$0.05
Pageviews per Session
1.2 ($0.06)
Annual Sessions
500,000
Annual Users
375,000
Value of a User
$0.12

Now the $45,000 that we generated in this scenario is nothing to sneeze at—it's
worth doing, and we can call that a leg of our revenue stool. But it's likely
not enough to make the venture worthwhile. Plus, the numbers get more
interesting as we get these users closer to True Fans.
Newsletter Math: Value of a "Subscriber"
Now let's assume that we've turned about 2% of those annual sessions into
newsletter subscribers. (Not an easy feat or something that will happen
overnight.) We've got 10,000 newsletter subscribers and we make $1,000 per month
off our newsletter by selling five ad slots for $200 per week each.
Here's that math:
Subscribers
10,000
Newsletter Revenue
$1,000/week
eCPM for 1000 subscribers
$10
Revenue per subscriber
$0.10
Annual Value of a Subscriber
$5.20

Wow. So just by getting someone to subscribe to a newsletter, and then
successfully meeting our ad sales goal, we see the value of that subscriber jump
up from cents to dollars.
Oh, and in this scenario, we're making $52,000 in annual revenue from our
newsletter, adding that to the $45,000 we made from web advertising.
Reader Revenue: Value of a "True Fan"
So, for a news publisher, what's a True Fan? I'm going to say a True Fan is a
donor or paid subscriber who meets an annual minimum amount of $120. They may
pay $120 a year in December during NewsMatch or $10/month starting the moment
they sign up. This could be a subscription that gets them full access to your
site, or maybe it's a donor category that gives the the right to call themselves
a VIP. (We've explore types of reader revenue in detail later.)
Either way, what we know is they're giving us money. So what might that look
like?
Donors/Paid Subscribers
1,000
Average monthly amount
$10
Annual value of a Donor/Paid Subscriber
$120

That one was easy. We're getting $120,000 from 1,000 True Fans which, as Kevin
Kelly noted, isn't a bad living for a content creator.
Let's total everything up.
Reader Level
Revenue
Visitor (Web Ad Revenue)
$45,000
Subscriber (Newsletter Ads)
$52,000
True Fan (Donor/Paid Subscriber)
$120,000
Total Digital Revenue
$217,000

When we add up all three levels of revenue, we're making $217,000 per year in
digital revenue for our local publication. That's decent revenue for at 2-4
person shop doing good work and enjoying their role in democratic society.
And for a growing media outlet that aspires to a larger newsroom, this digital
revenue represents a solid "leg of the stool."
Expand

What are "Table Stakes" in Journalism?

In the digital journalism ecosystem you'll hear a lot about "table stakes" which
references a program that started in February 2016 with the goal of looking at
the basic offerings any digital journalistic outfit needed to make it in the
21st century. "Table stakes" references the amount of money required to sit at a
poker table. It's the minimum you need to play. So what the Table Stakes concept
is for journalistic outlets are the seven "essentials" you need to thrive in
today's world. Check them out here:What are the Table Stakes — Table Stakes If
nothing else, thee are a great reference for thinking about what value your
publication offers to your community, and how you can be more effective and
relevant to your readers, thus resulting in more True Fans.


Filling the (Reader Revenue) Funnel
The sample math in the previous section shows the funnel in action.

1

Web Visitors
$0.12/year

2

Newsletter Subscribers
$5.20/year


3

True Fans (Recurring Paid)
$120/year

In our scenario, hundreds of thousands of people pour into the top of the funnel
because they come to read something interesting. They're shown some ads, and
each visitor is worth a few cents to our operations.
A percentage of those visitors decide to subscribe to our newsletter. If we do a
good job, they stick with us and become regular readers, which means they see
our newsletter ads on a regular basis and start to make up our local subscriber
audience. Now they're worth a few dollars to our publication over time. But
they're also part of a more "captive" audience—we have their email address—that
we can try to entice into being True Fans.
Finally, an even smaller percentage of all those original visitors (probably
something like 0.1-0.2%) become True Fans by signing up as donors or paid
subscribers. They love what we do, they want us to continue doing it, and
they're willing to pay for it. What journalist doesn't love that idea?
In chart form, it looks something like this:
Type of User
Value
How to Monetize
Who is Paying
Web Visitor
cents
digital advertising, upsell to newsletter subscription
advertisers
Newsletter Subscriber
dollars
newsletter ads, promoted emails, upsell to donor/paid, contesting, sell things
advertisers and local partners
Donor or Paid Subscriber
hundreds of dollars
pledge drives, special offers and experiences, higher tiers, personal thanks,
VIP perks
the reader

This can clearly get a little more nuanced, but hopefully it shows the value of
the funnel.
Yes, your news and information website is there primarily to publish news and
information. But from a revenue perspective, it's important to realize that your
website is the top of your funnel. Part of building an effective local media
website is making sure you craft a compelling argument for your visitors to
subscribe to your newsletter and your newsletter subscribers to become paid
donors or subscribers.
You're building (a.) a strong audience and (b.) a devoted tribe of True Fans,
both of which can significantly improve the sustainability of your news
operation.
Building your funnel should be the centerpiece of your revenue strategy as a
local publication. You want to fill the funnel and you want to monetize readers
at each level.
But perhaps even more important is to move as many down the funnel as possible,
get them to True Fan status—and then keep them there. (More on that in the
Readers Pay section.)

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published as part of the Digital Revenue Playbook for Local News Publishers.

Selling Display Ads on Your Site
Selling advertising isn't required of today's digital publisher. I know
non-profit digital publications that sell zero advertising and have seven-figure
budgets for their newsrooms.
But if you're a legacy print publisher in a local market, you're probably used
to the idea of selling ads. You've got a sales staff and everything.
If you're a startup publisher without that sort of experience, you may be wary
of the idea of selling advertising.
Let's start with the basics and see if and how selling digital advertising could
work for you.
Display is a Small Part of the Revenue Plan
Let's start with something obvious—wild success with digital advertising
requires a large audience. In fact, it really doesn't happen much anymore that
even national or international publications survive on digital advertising
alone, because (as we've seen) the revenues per reader are so low.
That said, it's still an important revenue tactic for many publishers. First, it
does represent some revenue you could take advantage of. Second, local
advertising can help communicate to your readers your relevance to the
community, and be a win-win for the advertiser and the publication. Third, niche
and local publications can often charge a premium for local advertising that
general news publications can't.
Your Primary Display Ad Revenue: Direct-Sold
For most local publishers, if you decide to sell display advertising on your
website (or mobile app or anywhere else in a digital format) the vast majority
of what you sell should be direct-sold advertising.
With direct-sold display ads, it's a lot like selling print advertising. You
choose a eCPM, set a price and frequency and go out and sell it to a local
business or organization.

Local Media Association + Local Media Foundation

How a new CMS changed audience and revenue outcomes for small publishers: Knight
report update

Progress ushered in after a new CMS launch takes time to show.  When we first
published the report, “Digital content platform upgrades for small media
outlets,” data from the four news companies — New York Amsterdam News, Houston
Defender Network, The Atlanta Voice and Washington Informer — was insufficient
to demonstrate the breadth and depth […]


One thing to remember about digital display advertising is that it's really more
like radio advertising than print—you've got a limited inventory and it's hard
to create a whole lot more.
If you've got five ad slots on a page, 100,000 pageviews per month and you sell
at a $10 eCPM, that's $5,000 in revenue per month or $60,000 per year. And
that's if you're really efficient with your sales. Of course, if you sell out
consistently, you can raise your rates, or charge for premium placement.
Expand

How to Price and Sell Display Ads

View more

Use Ad Management Software
Another note about digital advertising—I strongly suggest you have an ad
management tool that helps you rotate your ads on the site and that helps you
distribute ad impressions so you can fulfill what you sell. If you don't use a
tools such as Google Ad Manager , Broadstreet Ads or AdButler , then you can't
be as efficient with the delivery of your ads. That software is designed to
track impressions and deliver ads over time so that you fulfill what you agreed
to do for the advertiser.
Here's a simple example. I sell you an ad on my website for $100 for a week. I
can fulfill that one of two ways:
1.) I place the ad on my website so that it appears every time someone loads a
page to view a story, or
2.) I place the ad using ad management software, telling it to display the ad
10,000 times over the next week.
In the first example, if I have 20,000 pageviews where that ad is displayed,
I'll show that same ad 20,000 times, resulting in an eCPM of $5 and total
revenue of $100.
In the second example, if I have 20,000 pageviews on my site and I deliver
10,000 impressions for $100, and then I'm free to deliver 10,000 impressions of
another ad in that same ad slot, making my total revenue $200. Because I'm using
software to help me manage ad delivery, I can squeeze more productivity and
revenue out of each ad slot. Plus, with the ad management software I've also got
a nice report I can show both advertisers to prove I displayed the ad at least
as much as I promised.

That first case is really more of a "sponsored" model, where you sell a limited
number of sponsors to your website per week or month. If you don't have a lot of
web traffic, or you have only very limited bandwidth for ad sales, then the
sponsored model is a good start. You can sell five sponsors per week or month or
whatever works for you. Just make sure you do that eCPM calculation to make sure
you're not leaving revenue on the table.

