This is a milestone day for Membership Puzzle Project. Because today MPP — in partnership with The Lenfest Institute and the Google News Initiative — released the Membership Guide (Spanish). It is the culmination of three years of study and support for membership models in news.
With only a bit of hyperbole, we might say it’s everything we know.
The Guide is like a little course in membership. It takes you through the steps. It tells you how to do each one. It identifies best practices. It warns about common mistakes. And it gathers into one place the lessons people have learned as they built their membership programs— including, of course, the errors and wrong turns.
We spent six months pulling it all together, we consulted a lot of knowledgeable people to make sure we had it right, we talked to 50+ newsrooms — or individuals and organizations supporting newsrooms — on five continents, and we’re excited to share the results with you now.
The Guide is designed to help you no matter what stage you are at with membership. Just getting started? We have a section called that: Getting Started With Membership. Planning your launch? The Guide tells you what you need to do to be ready. Wondering where membership “fits” in your organization? We have practical advice. Want to know what is reasonable to expect if you’re asking members for money? The Guide tells you how to estimate that.
Already have a membership program and need it to grow? Worried about retaining members? Need better metrics to know how you’re doing? The Guide can help with all of these things. We designed it to answer your questions.
We mean that literally. We tried to think of the questions that people would have as they ventured into membership, and then wrote in reply to those. For example, our advice on “Making the business case for membership” is built on questions like these:
How many members can we expect to get?
How should we set prices for our membership program and offerings?
How much membership revenue can we expect?
What types of membership costs can we expect?
But “come with your questions” is only one way to use the Guide. In addition to the advice section we have case studies from around the world. Each one tells the story of a try. MPP treats the “try” as a basic unit of membership practice. A try is any experiment with members where the outcome is unknown. Here’s how we decided whether a given experiment deserved its own case study:
Can we isolate the “try” enough to clearly establish what the organization sought to do, how they did it, and what the results were?
Are there broader learnings from their “try” that other newsrooms could gain from?
Does this either drive home general advice or offer a creative solution to a common membership challenge?
Has the “try” been tested enough that we can hold it up as a tactic proven to work?
Inspired by The Lenfest Institute’s “Solution Set” newsletter, the cases explain who the players are, what they tried, why it's important, and what was learned. They end with "key takeaways and cautionary notes." A few examples:
Browse the rest. We have 34 case studies so far, and this is just a small selection of “tries” we learned about during our research. More will be posted as our membership knowledge continues to grow— and as MPP continues for another year. Put the advice section and the case studies together and it’s a whole other way to master membership. You can learn why it’s important to develop memberful routines, then read how Radio Ambulante empowered its listeners to help them build a global community, how Maldita invites members to fact check, and how KPCC managed to answer more than 4,000 questions about coronavirus.
Grasp the concept: moving from projects to memberful routines. Read how others did just that. Absorb their lessons. Avoid their mistakes. That’s why we call it a “guide.”
Which isn’t to say that we always knew where to point you. Membership in news is still a young discipline. That means the state of our knowledge is radically incomplete. This final product reflects those varying levels of certainty.
When you see “MPP believes…” that means that the team has informed hypotheses or or inclinations about its advice, or is drawing on the vision for membership that MPP holds.
When you see “MPP suggests…” that means the advice is based on early knowledge.
When you see “MPP recommends…” that means the advice is based on observing multiple “tries” that have confirmed that this advice works. This is our strongest level of certainty.
For more on these degrees of certainty see “How we made this.”A third way to use The Guide is a little more experimental. We are going to try adding discussions on key topics, starting with three:
Implementing memberful routines, anchored by Jay and KPCC’s engagement team;
Designing and iterating on your membership program, anchored by Krautreporter in Germany and Zetland in Denmark;
What the Membership Guide team learned from the user research process, and how that translated into the Guide you see today.
Bring your questions and your own experiences to the discussions.
There’s a lot about user testing and audience research in The Membership Guide. Here we tried to practice what we preach. Before we made any decisions on what the Guide should be — in fact, before we wrote a word — product manager Yvonne Leow guided us through a user research process to challenge assumptions about the goals, problems, and needs of membership-concerned staff in newsrooms.
MPP spoke to 25+ individual newsrooms around the world: legacy organizations and startups, local and national newsrooms, and digital, radio, and print. We spoke to founders, CEOs, engagement editors, marketing officers, and community managers.
We asked them questions such as “What does membership mean to your organization?”, “What’s the most challenging part of your day?”, and “What is your mix of project vs routine work?” Their answers taught us what the Guide should be. (You can see our user research questions here.)
It also informed how we designed the Membership Guide experience. Newsrooms’ membership journeys are rarely linear, and this product reflects that. Developer Brandon Roberts prioritized making it easy to move seamlessly between topics, to zoom in to an illustrative case study in the middle of MPP’s guidance before zooming back out to industry-wide learnings, and to dive right into the middle if that’s where you are in your membership work. Meanwhile, designer Jessica Phan made sure that the Guide projected a friendly, helpful, calming tone.
A caveat: We undertook this process in the early days of the pandemic, before any of us understood just how much coronavirus would change our world and our work. We tried to strike a balance between being responsive to the pandemic and ensuring this guide will remain highly relevant when the pandemic (hopefully) begins to subside.
As part of our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, we also convened a review committee to hold us accountable to our pledge to design a product for the full range of newsrooms that might be pursuing membership. And we had subject matter experts review some of the more technical sections of this guide. To learn more about this approach see how we made this. For a list of researchers, reviewers and contributors, see the About page.
We’re publishing the Guide today, but we are not done making it. We will be adding research by Heather Bryant on steps newsrooms can take to develop more inclusive membership programs in October. Coming later this fall are sections on culture change in newsrooms that make a turn toward membership, and news sites that are governed as cooperatives, meaning: the members are the owners.
One goal we did not quite reach: We originally hoped to survey enough newsrooms with membership programs to emerge with reliable benchmarks by which newsrooms could measure their progress, but we need more responses. Want to help us get there? Drop us a note at ideas@membershippuzzle.org and we’ll let you know when we undertake another round of surveying.
You can use the same address to alert us to any errors, make suggestions for improving the Membership Guide, suggest topics for future discussions, volunteer to host a discussion, or send critiques and reactions.
Are you ready to get started with the Membership Guide? Go here.