What about 'Programmatic' Advertising?
Let's start with a definition. In the broadest sense, "programmatic advertising"
in the process of using automation to buy and sell digital advertising. Using
algorithms and technology, an advertising buyer can target specific audiences,
optimize their ad placements or pricing and deliver personalized ads in
real-time. For publishers, programmatic advertising gives you the opportunity to
take the "highest bid" for a given ad slot and deliver the ad in real-time to an
ad slot on your site.
That said, what we often are thinking when we say "programmatic advertising" is
one aspect of it: real-time bidding. That's what Adsense, AdX or a host of
third-party vendors can offer to your publishing website—the opportunity to sell
an ad slot on your website to the highest bidder (done automatically in
fractions of a second) without you needing to go out into your community and
sell an ad agreement directly to an advertiser.
In reality, real-time bidding for most local publishers doesn't generate a lot
of revenue. (In fact, it doesn't generate enough revenue to keep some big
publishers afloat .) That's because the price you can get for a programmatic ad
is almost always a lot lower than what you can get for direct-sold advertising.
Where your local advertisers might pay you a $10-30 CPM for an attractive,
effective ad your website (particularly if it's part of a package with your
newsletter and some other perks), you're likely to get less than a $1 CPM via
Adsense, or up to a few dollars per thousand from other programmatic channels.
It's not that you shouldn't consider programmatic, it's just not going to a
strong leg of your revenue stool.
Want to do some quick math? Let's say you have 100,000 pageviews this month and
I let Adsense manage that revenue, and it delivers $1 RPM (Revenue per thousand)
for those pageviews. That's $100. For publishers who get hundreds of thousands
(but not millions) of pageviews per month, AdSense can represent hundreds of
dollars in revenue (but not millions ;).
Instead, for most publishers I encourage you to think of programmatic
advertising (on your website) the way print publishers used to think of remnant
space in print. It's a way to make a little bit of money when you don't
otherwise have an ad sold for an impression on your website. The easiest way to
do this is to sign up for AdSense (which you need to do if you want a new Google
Ad Manager account anyway) and then you turn on Adsense fulfillment for ad units
on your site, as shown here in Google Ad Manager:

While you can actually serve AdSense advertising without using Google Ad Manager
or similar software, I don't recommend it. (It's called AutoAds , if you want to
check it out.) In most cases, if you want to work with programmatic advertising,
you'll need ad server software. Google Ad Manager works, and you'll have various
levels of success with software such as Advanced Ads (for WordPress) or services
such as Broadstreet Ads or AdButler . ( Revive , which I've never used, is an
open-source solution.)
Beyond AdSense, you can often get better CPMs when you use Google AdX for
real-time bidding ads, but as a smaller publisher you'll probably need a
go-between to help you access AdX—for instance, Newspack , the CMS for news
publishers from the company that developed WordPress, offers AdX access for
publishers using that platform. (If you're not on Newspack, you can ask Google
for AdX access and see if it works out.)
If you can't get direct AdX access, you can also look for third-party solutions
that give you backfill options for unsold digital revenue. MyCode Media , for
instance, offer this service in particular to publishers who serve audience of
color and LGBTQ+ communities with their publications. Others, such as
EmpowerLocal and InfoLinks , offer programmatic revenue solutions for publishers
who meet their content and audience criteria.

If there's anything else to say about programmatic advertising for local
publishers, it's that having the capacity to serve programmatic advertising can
be important when you're working with regional or national advertising agencies.
When the agencies representing Nissan and Wells Fargo come calling and want to
run on your website (maybe because of a buy through your state's press
association or the national publisher's association you belong to) you'll be
best served by already having Google Ad Manager or a similar solution in place.


ToddTip:
My Video Advertising 'Hack'
Easily my favorite digital ad slot when I ran the Jackson Free Press was
provided by a company called Teads . Using their software, I could have a video
ad appear between paragraphs of text in the middle of stories in both the
desktop and mobile display of stories on the site. (We called this "InReads"
because that's what Teads calls it; the industry calls them "in-article" video
ads.)
This was a very effective and very lucrative ad slot both for local sales and
for remnant revenue when I hadn't made a local sale.
In our case, a local car dealership bought a lot of this advertising inventory,
because (a.) it was an effective ad position that reached an audience the car
dealer wanted to reach and (b.) the dealer was proud of their locally produced
TV ads, which often featured a local comedian who was very familiar to many of
our readers.
In the example pictured, which was part of our sales one-sheet, the video opens
up between two paragraphs of text once the reader scrolls to that position in
the story.

Other advertisers who liked that slot included a local jeweler, a gregarious
local restaurant owner and, of course, politicians.
These ads were popular with folks who already had TV commercials (or other video
ads) that we could repurpose for our website, and those same people were used to
what TV advertising costs. I would price video ads at $25-$30 per thousand with
a plan to deliver about 20-25k impressions of the ad per week. That would mean
$3000 per month in additional digital ad revenue that didn't touch the other ads
slots on the page.
Teads has their own ad manager tool for place and pacing your direct-sold ads,
and then they fill in with remnant digital ads (in my experience they were
national food and cleaning brands, etc.) that would pay the publication a rate
much better than ad sense.
Probably my favorite thing about offering in-article video advertising is that
your publication doesn't have to produce any editorial video in order to justify
running video ads. That's why I call it a "hack." You can benefit from the
higher CPM and visibility of video ads without trying to become what I used to
joke would be "the fifth worst TV newscast in town."
Now, if you want to produce video… and you're good at it… and you can stick to a
regular schedule… and you think there's ROI in the costs to produce that video
vs. the ads you can sell against it… go ahead. (Or, if original video feeds in
your publication's overall editorial mission, that's a good reason too.) But if
your number one goal is to enjoy higher video CPMs and deliver them on your
local site with about the same effort it takes to distribute a display ad
campaign, this approach works.

Newsletter Advertising: Good Money in the Middle of Your Funnel
One of my favorite thing about digital newsletters is that selling advertising
in newsletters can be very similar to selling local print advertising. A lot of
the metrics are similar. You can tell your advertisers that we have X number of
subscribers, that we send the newsletter Y times per week and that the cost of
the ad is Z over a given period of time.

In the above example, which came from a Jackson Free Press sales sheet, we sold
ads on our daily newsletter (we published Mon-Fri) for $500 per week. We'd offer
discounts for a longer-term agreement—a month or more. If you just wanted a day
or two it could be a little more expensive, like $150 per day.
Let's do a little math: 16,000 subscribers * five days = 80,000 readers so the
potential eCPM on a $500 weekly buy is about $6.25 per thousand subscribers.
However, since our open rates were around 25%, real readership each week was
closer to 20,000, meaning an eCPM of about $25.
So if our weekly newsletter had four ad slots and we sold them all at this
price, that's $8,660 per month or almost $104k per year. The JFP Daily
newsletter didn't feature any full stories — it was designed to get people to
click through to the stories online. So that meant the newsletter both generated
revenue and boosted our online traffic on a daily basis. While it took a little
effort to produce and send, the real effort was the daily reporting and editing
that generating the online stories in the first place.

We didn't sell out all four ads often—one was usually reserved for a house ad.
But if we did sell out, guess what the plan would have been? Add another ad
slot. Unlike Web display advertising, you can easily add more inventory (within
reason) by creating another ad position in your newsletter, by publishing more
frequently or by starting additional, more specialized newsletters.

One note about the example image above of the JFP's newsletter—in that sample
image, you'll see that it's a desktop version that isn't mobile responsive.
These days I wouldn't advise that. We loved those big 300×600 pixel ads down the
side of the newsletter, but the truth is that most people read the news on
mobile devices. So your email newsletter should be designed with inline mobile
ads—most likely 300×250 pixel ads—that show up between sections and stories. For
instance, Arkansas Times has attractive display ads in their mobile-friendly
newsletter, shown below. Note the local credit union ad (man, do I love credit
unions that advertise) and then the headlines from the newsletter.

Another bonus: The advertising you place in newsletters can be very effective
for your local advertisers, especially for those advertisers with upcoming
events. At the JFP, I loved selling newsletter ads to local nonprofits who had
fundraising events coming up, or to the local theater for the opening of a new
play.
Promoters, museums, politicians, environmental activists, restaurants for
holidays, the bakery for Mardi Gras, the candy shop for Valentine's
Day—everybody can come up with a time-based Call to Action (CTA) for their
advertising, and while those can be effective in display ads, I think they
really shine in local newsletters.

I think one other thing to remember is that newsletter advertising can be part
of a smart mix for your advertisers. A package of advertising that includes
display ads, newsletter ads, social media advertising—plus paid content and
print (if you offer either of those)—can be a good way for them to make sure
they reach all the different ways readers engage with your publication. You can
always offer a "multichannel" discount—say, 20% off everything when you buy ads
in two or more channels (web, newsletter and print) for instance.
Expand

What about programmatic ad serving for newsletters?

This is absolutely a thing. The two benefits to this are you can traffic and
track your newsletter advertising in whatever tool you use for the display
advertising—Google Ad Manager, Broadstreet, AdButler, etc. and you can automate
the display of newsletter ads so they start on stop when they're supposed to.
When you set up your ads this way, you should be able to get good metrics on
when the ads are viewed and clicked, and, depending on your setup, you can use
your ad server to optimize the ads that are shown in your newsletter. (In fact,
you may even be able to pull programmatic or remnant advertising into your
newsletter.) The bad news? It can get a lot more complicated than just dragging
the ad image into your newsletter layout. You'll need to check the documentation
for your ad manager (ex: Broadstreet), your Email Service Provider (Mailchimp,
Active Campaign, etc.) and whatever tools you're using to produce your
newsletter.


Building Your Email List
In order to sell some lucrative newsletter advertising, you're going to need a
nice-sized email list. Plus, a large list of engaged readers can be valuable for
other reasons, as well:
Your email list is the middle of your funnel—email subscribers can be enticed
into becoming donors, VIP members or subscribers.

Your list allows you to a lot of other interesting things, such as selling
sponsored content, throwing in-person events (or marketing other people's events
effectively), contesting, surveying and implementing other calls-to-action that
reach thousands of people in your local area at once.

So how do you build the list? Here are some quick ideas, and I'll reference some
others I'll go into more depth on in later sections.
CTAs and pop-ups. On your website, make sure you have very obvious subscription
buttons and pop-ups. You might consider a subscription box inline for every
story or at least at the bottom of every post.

QR codes. Put them on your business cards, leave-behinds, apparel, cars—anything
that represents your publication in public. (Get some great ideas from Local
News Blues .)

In-person. Sign people up at the table you place at outdoor events and
festivals. At JFP, we would sign people up then give them a chance to spin our
wheel (we had a table-top wooden wheel a little like Wheel of Fortune) for free
movie passes, gift cards and other small merch.

Contesting. One of the big ways (discussed later as well) that weeklies across
of the country add to their email lists is by requesting an email when they give
something away. Free concert tickets, restaurant gift cards and so on can be
promotions with advertising partners where you both get the emails that sign up
to win. (This is also a way you can use your email list to help a local business
or partner build their list… for a price.)

Balloting. Start a "Best of" contest and use the balloting software to request
an email address with an "opt-out" option for the newsletter. You can add
thousands of emails per year this week. (More on that in the contesting section
.)

I've also got one "don't." Don't buy an email list. You want, at a minimum,
someone to have expressed at least some interest in your publication before you
send them your newsletter or any other folks in town. After all, you've got a
publication with the ability to reach people. Use it!

Sponsored Content: Is It For You and Your Publication?
When the concept of sponsored content or "native content" (advertising that
looks like it's "native" to your site instead of a visual ads that stands apart
from your stories) first came on the scene, there was a great deal of
skepticism. The idea of ads that work like stories sounds like "advertorial" to
a lot of long-time journalists, and it seemed like a major breech of trust with
readers, who expect us to tell the truth about something regardless of who is
paying us to reach them with an advertising message.
While some of that skepticism remains, sponsored content has proven to be a very
popular way for local publishers to generate revenue from local, regional and
national advertisers.
Sponsored content offers a few advantages for the advertiser:
1.) It allows advertisers to engage with the audience in a more authentic and
less intrusive manner, as the content seamlessly integrates with the rest of the
site's material.
2.) it provides an opportunity for advertisers to tap into the trust and
credibility of the publication, enhancing their brand image.
3.) It lets the advertiser (or your team, writing on their behalf) explain their
offering better in a combination of photos and story-length content.
From the newspaper's perspective, sponsored content allows publications to
diversify their revenue streams and maintain financial independence
while—ideally—offering content about local businesses, organizations and brands
that actually is relevant and beneficial for readers.
So how do you do it? First, you'll want to set some pricing. Broadstreet offers
some recommendations where the price for a sponsored content article ranges from
$250-$1,500 or more depending on how much work your team has to put into it and
how prominently you display the article. (You might also have discounts for
packages of articles or special pricing for entire sections of your website if
they're sponsored by one company.)
Next, you'll want to make sure your CMS will help you mark the content as
SPONSORED or PAID. Triad City Beat in Greensboro, N.C. makes it pretty clear:

Once you've got the price worked out and you know your site is set up for
sponsored content, the rest of the task is to produce a good story in
conjunction with that sponsor.
You want content that is compelling, honest and valuable to the reader, both so
that it's effective as a marketing piece and so it doesn't make the reader think
any less of your publication. Avoid content that is spammy, cheerleading or
overly press release-y.

Actually, a section of your website where local businesses and organizations can
pay you to post a press release isn't a bad idea, as long as you label it as
paid content.
Offer to help your advertiser produce content that your readers will appreciate,
that informed the reader about the organization and makes a geniune valuable
offer for their time and/or money.
This works really well for newsletter advertising, too! You shouldn't be afraid
of paid content that is well-marked, useful to your reader but appears in story
format. Here's a great example from Jessica Yellin's "News Not Noise"
newsletter. The sponsored content has a logo and is visually offset from the
editorial content, but it's still effective for the advertiser:

Expand

Linking to Advertisers via Sponsored Content

When you publish sponsored content on your site, you will likely need to decide
whether or not links back to the sponsoring company's website—and how many of
those you want to do on a regular basis. Links from a news website (particularly
if you do great content, are popular and have been around for a while) can
confer SEO authority to the sites that are linked from it. For paid content, you
can use the rel=sponsored tag in the link's anchor tag so that the link doesn't
confer any special SEO authority to the sponsoring site because it's on your
website. For example: <a href="https://www.localco.com/" rel="sponsored">See
Local Co's website</a> Many of the businesses or organizations buying sponsored
content what may you to link without the sponsored tag, but enough of those
could eventually cause your site to be penalized by Google in search results. So
be careful. The content and exposure are still very valuable to local business
and hopefully the ones you want to work with understand it's important to play
by the rules.

Another place where you can place sponsored content for your advertisers is in
your social media feeds. As a media outlet, you may have a larger or different
reach than the advertiser. Selling them a "sponsored" social media post (or,
more likely, a series of posts, along with some boosting to make sure it gets
traction) can help then generate awareness of an upcoming event, ticket sales, a
holiday promotion or the contest you're helping them run to get more followers
or email subscribers. (See the Contests for Advertisers section later in the
playbook.)

Great stuff, right? Subscribe!
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When Your Readers Pay: Donations
When I ran a local "free-on-the-streets" weekly, the idea of charging readers
seemed like a mortal sin. (It was right up there with paid content.) While paid
subscriptions have been common for local daily papers for a long, long time, we
in the industry knew that having readers "pay for the paper" wasn't the main
revenue stream for a newspaper; at best, those subscriptions fees offset some of
the printing and distributions costs. It was the ads that made money.
10 years ago we couldn't even fathom the idea of asking readers to donate to the
newspaper. We weren't a charity. Sure, we'd heard of the public radio model, but
it didn't occur to many of us to simply ask our readers for money—or that we
even could.

Editor and Publisher

Honolulu Civil Beat now thriving as a nonprofit - E&P

Honolulu City Beat, now a non-profit, has over 7,500 donors averaging $12/month
bringing in over $1 million a year in recurring revenue.


For many local non-daily publishers, the idea of generating either reader
donations or subscriptions started hitting its stride as the newspaper industry
went through the major economic challenges that started with the collapse of
classifieds ( thanks Craig! ) and accelerated during and after the Great
Recession of 2008.
For a lot more publishers, the pandemic years of 2020-21 were when we first
really started dabbling in donations, memberships and reader revenues—and, in
many cases, had some success doing it.
Now that we're past the crisis days of the pandemic, reader revenue is here to
stay as a significant "leg of the stool" of local media revenue. If you read the
earlier section on True Fans, you'll note that getting those fans to pay you
directly is key to that strategy's success.
So, how do you do it? Let's look at donations, memberships and paywalls.

Folks are doing hard work in local media ecosystem to develop software and
strategies that work well together for growing digital publications and
revenues. In this story, a number of legacy African American newspapers got help
from the Knight Foundation, Get Current Studios and Newspack to move forward
with impressive digital revenue tools—and results.

Local Media Association + Local Media Foundation

How a new CMS changed audience and revenue outcomes for small publishers: Knight
report update

Progress ushered in after a new CMS launch takes time to show.  When we first
published the report, “Digital content platform upgrades for small media
outlets,” data from the four news companies — New York Amsterdam News, Houston
Defender Network, The Atlanta Voice and Washington Informer — was insufficient
to demonstrate the breadth and depth […]


Reader Donations
Asking readers to donate to your publication has become very common for media of
all sizes, worldwide. The idea that readers would support local news
publications the same way they support public radio in the U.S.—or, for that
matter, the way they support local museums, arts organizations or other
public-service charities—has become a common a critical revenue stream for many
news publishers.
The way I'm defining it, a donation is a one-time thing, at least in the sense
that it's something the reader decides to do, does, and then moves on. They may
donate again in the future, but to do so they need to go through the donation
process again. That's as opposed to some sort of recurring payment they set
up—we'll call those either memberships or subscriptions.

In the parlance of this revenue playbook, recurring donors and True Fans are
basically the same thing. I love a good one-time donation, but what we're
ultimately working toward is getting someone to set up a regular payment, either
monthly or annually. In some ways, one-time donors are "jumping the funnel"
because they go straight from being a visitor to being a supporter. But, if we
thank them for the donation, collect their email address (if they'll give
permission) and keep them engaged through our email newsletter and occasion
appeal, it's likely you'll turn some of them into True Fans.
A donation may be an impulse purchase for the reader—like buying a candy bar
while waiting in line at the grocery store. (You know… that one line that still
has a human checker.) For instance, a reader decides to give you a few bucks
after reading a story they appreciate. Or they decide to give during your pledge
drive because there's a matching gift they want to help you take advantage of.
For that reason, we need to focus on making it easy for the reader to make that
donation. We want to avoid friction in the transaction—and usually, that has to
do with how we write the appeal and configure the software that accepts the
money.
The Donation Appeal
If you plan to accept donations, you'll need some appeal or calls to action
(CTAs) on your website and in your email newsletters. These should be visually
prominent in places where a reader will see them while they're reading a story
on your website. Again, it's like those shelves of candy at the grocery story
checkout line—they make an impulse purchase easier.
Here's an example—I'm always impressed with how the Guardian, based out of the
UK (although I'm looking at the US version here) shapes their appeals and makes
it easy to donate. This box appeared at the bottom of a story I read this
morning.

The tools for donating are right there in the appeal box. You can even choose
monthly or annual. This creates very little friction for a reader who is ready
to give some money to a publication they visit frequently or otherwise
appreciate.
Expand

Deep Dive: Marketing Your Publication

To get people to "buy what you're selling," you're going to need to do some
marketing of your publication. Linked below is an interview by the American
Press Institute with Tim Griggs, CEO of Blue Engine Collaborative and a
long-time coach and thought-leader in the journalism ecosystem. I particularly
like his answers about how to engage your readers and community your
publication's value proposition beyond platitudes such as "support local
journalism." You've got to make it more personal and meaningful—and you'll do
that by testing and measuring results.Driving revenue and sustainability

Donation Software
The other part of accepting donations is having the software that can do it. The
software that the Guardian uses for collecting donations looks pretty
sophisticated with those options designed to make the donation easy. They
probably had somebody write it for them, which could be expensive. Fortunately,
there's plenty of software out there designed to make donations easy on the web.
When I first started accepting donations at the Jackson Free Press, it was
actually about six months before the pandemic set in. We accepted one-time
donations was via Paypal, which offers a very simple Paypal.com/paypalme/ tool
for Paypal account holders.
The Mississippi Free Press currently uses software called Givebutter , which
isn't specifically designed for news publications, but does give them tools that
make it easy to accept donations and track those donations for sending "thank
you" messages and receipts (particularly important if you're non-profit).

Mississippi Journalism and Education Group

Give Now to Grow MFP Journalism in 2023!

Help us grow our newsroom in Mississippi and our systemic reporting to make a
difference for our home state and beyond.


One thing the MFP team likes about Givebutter is that each campaign page has a
place where donors can say why they're donating. From the perspective of the
publication, it's nice to get these messages, and they're probably also good
marketing when others land on the page and see great things being said about the
publication.

Other popular tools for collecting donations include DonorBox and News Revenue
Hub's RevEngine . My recommendation is that you use something that collects
names and email addresses, works with multiple payment options (Venmo, Google
Pay, Apple Pay, etc.) and helps you send thank you notes and receipts for those
donations.

I'm not an accountant or attorney so you should consult one (or both) when it
comes to how you account for donations at your organization. If you're a
for-profit media outlet, you probably can't offer any tax benefits to your
donors, unless you have a non-profit organization or a fiscally-sponsored fund
for accepting tax-deductible donations. (The Alternative Newsweekly Foundation ,
which we work with on various projects at AAN, can offer local publications
fiscal sponsorship for reporting or other projects.)
I will also note that if the software you use for donations allows you to ask
your donors to join your email or SMS newsletter, I'd highly encourage that.
Once they're engaged as one-time donors, it much more likely they could become
recurring donors or "members" down the road.
Donor Campaigns
I'm talking about campaigns in this "Donors" section instead of later in the
"Members" section, because what I've seen first-hand is that you get more
one-time donors during one of two events:
A story that goes viral with big traffic, or

during major giving campaigns such as NewsMatch in Nov-December, #GivingNewsDay
on Tuesday after Thanksgiving in the US, and then whatever other campaigns you
decide to throw throughout the year.

First, let's talk about NewsMatch . Proctored and promoted by the Institute for
Nonprofit News, the program provides matching dollars for non-profit members of
INN who qualify under the guidelines. The amount that they'll match for your
non-profit newsroom will vary based on your size, how many publications
participate in NewsMatch and how much money they raise—but that amount is almost
secondary to the campaign itself.
NewsMatch is a wonderful opportunity for any local publication to focus on new
donors (and new members) during the holiday season each year, and to campaign
not just for donations, but to also come up with your own local matches (from
local philanthropy, big donors, businesses, professionals or other supporters)
to encourage small donors during the "match."

If you're a non-profit news outlet, you should definitely participate in
NewsMatch AND develop local matches so that you can get more than just the
amount in your official NewsMatch each year. (The Mississippi Free Press takes
in hundreds of thousands of dollars during NewsMatch, even though the
INN-provided match is around $10k.)
If you're a for-profit news outlet, you should work on potential supporters and
sponsors earlier in the year and see if they'll donate a match during NewsMatch.
Part of the pitch to those partners is all of the marketing promotion they'll
get during the matching period and the goodwill that can go along with being a
local corporate match.
"PetPals on Main is matching the next $1,000 in donations to OurTown
Independent" is a great way for the partner to be a part of the solution, double
your impact and make a little noise about themselves; the same can work for
attorneys, accountants, lawyers and so on.
# GivingNewsDay is that same energy focused on a single national day of
non-profit giving called GivingTuesday . Basically it's a clever hashtag and
campaign to get a little steam for your donor campaign while folks are thinking
along the lines of charitable and non-profit giving.
Whenever you decide to run your campaigns, realize that it's during that time
that you'll likely get the bulk of your donors and members. Come up with excuses
to start (and stop) these campaigns so that you can focus your marketing and
efforts on (1.) asking for money and (2.) thanking your donors in ways that make
them feel like they're appreciated.
That puts them on the road to being True Fans.

Here's a tip—at the Mississippi Free Press, they make a point of calling every
donor, even if the donor only gives a few dollars. 95% of the time the person is
surprised and happy to hear from the MFP. This is a wonderful way to say thank
you, but it also can help develop the relationship so that the reader donates
again in the future or signs up as a recurring donor.
It's certainly a nice way to stand out from the crowd.
Memberships: Getting Paid By True Fans
Ah, we've finally gotten to those True Fans. While one-time donors are lovely,
lovely people, a lot of those one-time donations come as a result of viral
stories or giving campaigns.
Memberships might come as a result of campaigns as well, but the recurring
revenue they represent—along with the long-term relationship implications—are
why I think that in order to call someone a True Fan they need to be a
recurring-revenue member (I call them "VIP Readers") and not a one-time donor.
VIP Readers represent recurring revenue, and recurring revenue is great for a
few reasons:
Consistent baseline revenues for budgeting. If you build up your membership, you
can start to budget against those anticipated revenues and feel good about your
spending. (That generally helps the founder or CEO sleep at night.)

Helps sell advertising and sponsorship. A based of paid subscribers is "social
proof" for your publication that can go in your media kit and help encourage
advertisers that there's a loyal audience they can tap into. Likewise those True
Fans might represent a group of folks you can activate to help you impress
advertisers and sponsors because you can "influence" them to show up, buy
tickets, attend the talk, cash bomb a local business, and so on.

Looks good for grants and project dollars. Recurring revenue from readers can
help you get other revenue for your organization, including from sponsors and
advertisers (an engaged audience willing to pay you is a selling point) and from
grantors and philanthropy. Big supporters love to know that you've got the
basics covered with "earned revenue" like readers memberships, because it means
the money they invest in your reporting goes directly to editorial impact.

So how do you get readers to sign up as members? Most of the time, the journey
is the one defined in the funnel back in the True Fans section. You get Web
visitors to sign up as newsletter subscribers, then you encourage your
newsletter subscribers to become members.
To do that, you may need a program.
Design Your VIP Reader Program
Let's be clear—your True Fans are supporting you because they're fans, not
because they want the mug. Especially at the outset, I discourage you from
creating physical merchandise that you hand out in exchange for memberships—that
tends to make things a little too transactional. Instead, I'd recommend starting
with recognition and access for your reader membership program, and then you can
play with other ideas as they come up.
Here are a few ideas:
1.) Name them. I like to call members something like "VIPs." If your readers are
the Main Street Gazette VIPs ("Become an MSG VIP today and support our work")
then they stand out from other readers on the site, and they know what they're
signing up for.
2.) Give recognition. All of you VIP members can show up on your website
somewhere on a thank you page, and you can consider rotating them through other
places. New VIPs can show up in your newsletter once per week or you can list
them all once a quarter in a special newsletter edition. Thank them on social
media as they come in, as they renew or hit milestones. You might even take a
few VIPs every day or week and make them "sponsors" or "patrons" of the
newsletter that week, right at the top of the page.
3.) Offer virtual access. It's possible that some of your True Fans became VIPs
because they like you or they follow members of your team. A quarterly ZOOM call
with you investigative reporter or your local government reporting team could go
a long way with them. You can also have your staff interview newsmakers or bring
recognizable local celebrities and leaders into a ZOOM room with your VIPs.

Want to take the ZOOM meeting a bit further? Your editors can teach
memoir-writing courses or your marketing team could teach social media
principles. A local historian can come chat about the area. A few local
musicians can talk about the music scene. A museum curator could talk about fine
art. And so on and so on.
4.) Meet up IRL. Grab the corner of a restaurant, coffee house or bar and invite
your VIPs out to visit with you. It doesn't have to be a big event: You can buy
a couple of plates of appetizers and tell them to buy their own drinks. The MFP
makes a point of holding a "VIP Lounge" whenever the management team visits a
city in the state or around the country. And access isn't actually limited to
existing recurring donors (although that's who they invite via email)—anyone is
free to bring a friend. What the MFP does tend to get is a little extra
financial support, leads on other donors and philanthropic possibilities, local
story tips and off-the-record discussion that can help inform their reporting.
5.) Partner for Perks. If you're working with local advertisers or sponsors in
your market then look for ways that you can partners for discounts, deals and
giveaways for you VIP readers. This might work particularly well if your VIPs
can get deals for other membership around town to the art museum, local theater
company or any special discounts offered by your CVB or Chamber. And if the
local falafel hut (or Toyota dealer!) wants to offer discounts to your VIPs,
that's another nice option. Again, I wouldn't go too far down this road, because
you don't want to turn support for your publication into a transaction that
feels like they're paying for a coupon book and evaluating the deals against the
"cost" of their VIP membership. Keep this at the "happys" level.
Sign Up, Track and Retain VIP Readers
I believe that just offering some of these VIP items—particularly recognition
and access—will help with retention. Even if a VIP reader doesn't take advantage
of the quarterly meet-ups with your editorial staff or the ZOOM interview
sessions with authors and former governors, the fact that they're happening will
help keep them.
But, first, we've got to sign them up. How?
The Donor Platform: Recurring Payments
Before we talk about the appeals for VIPs, we need to talk about the basics. In
order to sign up regular contributors, you'll need a system that accepts regular
contributors and processes their payments. While a number of payment
processors—Paypal, Square, Stripe, etc.—offer the ability to process recurring
payments, the main issue is usually what you use for the front-end interface for
your recurring payments.
Again, GiveButter can do this, as can many nonprofit-oriented donor platforms
such as Donorbox , Fundly , Network for Good and Little Green Light . There are
a few donor platforms that are a bit more tailored for donors to news
publishers, such as News Revenue Hub , and some others that are aimed at content
creators, such as Memberful and Hype . ( GiveWP is an interesting tool that's
not an online service as much as it is a plug-in for WordPress that connects to
payment processors. Might be nice if you've got some WordPress design or
developer chops on your team.)
Which tool you use is up to you. If there are a few things to consider, they
would be:
1.) Multiple choice. Some tools will put one-time donations and recurring
donations into the same user experience. When your user can pick a one-time
donation vs. a monthly donation on the same screen you might be able to tempt
them toward the monthly (or annual) recurring payment.

2.) Friction. One concept in all sorts of e-commerce and online transactions
(which is what we're doing, right?) is the though out avoiding friction in the
transaction which might slow things down and get your donor to bail. If a donor
is faced with too many screens, or too much form-filling is required, they could
give up. The answer is often to use pop-ups and short answers to move them
along.

3.) Content controls. This may or may not be important to you, but it's worth
nothing that software designed for non-profit donations probably doesn't offer
special access to content on your website or elsewhere. Software designed for
content creators ( Memberful , GiveWP , News Revenue Engine ) can help you also
subscribe donors to special new newsletters, podcasts, Discord channels (for
chat) or special sections of the website. If you plan VIP-only content, this
might be important to you.
Customer Relationship Manager (CRM)
A Customer Relationship Manager, or CRM, tool will be important if you're going
to go far with reader membership. CRM comes to us from the world of sales—it's a
database that you use to track your prospects and customers. Think Salesforce .
The point is that you can track your interactions with your "customers" and
learn more about them over time. In the non-profit world, CRM tools such as
Virtuous , Bloomerang and DonorPerfect enable you to track the calls and appeals
you send to potential donors, screen their wealth using online tools and
generally strategize about how you're going to get them to donate to your
organizations.
Many donor platforms offer some level of CRM tools, at least for tracking the
donors, sending thank you emails, receipts and so on. Companies like BlueLena
and News Revenue Hub are working to intergrate more CRM tools into their
offerings, such that the database of your e-mail subscribers and donors can
become a repository of first-party data that can be useful both for reader
revenue and for helping you target your advertising.
For internal use, the CRM can tell you when donors are coming up for renewal,
how long they've been donors, whether or not they've changed their giving level
and other such tidbits of information. This allows to put some tactics in place
for keeping them—birthday messages, personal VIP-only invites to events in their
local area, survey for their opinion, offer a VIP-only giveaway, reminders of
how important they are a few months out from their anniversary date, and so on.
Software can help you track and retain these True Fans so that everyone
continues to enjoy the relationship.
How Do You Get More VIPs? Ask!
So how do we get folks to sign up as VIPs? The most obvious path is via the
funnel that we've discussed previously. Your email newsletter subscribers have
expressed a level of interest in your content and your organization. So, when
you send them an email newsletter, you should include at least a casual appeal
for them to become members on a regular basis, and then a more overt appeal a
little lesson often. (You decide—that could be monthly, quarterly, or during a
couple major VIP membership drives of the year.)
I suggest you create a landing page on your website that outlines your VIP
program, offers some quotes from happy VIPs and/or your staff about the
importance of the program and offers a sign-up form. You can recommend some
monetary levels for VIPs—$10/mo, $25/mo, $50/mo, $100/mo—and then offer a box
where they can fill in their own levels. I wouldn't worry too much about
offering additional benefits for the higher amounts, although you could name
them something different ("Platinum VIP") and recognize them that way on the
website and in your other materials.
VIPs—True Fans—are there to support you. Most people just want recognition and
thanks for the support they give to other people and organizations. When we're
talking about reader donations, I truly believe that you should avoid making it
transactional, and focus more on what you'd like the relationship to be: They
support your journalism, which they believes improves your community. And you
thank them for the support.

Remember the "swag" discussion? I actually like the idea of doing in-person swag
or random giveaways more than the PBS approach of giving everybody a mug or yoga
DVD. If you print up some caps or mugs, announce random winners on your VIP
list, send them on donor anniversaries, or just hand them out at live events as
marketing perks. (Oh, and remember that caps and visors are one-size-fits-all
while t-shirts are not.)
For non-profit media (and I'm not an attorney or accountant) that might also be
way to avoid having to figure out the net value of a donation (minus the swag
gift) for the donor's receipt.
Once you've gotten VIP readers signed up, I think the other important thing to
do is keep following up. If you're going to offer a VIP-only newsletter, then do
it at the cadence you promise. (My suggestion would be as infrequently as you
think is viable—maybe once every other month or once a quarter.) If you promise
to have ZOOM or in-person meetups, then do them. If you're going to have special
speakers or topical online webinars, make sure you get them on a calendar and
produce them on a regular cadence.

I have a general tip for anyone who decides to publish something, whether you're
a news outlet, a non-profit with a newsletter or a local business sending out
the deals of the week.

Here's the advice: Pick a cadence and stick to it. If you're promise a weekly
newsletter, publish it weekly. If you can't pull that off, only promise monthly.
But whatever you say you're going to do, make sure it's something you can pull
off… and then, pull it off!
Expand

How do you land big donors?

In my experience, every once in a while you'll get a big donation for your media
enterprise — $500, $1,000, maybe even $5,000—through your online donation tool.
In most cases, that's probably the limit. If you want larger donations, then you
need to meet with people and make the ask. How? Your existing e-mail subscribers
and donors are a good start. Using non-profit CRM software, you can access
wealth-screening tools (DonorSearch is popular and sometimes intergrated with
non-profit CRM tools) to let you know when a given donor is worth more money and
when they're known for giving to causes. Then, you reach out to set up a
meeting. Remember when I mentioned that the Mississippi Free Press calls all
their donors? That habit can make it easier to reach out to the big donors, as
well, because, in one way, you're treating them like everyone else—showing
appreciation at the outset. The process is really like any sales call, except
the pitch is generally more about helping people (your readers and their
communities) than it is about making money. You should have donor materials that
discuss how you spend your donor's money and perhaps projects that might
interest the donor. But remember this. Your goal is to build a relationship with
the donor, not just get the donation. Once you get on the phone or in person
with a potential big donor, you need to listen to them. Sit back with your
coffee or lunch and ask good questions (you're a journalist — or
journalist-adjacent — right?) to get them talking about what's important to
them. Ask how they make the decision to support causes. Brent Weaver at uGurus
teaches the concept (he's a nerdy-ish web developer teaching others to have web
development agencies) that "relationships = interactions over time." One
recommendation is to keep your meetings short as a rule—30-minute calls or
50-minute in-person meetings—and plan more of them with a potential donor (or a
sales prospect). The argument is that meeting more often for shorter amounts of
time builds a relationship faster than meeting fewer times for hours-and-hours.
Even if it feels like you're "really hitting it off" and have a three-hour happy
hour with a donor, the next call or meeting may be tougher to set up than it
would be if you still have a lot to discuss after 50 minutes. Once you know more
about what the donor wants, you can pitch your idea for how they can help. It
may even be a later meeting. The pitch should include a discussion of their
priorities, how your organization's goals address those priorities, and how
their donation is going to help you with your organization's goals. Note that it
can be tempting to craft a project or suggest that you "hire a reporter" in
order to land that whopping $50,000 or $100,000 from a new donor. Fight that
temptation. Instead, focus on the synergies between the donor and your
organization and do what you can to ask for funds that are unrestricted and can
be used for your general operations. One other note on big donors—having some
can make it easier to get more. In The Raising of Money by Jim Lord (a great
book to read if you're getting into the donations game), one of his suggestions
revolves around the idea of the "peer ask." The principle here is that if one of
your big donors goes to a wealthy friend saying "Cynthia, I think the Sidewalk
Free Press is something you should look into, I'm giving $50,000 this year, and
if you kick in they can do a lot more environmental coverage," that's a much
easier way to get the donation. If you can get your existing supporters, donors
or board members to help you make the ask—or make the introduction and/or go on
the meeting with you—that can be a big boost. I'd say you're probably more
likely to get big donors when you're a non-profit, just because the tax
implications are more significant at that level, and, frankly, many big donors
are specifically looking for tax benefits when they donate. That said, if you're
a for-profit and you're going after big donors, these days it's fairly easy to
set up fiscally-sponsored non-profit fund that you can use to fund
investigations, reporters and other parts of your operation. The Alternative
Newsweekly Foundation is a sister organization to AAN that can help you get
started. You could also look to your local community foundation or a similar
organization to be a fiscal sponsor, which could also confer some credibility
for local donors. Setting up fiscal agency shows you're serious about the way
donated money is handled, and your fiscal agent will know the lingo and be able
to help with things like donor-assisted funds, family foundations and other
inside baseball comes up in the donations game. (And they can give you better
advice than me on the tax front—I'm not an accountant or lawyer!)


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When Your Readers Pay, Part Deux: Subscriptions
The paywall.
I've mentioned that I come from alt-weekly background. For most alt-weeklies,
especially in the heyday of being the local "alternative" to the daily (often
corporate, chain) newspaper in our towns, the idea of having a paywall was pure
anathema. And I find as I talk to startup publications these days, publishers
generally fall into two camps, when it comes to subscriptions:
1.) Readers should pay for the news.
2.) We can't possible force our readers to pay to read the news.
The most important thing I want to say about paywalls in this playbook is this:
The difference between a paywall and a donation is that you're turning the
relationship into a transaction (subscription) instead of a gift of support
(donation). Both have their pros and cons, but if you're trying to make the
decision of how you're going to go about developing a reader revenue program, I
think you should start there. Do you want to be more transactional? And, can you
justify that?

Don't skip this section just because you're Team Donor vs. Team Subscriber. As
you'll see in just a few paragraphs, paywall software can actually work for both
approaches.
What Makes it a Subscription?
Let me define what I mean by transactional and we'll think through some of the
process you need to put into place to succeed with a paywall. For instance,
you'll need:
1.) Paywall software. This is sometimes easier said than done. You'll want to
implement software on your website that makes it easy for you to decide what
sits behind the paywall and what doesn't. You'll also want it to do a good job
of accepting payments, registering your users, accepting their passwords,
helping them reset their passwords and so on. You probably also want to make
sure it isn't easy to fool but using a different device or an incognito window
to bypass the paywall and read your stories.
2.) A customer service mindset—and maybe a dedicated employee or two. Once
people are paying for a subscription to your publication, they're going to
expect it to work, and they'll likely expect more from you than if they were
simply a donor. So, you need to plan accordingly. I've spoken with development
officers at non-profit publications that opted for paywalls, and they have
lamented to me that their jobs are often more about hand-holding people through
the login process than they are about wining-and-dining big donors to add
revenue to their philanthropy leg-of-the-stool.
3.) A set price. Because subscriptions are more transactional, you'll want to
set a base price for what it takes to get past your firewall. Often, your reader
will select that price—say, $10 per month—because they want to read you content
and they'll pay the minimum required. That's as opposed to VIP donors, who are
giving money to support you, and might be willing to do $25 per month, $50 per
month or more.
4.) Content worth paying for. One of my favorite sayings is "The best way to
make money on the Internet is to tell people how to make money on the Internet."
The same is basically true for subscription content—people are more apt to pay
for content that benefits them monetarily or adds quality to their lives. The
reason the Wall Street Journal is subscription-only is because its readers think
WSJ's content helps them make money. (A few years ago, the American Press
Institute found that the number one reason people subscribe to a news site is
because they cover a specific topic.) At large news organizations such as the
New York Times or Washington Post, subscribers may have their own reasons for
subscribing—they love New York, they want to WaPo's take on social issues, or
they like the recipes or crosswords.
Content Worth Paying For
Just because your content is local doesn't mean it isn't worth paying for. One
of my shining examples of paywall success is the Arkansas Times , a long-time
member of the Association of Alternative Newsmedia, which makes hundreds of
thousands of dollars per year on their digital paywall. (They also sell
advertising, print a monthly publication, ask for donations and throw events
throughout the year.)
Is their content worth paying for? Their subscribers seem to think so—Arkansas
Times represents a progressive viewpoint in a largely conservative state,
putting them outside of the norm and helping them remain an alternative to their
daily newspaper in Little Rock—which also has a paywall. ArkTimes also have a
very active political blog that insiders like to read, as they get scoops on the
machinations of state government.
Oh, and they market their subscription as support, giving them the best of both
worlds:

So, in this case, the paywall helps coax people into subscribing once they've
read a few stories, and the marketing of the paywall still focused on the idea
of that it supports the publication—in other words, they're seeking True Fans.
It's probably a good way to do it.

Also notice that the Arkansas Times offers the option of Donating or
Subscribing. What's interesting about this is that they are leaving things open
so that someone could give them more money than the subscription cost, which is
currently $10/month in their case. However, donating doesn't actually get you
access to the website. So that's something else to think about—if you tell
people they have to have a subscription to read your stuff, then they'll
probably be less likely to donate. (The converse of that is once they're a paid
subscriber, you know who they are, and you can reach out electronically and even
in person to see if they'll donate more for VIP status, etc.)
The Leaky Paywall
Another way that subscriptions (and, specifically, subscription paywall
software) can be helpful is when you take the "leaky paywall" approach, where
you offer a few stories without interrupt, and then ask for an email address to
enable the next few stories.

This is a nice way to build your email newsletter list and build up interest
from new readers who are willing to trade an email to continue to access your
content. Eventually, you can further limit their ability to read stories without
a paid subscription, or you can use this approach to continually marketing
something like a VIP membership until the reader decides to take the leap.
Once they've subscribed or become a member, you can remove the paywall
restriction (as long as they're logged into the website) and show them all the
stories they want to read. Plus, when they're logged in, the software may allow
you to offer a different, personalized greeting, thanking them for their
subscription or membership.
Expand

Paywalls and Donors = ❤️ ?

Pete Ericson and Tyler Channell of Leaky Paywall and The Paywall Project are so
into paywalls that they have a podcast on the subject. In Episode 26 (!) they
discuss how paywalls can work with both subscription and donor strategies can
work together to increase revenues for a local news publisher. One caveat: Pete
describes "subscriptions" and "memberships" as essentially the same thing, with
both leading to full access of the site's content. In my definition, a "member"
is really a recurring donor who gets relatively little more than recognition and
appreciation for becoming a VIP donor. So while Pete discusses two distinctions:
donor: someone who gives money to support the publication subscriber/member:
someone who makes a recurring payment for full access to the content I have
three: donor: gives money to support the publication VIP member: gives recurring
money to support the publication and be a part of the club subscriber: makes a
recurring payment for full access to the site's content Only the third, in my
case, required a paywall. BUT… that doesn't mean the paywall doesn't work for
donors or VIP members. In fact, it can be a great idea to use paywall software
to encourage people to sign up for your email newsletter (for free) or to become
a VIP member in order to either gain access to special features on the website
(stuff that's "behind the paywall" even if it isn't your news content) or who
get personalized recognition when they show up at your website and are logged
in. Pete and Tyler also lay out some different strategies for publications based
on where they are in their lifecycle (startups might rely more on donations,
while more mature publications could use a leaky paywall for members or
subscribers. Another tip—publications covering topics such as environmentalism
or education might really promote (or only just offer) monthly memberships or
subscriptions, even as startups, to promote recurring revenues. And, you can
always experiment with different approaches and make changes along the way.
Check it out.

If you think you're interested in setting up subscriptions or using paywall
software to help you fill the funnel leading to donations and VIP memberships, I
recommend talking to your CMS provider as soon as you can—particularly if you're
planning a change to a new CMS or you want to implement specific paywall
software. Let's get some assurances that everything will work well together.
The wrong paywall system can be a nightmare for a publisher when it comes to the
customer-service and customer-satisfaction challenges that come with the
software. And those challenges are different from simply using Givebutter,
Donorbox or Memberful to take recurring donations.
The rewards of a nicely integrated paywall system (even if it doesn't actually
limit the reader's access to the news) can be great, but there are risks you
need to think through as well.

How Reader Polls and Contesting Support Local Publishing
When we launched the Jackson Free Press in November 2002, our first issue
including a ballot. It was the inaugural Best of Jackson ballot, designed to
celebrate local people, businesses and organizations. We thought "Best of
Jackson" was something that people in Jackson could use to help generate a sense
of community pride.
We also knew it would help our fledgling weekly paper by immediately creating
interest among potential advertisers. By February 2003, we'd had our first Best
of Jackson party and we'd put our first Best of Jackson issue on the streets,
having sold more ads than we could have imagined at that point.
The annual "Best Of" or "Reader's Choice" issue of local weeklies and monthlies
is often the most lucrative issue of the year advertising. The package can
include ads in print, online, on the ballot, leading up to the nominations
phase, taking them through the finalist phase and advertising in the Best Of
issue where winners are proclaimed. Maybe you can even sell them a plaque—or a
longer-term advertising agreement.

Are you digital only? Services such as SceneThink offer both an online ballot
(with advertising options) and a final announcement website where different
types of advertising and monetization can live throughout the year.

And while people are voting in your Reader's Choice or Best Of, something else
magical can happen on the digital ballot you offer them—you can collect their
email address. If they don't opt out of your newsletters, you can add hundreds
(sometimes thousands) of email addresses to your list during "best of season."
In other words, it's a great top-of-funnel strategy to pull people into your
publication's ecosystem.
Expand

Todd Tip: Multiple Ballots

At JFP we eventually settled on a two-ballot system—a Nominations ballot and a
Finalists ballot. On the Nominations ballot, each of the 100+ categories in the
Best of Jackson (Best Restaurant, Best Local Nonprofit, Best Bartender,
Best-Dressed Jacksonian) was just a write-in slot. The software would help you
count up the number of nominations that each individual entity got, and then the
top 4-6 (depending on the number of nominations in the category and the spread
of those nominations) would be declared Finalists and appear on the Finalists
ballot. The Finalists ballot was multiple choice, so once the voting closed on
that one, you'd count up the votes and get a winner in each category. For Best
of Jackson, we declared one Winner (unless there was a time) and everyone else
was a Finalist. (Other publications use the vote count to declare Second, Third,
Honorable Mention or whatnot.) Our Best of Jackson issue was always published in
January (we thought it was nice to start the year with a big issue), which mean
the Nominations generally happened in early November and the Finalists ballot in
early December. We'd give ourselves a few weeks between each to do the counting
and sell the advertising. Part of our reasoning was this—the two ballots gave us
more authentic results (the nominations process was an opportunity for less
obvious or newcomer candidates to break through to the second ballot) and it
gave us more sales opportunities. During the nominations phase, we'd get
advertiser who were contract advertisers and/or familiar with Best of Jackson to
advertise while nominations where on-going. Once we knew who the Finalists were,
we could reach out to those Finalists with specific advertising and marketing
packages to get them to advertise during the Finalist voting and to get them to
advertising in Best of Jackson issue and on the results website. While we
enjoyed declaring the Winner in each category (and it made the day the Best of
Jackson issue was published a big day each year) we made a big deal out of being
a Finalist. We would encourage Finalists to advertise the fact, put it on their
social media, use our web badges and even buy plaques (we gave them paper
certificates) to hang up in their shops. And all of that, in term, was great
marketing for the Jackson Free Press as a centerpiece of local culture and a
champion of local businesses and organizations. Of course, two ballots isn't the
only way to do it. Best Of balloting software can support one phase where you
have write-ins, tally them up and then declare the placements of winners. It's
your choice—and, frankly, that approach might be best for a smaller contest, or
if your focus isn't as much on advertising as it is on generating buzz, getting
email addresses and cementing your spot in the local culture.

Once you've gotten a Best Of under your belt, it can be tempting to do other
contests to get the same benefits—built in advertising demand during the
nominations and voting, and more audience e-mail addresses from processing the
ballots online.
At Jackson Free Press, we would hold 3-4 other ballots through the year,
including Best Doctors, Dentists and Clinics (very popular); Best Lawyers and
Law Firms; Best Local Household Services and so on.
We'd basically have a quarterly contest going that would attract different
businesses and services to whom we could sell advertising packages while we
built our local email list for other purposes.

ToddTip:
Use Contests to Help Local Businesses and Orgs Build Up Their Email List (…For a
Fee)
Once you've got a somewhat sizable email list for your publication, you can use
a contest to help other local businesses or organizations grow their email
lists—and you can do it to generate revenue for your pub.
Here's my approach. Using software called UpViral (I've also used ShortStack ),
you create a contest to give away some value at the local partner. If they're a
restaurant, have them give away a few $100 gift cards; if they're a museum or
venue, have them give away gift certificates for memberships worth $100 or
whatever.

Using your partner's own product is important—everyone would like a Amazon or
Visa gift card, but only people with local interest will want to win a gift
certificate to Main Street Falafel or OurTown Music Lessons. That means the list
you help them generate will attract people on it with a stronger interest in
remaining.
In the contesting software, you allow people a chance to win the gift card by
entered their email address. There should be an opt-out checkbox, which, if left
checked, causes them to be subscribed to the partner's email list (and to your
publication's list, if they're not already on it.) Make that clear in the "small
print."
Once they enter with their email address, the software should give them the
opportunity to share the contest on social media for more entries. That's a nice
bonus to help get the word out about the contest and generates some social buzz
that your partner will appreciate.
Finally, with everything set up, blast the contest out to your email list as a
"promoted e-mail" or "partner campaign" — however you denote sponsored content.
Most of your readers will appreciate the opportunity to win something
authentically local. When the contest is over, pick the winners randomly and
announce them on the partner's new list, welcoming everyone else. (If they want,
the partner can welcome the non-winners to their list with a discount or coupon
of some sort.)

You may want to run a little paid social media boost or advertising campaign in
your channels to send folks back to the contest as well; not everyone on your
email list actually looks at every email, and marketing to your existing social
audiences can create an additional boost. Anytime you're doing something in
email or social for a client, I'd put a little of the revenue back into social
media advertising just to "pour a little gas on the fire." (Also, don't pour
lgas on actual fires.)
The contest will likely generate a few hundred new email subscribers for your
partner organization. Pricing it somewhere around $3-5 per email isn't
outrageous — maybe a flat rate of $750-1500 depending on the size of your list.
Or, sell the contest as part of a broader digital campaign that includes web and
newsletter ads along with the contest.

Using Live Events to Fill Your Funnel (and Please Your Readers)
Since throwing an event isn't technically "digital"—or not purely so—so I'm not
going to go really deep into "how to make money throwing events." That's a
little outside the scope and is probably already a playbook of it's own.

Events aren't just to build revenue or emails lists. They can also be an
important part of your reporting, especially if you have a solutions journalism
lens for what you do.

Free Press

Gathering Toward Solutions: A Community Event Playbook for Journalism
Collaboratives

This toolkit offers an introduction to the before, during, and after of
well-designed community gatherings.


That said, events can be a great way for a local media outlet to leverage its
reach and build another leg in the stool of revenue.
For our purposes, though, events can be really good for two things we've already
talked about: collecting email addresses for the top of your funnel, and
offering perks for True Fans at the bottom of your funnel.

Better News

DIG DEEPER: Live Events Ideas from Better News

News enterprises, particularly those bound by geography (locals, regionals and
metros), must do more than provide journalism. Your purpose must also extend to
fostering experiences and conversations and convening community for the purposes
of problem-solving and connection. Participating in or hosting in-person events
can help news organizations deepen their relationships with casual audiences and
attract new ones, while using digital platforms such as livestreaming and
text-based tools to bring live events to larger audiences creates the sort of
real-time, appointment-based engagement that is increasingly scarce in an
oversaturated media environment. When used strategically, events can not only
drive audience and engagement and provide strong marketing for your brand, but
also generate significant revenue for the larger organization.  


So what am I talking about when it comes to events? We've got lots of options,
but let's limit the scope a bit:
1.) Tabling. This is sort of a big umbrella, but what I'm talking about
attending other people's events — think street fairs, farmers' markets, parades,
"taste of our town"—and having a table (and maybe a tent) there. Run some sort
of contest where people enter the contest by giving you a phone number (for SMS)
or email (for your email list). It's great for community building, story ideas,
and adding to your email list.
2.) Talks. Want to make your True Fans feel special? Throw a talk! Grab a couple
of microphones, a member of your staff and a local celebrity. It can be a
politician, writer, musician, museum curator, etc. Invite people out; offer some
chips and dip. This can be something great to partner with a venue such as a
museum, art gallery or coffee house and get them some publicity along with a
small crowd who can buy drinks. (Oh… you should also record the talk to video
and post it; it'll make a nice VIP-only story on the website.) Get email
addresses from anyone new.
3.) Gatherings. This is one that the Mississippi Free Press specializes in.
(They call them "Lounges.") Call up a local restaurant and get a corner table in
their bar reserved for happy hour on a Friday and then invite your VIP Readers
to come visit with some of your staff. Buy a few plates of appetizers and let
everyone buy their own drinks (esp. if you're a non-profit). Visit. Talk. Get
story ideas. See who comes. Get email addresses from anyone new. (See a
pattern?)
4.) Sponsor. As a media outlet, you should set aside some portion of your
inventory for in-kind sponsorship. This can be tough, sometimes, because
non-profits, museums and venues can be your best advertisers if you sell
advertising.
What I would look for in sponsorship is (a.) a situation where being a sponsor
helps my brand and (b.) an opportunity to get email addresses from attendees of
the event. Ideally that would mean the event shares their registration email
list with you, so that you can at least encourage their list to subscribe to
yours. At best, you could throw a contest together or do something where it's
clear that their attendees are signing up for your newsletter as well.
Expand

Best of Jackson Party Formula

While the Jackson Free Press was publishing, the annual Best of Jackson Party
was one of the highlights of the calendar for the whole city. The basic model
was the same each year: 6-10p on Sunday evening (so service industry folks could
attend), usually in a venue or part of town that people didn't usually frequent
for parties. The event started with low-key music and free food served by local
restaurants and chefs (the finalists and winners), with wine and beer donated by
local distributors (or traded for advertising). After surprise entertainment
(drum line, drag queens, flashmob, etc.) around 7:15, we'd hand out awards from
7:30-8:30 and then things switched over to a DJ dance party until 10. The party
was free to attend. All we asked for was an email for the registration (and we
limited the list to 2,000, with priority given to actually finalists in the
contesting). The result? An amazing party that fed the souls of our True Fans
and usually added several hundred new emails to our newsletter.


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Pursuing Grant Revenue and Philanthropic Dollars
There's an old adage about getting a business loan: it's easiest when you don't
actually need the money… and it it helps when know someone at the bank. The same
can, perhaps unfortunately, be true for grants for your journalism. You may get
lucky turning in an online grant application to an entity that has never heard
of you before. But you're much more likely to get a grant if you get to know
people in philanthropy—and if you don't desperately need the money.
So, what can you do? Here are some things to think about if you'd like to add
some grant funding as one of the legs of your revenue stool:
1.) Think local. One way to get national grants is to show success with local
grants. Look to granting opportunities from your city, region or state. For
example, arts organizations, alliances and commissions offer grants for certain
types of arts reporting or collaboration. Humanities councils or bureaus can do
the same for reporting or initiatives around conversation, thought-leadership or
democracy. Meet people at your local community foundation, as they will both be
a grantor and a center-of-gravity for local and family foundations. And learn
more about state, regional or national foundations that do work in your area.
The Kellogg Foundation is active in Mississippi, for instance, and they've been
a source of grant funding for the Mississippi Free Press.

Here's one quick shortcut: Pay attention to the PBS and NPR stations in your
area. Listen to who underwrites their local programming in particular, and see
what you can learn about their grant funding from press releases—or by taking
their development director out to lunch!
2.) Get to know people in philanthropy. Some of this means attending the
cheese-and-wine events in your community, including those outside of journalism.
See who shows up and funds in other nonprofit verticals such as economic
development, the environment, education, healthcare, criminal justice and so on.
Alberto Ibargüen, former CEO of the Knight Foundation (one that you should
really get to know), is famous for saying about local philanthropy , "Whatever
your first priority… journalism needs to be your second, because trustworthy
information, most often locally sourced, is essentially to achieving any of
these other important goals." It's a good line to have on the tip of you tongue
at cocktail parties.

Want another shortcut? Join an association! AAN, NAHP, NNPA, LION, INN, ONA,
NNA, LMA and others exist, in part, to help you meet more people in your
industry and in the broader journalism ecosystem. The annual conferences often a
great way to make connections, meet actual funders, and many of the associations
themselves are spending more time these days working on grant funding for
members.
3.) Shore up your other revenues. Grant funders often do not want to be your
most important source of funding, and, while this is changing somewhat, it can
still be difficult to get operating funds from philanthropy in order to pay the
light and broadband bills for your publication. Instead, they're more likely to
fund projects or reporters for a start. That said, one thing that tends to
impress funders is knowing that you've got the basics covered—you're asking for
a grant to improve and expand you coverage, not to pay back rent. If you can
show strong recurring reader revenues and local donor patterns, for instance,
that can help you make the case to grant funders.
4.) Try for a chat before sending a proposal. Many funders are very, very
willing to talk to you before you submit a grant proposal. (Others may not do
one-on-one calls, but look for webinars or information sessions prior to a grant
deadline.) There's no rule that says you can't "get the inside scoop" on what
they do or don't like to see in a proposal, and making that personal connection
can give them extra nuance around your proposal and the opportunity to learn
more about your mission. This is one of the key antidotes to the problem of "we
never get grants we apply for"—you've got a much better chance if you've spoken
with the grant officer and everyone has a better idea of why you're applying and
how it could help.
5.) Understand the language and go in with clean books. Some other suggestions,
which you'll see in the News/Media Alliance link below (especially in their
guidebook ) including understanding some of the lingua franca of grant-making,
including Letters of Intent, one-pagers and other items you should have on hand
for a grant proposal. One item that I will highlight here is clean financials.
If you want grant funding you need, at the very least, to show that you'll
account for the funding correctly and that you've got a system in place for
making sure money is spent responsibly. Very few grantors wants to send their
money into a black hole where you pinkie-swear it's being spent on important
stuff.

News/Media Alliance

Getting a Grant: How, Where and Why to Apply for Journalism Funding

The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) has developed guidelines for seeking funds and
a “living” directory of journalism grants.


6.) Improve and track your diversity. Diversity may be anathema for certain
politicos in the U.S. and elsewhere right now, but, as of this writing, it's
pretty important to a lot of philanthropic funders. So two items to think about.
(a.) Your newsroom—whether is a payrolled staff, contract remote or
freelancers—should reflect your community and/or to community you're reporting
on. Work to make this a priority.

(b.) You should track your diversity metrics (on staff and in terms of your
journalistic impact) so you can discuss them with grantors. If you feel that
those stats aren't advantageous because they're not very diverse, see (a.)
above.

7.) Starting small is OK. Feel good about starting small with grants. If you can
get a grant for a few thousand dollars from a local organization for a voter's
guide or to help with a specific type of coverage or investigation, go for it if
you have the resources. In your first months and years of grant funding, piecing
together smaller grants can be a good thing, especially if you execute them well
and build up a fan-base in philanthropy. Those smaller grantors can offer
references and connections to larger ones, and showing them on your books will
help make larger grantors more comfortable with the idea of giving your money.
8.) Get a fiscal sponsor. A fiscal sponsor is a 501c3 that lends its non-profit
status to your organization for the purpose of taking non-profit donations or
grants. A professional fiscal sponsor takes a small percentage of the grant to
help with accounting, tracking and reporting the success of your grant to the
grantor. A fiscal sponsor will also often make the grantor feel more comfortable
when giving you a larger grant, because the fiscal sponsor is more accustomed to
managing larger sums of money and has the capacity to account for it and even
invest it. Options include your local community foundation or, if you're not
sure who to contact, reach out to AAN's sister organization, the Alternative
Newsweekly Foundation , which handles fiscal sponsorship for our members and
many other news organizations.
So, where do you find grants? Remembering that I've mentioned local sources and
news associations, one major resource is NewsFuel , a database of funding
opportunities for local journalism.
Expand

What is Press Forward?

Announced in 2023 and gathering steam in 2024, Press Forward is an initiative
spearheaded by the Knight Foundation and fiscally sponsored by the Miami
Foundation. It's goal is to create a "national coalition investing more than
$500 million to strengthen local newsrooms, close longstanding gaps in
journalism coverage, advance public policy that expands access to local news,
and to scale the infrastructure the sector needs to thrive."Press Forward | A
national initiative to support the revitalization of local news Out of the gate,
you're probably not likely to get a "Press Forward" grant, as the grants will
generally come from other philanthropic organizations as part of their
commitment (or increased commitment) to journalism funding. (For instance, the
Mississippi Free Press is a MacArthur Foundation grantee, announced as part of
their first cohort of Press Forward grants.) That comes under the banner of
"Aligned Grantmaking" where individual foundations can grant money to news
outlets or other organizations as part of this national effort. Soon to be
announced is the Pooled Fund, which will be open to grant applications. In this
case, foundations that don't have dedicated journalism program officers can rely
on Press Forward to help them pick and manage grantees to receive journalism
grant dollars. Finally, Press Forward is encouraging "Press Forward Locals,"
often managed by community foundations, to encourage local grantmaking to
journalism outlets. It's a valuable educational and organizational effort,
because those Press Forward Locals have (hopefully) a vested interest in seeing
journalism and democracy thrive in their cities, regions and states.

Finally, one big "don't" as you seek grant funding: Don't take a grant for a
project simply because the money is there. If you don't really have the
capacity, expertise or interest in doing the project, you'll likely fail—or
worse, spend too much. A major cautionary tale in philanthropy is the project
that costs you more to fulfill than the dollars granted.
If you're offered a few thousand dollars to augment some reporting you're
already likely to do—adding precinct-change reports and visuals to the political
reporting you're planning this election cycle—that can be a nice way to add some
project-only dollars. But a few thousand dollars to report on the state of
schools in the suburbs when all your work is in the inner city might just not be
enough for the project. If you need to add significant capacity in order to
succeed at the project, then the grant needs to have capacity-building amounts
of funding.

One more caution: Beware of strings attached. Particularly if you're getting
grants from organizations that aren't used to funding journalism, you'll need to
spell out what you will and won't do with that organization, including whether
they have the right to read or edit stories (they shouldn't) and what the
parameters are for your reporting. Beware the grant that is actually a sponsored
story. If it seems to going in that direction, and you offer sponsored content
on your site, maybe steer them toward a "buy" instead of a "grant."

Be an Agency: Audience Extension, Content Marketing and Client Services
After first blush, becoming a "digital agency" might sounds like a lot to take
on for a local publisher, and, in truth, it's not the first place I'd suggest
you look for revenue. However, doing digital agency work for clients can
actually a nice extension of what you already do—digital publishing and
advertising—and for the right organization, it's a way to add to the bottom line
using your existing skillsets and team.
Let's look at some of the ways you can generate revenue by helping others with
their digital presence.
Digital Advertising Audience Extension
If you already sell digital advertising, then you may have hit this ceiling
already—a client who would like to buy hundreds of thousands or millions of
impression, and you can't deliver that many. The solution is to offer an
"audience extension" service, where their digital ads are displayed
programmatically on other websites visited by readers in your city or region.
This is done using geotargeting and the services of an ad network. And what this
means is that the ads can appear on a wide variety of regional and national
websites—sports, gaming, home and lifestyle, hobbies, etc.—but they only appear
to folks visiting those sites from your area.
I've got two broad options for you when it comes to Audience Extension:
Google Ads. The first way to offer audience extension to a local client is to
create a Google Ads account in their name, and then create a geotargeted
campaign using their advertising creative. Depending on you relationship with
the client, you can charge them a service fee for managing the program
(especially if they work with you long-term, and perhaps on other products as
well) or you can charge them a flat CPM for their broader advertising while you
pay the lower wholesale amount to Google. In that case, you could charge $5, $8
or even $10 per thousand, and pay closer to $1-2 CPM for the ads that are served
for the client. That's the approach I would take a for a one-time campaign or a
limited relationship with the client.

Third-Party or White Label Service. Using a company like AdCellerant , you can
run geotargeted, local or regional campaigns for you clients for which you
charge a higher CPM while paying the service provider a lower CPM and pocketing
the difference. The advantage is that this provider will have access to more
networks and more tools than simply Google Ads, meaning the ad is more likely to
appear in prime real estate on name-brand websites. That company is also going
to have tools for more sophisticated campaigns such as OTT video services, so
you could help local clients get their commercials to appear during shows
streaming via services such as Hulu and FuboTV.

Being able to offer this service gives you something else to talk about when
you're on a sales call with a local prospect. Even if they say "your publication
seems too small" or "too niche"—or they don't seem to like it—you can answer
back with, "Actually, we could help you advertise on all sorts of different
sites around the web, but target folks right here in the Jackson Metro, and you
can work with our local team to design the ads and track success."
Google My Business and Search Engine Optimization
The Google My Business service is actually a great lead-generation tool for
local digital revenue. When you find a local business or organization that
hasn't "claimed" their Google My Business listing, there's a good chance they
have other digital deficits lurking in their online marketing place. You can
figure that out by (a.) looking at their Google My Business listing to make sure
it seems active, complete and has an About statement for the business and (b.)
clicking the "Own this business?" link to see what results you get.

If no one has claimed ownership, that tells you it's be a great idea to call
this business and offer your "Google My Business Customization Service." For
$500-$750 you can help "own" their business on Google My Business, dress it up
with images, menus, reservation links, Q&A answers and more. It's really a great
way to customize the look-and-feel of the businesses results on Google.
Business can have search results issues that affect them on Google and Bing as
well. A lot of times, businesses have inaccuracies in their citations in the
databases that underpin search results—databases managed by data aggregator
companies such as Data Axle, Factual/Foursquare and Localeze.
You can figure out if a local business has a citations problem by using the free
Moz Local Listing Score tool, where you enter the name of the business and its
address. It will search for that business and let you know if you have issues in
major databases.

You can then page through the results and see which databases need to be updated
so that everything matches—it could be something straightforward such as your
Facebook details, or something more involved. For the more involved listings,
you can use the Moz Local tools (for a price) or a service like BrightLocal 's
Citation Builder to create the citations for your client. What do you charge? It
can depend on the cost of the service and what else you're doing for the client,
but $500-$1000 is a fair price to improve their search results over time (and it
can take some time for them to come up) while you report the successful
completion of new citations and show those pie charts improving.

Fit Small Business offers a number of handy guides aimed at small businesses
that you can learn from and repurpose in order to serve local businesses as a
digital agency. Here's a deeper drive into Google My Business and local SEO
citations if this look like a service you might want to offer.

Fit Small Business

How to Build Local SEO Citations (+ 7 Ways to Build Them)

Local SEO citations help build your business' online presence. Here are 7 ways
to learn how to build local citations for your business.


Search Engine Marketing
If your clients want help getting to the top of Google and Bing search results
then another option is to help them buy ads on the search engines. Search Engine
Marketing (SEM) is simply that—buying your way into a featured listing that
appears when users within a certain geography use the keywords for which you
choose to bid.
To place ads for your client, you can use their Google Ads or Microsoft Ads
account and go to work. To make money doing this, you can charge something like
a flat monthly fee or a percentage of their advertising spend, often 15% what
they budget each month for SEM. Generally you'll do this as part of a broader
campaign to handle their digital advertising (see Audience Expansion above) or
to handle both their

WordStream offers a fairly comprehensive primer on Search Engine Marketing if
you'd like to take a deeper dive. It's got a little pitch for their tools at the
end, but you might actually want to check those out too, as they do offer some
free tools to help you get started with SEM ad creation and keyword research.

WordStream

Search Engine Marketing (SEM): How to Do It Right | WordStream

Search engine marketing is one of the best ways to grow your business in a
competitive marketplace. In this guide, you'll learn an overview of search
engine marketing basics, tips and strategies.


Client Websites and On-Page SEO
Years and years ago I took my understanding of HTML and the Web (I used to write
books about both) and leveraged that into offerings for local businesses, with
the goal of helping them improve their presence on the Web while providing my
newspaper company with a tidy monthly income stream. I created a brand — JFP
Digital Services (now Changemaker Media Services ) set out to build and manage
websites and mobile presences for local restaurants, bars, stores and
organizations.
While I did end up hosting a lot of local business and organization's websites
(and I still do) on it's own, the truth is that the "web business" wasn't the
lucrative part. Businesses often undervalue web design services, since they
figure they can use GoDaddy or Wix or some other service to build the site
themselves on the cheap. (They rarely do actually finish such sites, which is
one place you can come in.)
So, briefly, I'll offer an idea or two here. First, if you have a local business
or organization struggling with their website, you can offer to build it for
them, if you have that expertise. If you think you'll be building sites for a
number of businesses, you can look to a service like SiteSwan , which makes it
easy for you to offer a hosted web solution to multiple businesses at around
$10-15 per site. Squarespace Circle offers discounts and affiliate revenue for
signing new clients to Squarespace, which you can do when you create a new
Squarespace website for the client. Duda offers an "agency" plan for hosting
multiple sites as well as white-label service so that it looks like your company
is doing all the heavy lifting.
How do you price a client website? Depending on how much effort the initial
design is, you might charged between $250-$5000 to get it set up. For sites my
company creates in WordPress, simply designing the site is generally $2500-5000
(especially for e-commerce) and then we charge $249/month for full "managed"
services. For sites in SiteSwan, we charge a lot less, most clients pay $990 to
get set up and then $99/month for their site, which includes an hour of changes
per month. Here's the pricing grid from JFPSites.com, which is what I called our
basic website creation service.

From experience, I'll say that you're best website clients are those who want
other, ongoing services from you, such as monthly content marketing or social
media management, as discussed next. For others who simply need a billboard (and
maybe a menu or two that they change out quarterly) one of these services can be
a way to make a little money and keep the relationship going.
Content Marketing and Social Media Management
One of the "legs of the stool" for the Jackson Free Press was offering
content-marketing services for local nonprofits. While restaurants and retail
weren't as profitable for us, helping local nonprofits become "publishers" was a
nice niche.
One reason this worked as a revenue stream for the weekly paper is because these
clients had similar needs to our publication—they needed to get the word out to
supporters and constituents, often via a regular newsletter, and they needed to
fill their website and social media channels with content. That happened to be a
good fit because some of the same staff members who helped put together a
newspaper and online news content could help make something similar happen for
local non-profits.

For the record, we didn't use our reporters for content marketing work, since we
felt that wouldn't be ethical, but we did use our advertising designer, sales
team, copyeditor and me—the publisher—to fulfill these tasks. Eventually we had
a "content manager" on this team who did a lot of it as well, particularly the
social media content development and management.
In exchange for a monthly retainer or and hourly rate we offer a mix of services
to clients. They tend to look something like this:
Weekly or monthly newsletter that we help to write, copyedit, assemble and send.

Weekly, bi-weekly or monthly blog or news updates on their websites.

Press releases to tout new programs and accomplishments; press alerts to
encourage press coverage for events.

Social media channels updated with posts and reels 2-5 times per week.

Web updates to static content, managed hosting and regular (often quarterly)
analytics reports.

Video production and editing.

Livestream support for webinars, social media gatherings or in-person events
with a streaming component.

Graphic design for slide decks, promotions, leave-behinds, reports, printed
collateral and more.

Live event support (name tags, registration table, vendor outreach, etc.)

Most of these clients paid between $1500-2500 a month for the steady work and
then $75-150 per hour for the one-time projects depending on the type of work
required (e.g. $75/hour for graphic design or live event support, $150/hour for
video production). While I would frequently say that "I'd rather sell a Full
Page ad for $1500 than do a month's worth of content marketing for $1500) the
truth is that we were able to shore up the company in lean times with these
services, they kept our team busy with work we were good at and even would help
us find story ideas to pass on to the editorial side, as we spent a lot of time
in the entrepreneurial, medical and mental health spaces thanks to our client
base.

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Conclusion: You Can Do This
You probably didn't get into local journalism to get rich. (If you did, then we
really need to chat.)
But as you can see from this playbook, you do have options and practices you can
follow for generating the revenue you need to sustain your publication, pay your
staff and—yes—pay yourself a good salary if you don't already.
I'm here to help! If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please
send them to me a todd@localmediaplaybook.com . I'm happy to answer anything I
can in email, and I love getting new ideas for this playbook or for newsletter
updates. I also offer one-on-one coaching if you'd like me to help you talk
through your plan of action for generating sustaining revenue for your
organization.
I wholeheartedly recommend you join an association if you haven't already.
Consider the Association of Alternative Newsmedia if you think you're a fit (you
can write and ask me if you're not sure) or our partners the National
Association of Hispanic Publishers (NAHP) or the National Newspaper Publishers
Association (NNPA, aka "The Black Press"). Other wonderful groups include LION
Publishers , the Institute for Nonprofit News , the Online News Association ,
the Local Media Association and the Tiny News Collective among many others.
Again, drop me a line if you'd like to ask more about any of those and I'll do
my best to recommend and connect you.