First, we identified each of the major tasks that will come up from the moment you start considering membership to your one-year anniversary, then surfaced the most relevant MPP resources and activities for accomplishing those tasks.

Beyond that one-year mark, we’ve found that newsrooms’ membership journeys become much more varied, so it would be unwise to give general advice. Tools such as audience research and retrospectives will always be available and useful. 

The steps below are written with one of two particular users in mind: the person in a newsroom responsible for executing on the membership strategy, or the consultant brought in to help. This is meant to help you jump quickly to the right place in the Membership Guide to accomplish the task at hand. 

However, we can’t ensure that if you do X and Y, Z will happen. There is no plug-and-play membership strategy. This is simply a document that can help you find the right intervention for the challenge at hand. 

If the newsroom is pre-launch 

Task: You need to understand how membership is different from other revenue and engagement models and what it takes to get started.

• Resource: “Defining membership” in the Membership Guide

Task: Assess membership readiness 

Identify the areas where the newsroom needs to improve in order to succeed with membership, before or after launch.

• Resource: “How to know if you’re ready for membership”

• Activity if the person leading the effort is a consultant: Membership Readiness Audit 

• Activity if the person leading the effort is newsroom staff: “Are you ready for membership?” worksheet 

Task: Develop your membership launch roadmap

Preparing for a membership program launch takes many months. Develop a roadmap that will help you identify what needs to happen when, and stick to that plan. 

• Resource: How do we execute our top ideas? (A straightforward overview of how to build a roadmap) 

Task: Determine how you will staff your membership strategy 

Identify the core team and the membership project/product owner. Think not just about the launch, but who will be responsible for the ongoing work associated with managing your membership program. 

• Resource: Staffing your membership strategy 

• Resource: Membership skills checklist

• Resource: Case study on how Chalkbeat developed its “AudSquad” 

• Activity: Use the RASCI model for your membership launch

• Activity: Use the RASCI model for your core membership operations post-launch 

Task: Identify your value proposition and membership value proposition

Identify what value your newsroom and its journalism provides, and what value membership provides for your members

• Resource: Discovering your value proposition

• Activity 1: First, Best, Only

• Activity 2: Strategyzer Ad-Lib template

Task: Learn about your potential members 

Find out what they value about you already, whether they are interested in becoming members, and what they would value in a membership program. Integrate this new knowledge with your value proposition.

• Resource: Conducting audience research

• Resource: Audience research brief template

• Resource: Membership viability and design survey template

• Activity 1: Refine your value proposition based on audience research

• Activity 2: Test your assumptions about your audience

Task: Set objectives for your membership strategy 

Set measurable, mission-aligned objectives for your membership program

• Resource: Determining how you will measure success

• Activity: Use your membership value proposition to identify objectives for your membership program

Task: Design your membership program

Get a membership program MVP on paper

• Resource: Designing your membership program

• Activity 1: Complete the membership program design worksheet 

Task: Refine your draft membership program

Collect feedback on the membership program from potential members 

• Activity: Host a focus group to discuss your membership program. You can also use this time to share a mockup of your membership landing page. Here is MPP’s template from hosting a focus group with De Correspondent members

Task: Choose your membership tech stack

Choose a set of tools that can grow with your membership program for at least the first two years

• Resource: Choosing your tech stack

Task: Determine the costs of implementing and supporting your membership program

Develop accurate estimates of what it will cost to run your membership program, and make changes to your membership program if your estimates come in over budget

• Resource: What costs can we expect? 

• Activity: Make a budget for one-time and recurring costs 

Task: Plan your membership launch and how you will retain your members 

Plan and troubleshoot all the basic components of a successful launch and develop plans for dealing with hiccups that arise

• Resource: Launching your membership program

• Activity: Go through the launch checklist 

Task: Put smart defaults in place from the beginning to make retention easier

Simple things like an onboarding series, regular member satisfaction assessments, good customer service practices can reduce churn. 

• Resource: Retaining your members 

If the newsroom is post-launch 

Task: Assess how your launch went

Identify what worked well and what didn’t so that you can address any obstacles to growth and retention early on

• Resource: How to hold a retrospective

Task: Retro the first 90 days of your membership program 

Identify how you are doing with management of the membership program

• Resource: How to hold a retrospective

Task: Plan your one-year membership growth campaign

Leverage the one-year anniversary of your membership program as a growth opportunity

• Resource: Marketing campaign calendar

• Resource: Case study: How “members-getting-members” brought Zetland to sustainability 

Task: Retro the first year of your membership program 

Identify what is working well and what isn’t working well internally and among your members  

• Resource: How to hold a retrospective 

• Activity: Hold a retrospective with your membership-concerned staff members 

• Activity: Conduct a member satisfaction assessment

Things you can do at any time

Offer a participation pathway. Identify an opportunity to invite audience participation that meets their motivations and your newsroom needs

• Resource: Developing memberful routines

• Resource: Thinking about how to engage your crowd? Here are things you might ask them to do.

• Activity: Retro your pilot participation pathway and make a plan for making it routine

• Resource: How to hold a retrospective   

Troubleshooting membership hiccups 

The membership program is in beta, and you need to get ready to scale. Head’s up: going from soft launch to full launch without evaluating your ability to scale is risky. Consider the following, first:

• Retro the first 90 days (or initial phase) of your membership program with your team

• Collect feedback from your beta members on their member experience

• Go through the launch checklist again, incorporating feedback from your beta members 

  • What customer service challenges emerged during beta? 

  • Were there any gaps between expectations and their experience?

  • Were there any benefits that fell flat?

  • Were there any benefits that you struggled to support?

• Review and revise your staffing plan for launch and ongoing membership program management 

The membership program is up and running, but you're missing your targets.

• Check that your targets are realistic. 

• Check that your checkout process is smooth and easy to navigate

• Make sure your membership landing page is easy to find 

• Check that you’re following these membership marketing best practices 

• Are your audience needs aligned with what your membership program delivers to them? 

  • Hold a focus group with your existing members 

  • Survey loyal readers who haven’t become members to find out what they would want in a membership experience 

Your churn rate is too high.

• Investigate why you’re churning. Is it intentional, i.e. members are canceling? Or is it incidental, i.e. their memberships are lapsing because their credit cards are expiring? 

• Make sure you have a customer service plan in place to address each reason you’re losing members. 

• Check that you have smart defaults in place, such as an onboarding series and recurring payments as your default.

• Check that you are sending regular stewardship messages explaining what their support makes possible.  

• Reach out to canceled members to find out why. You might not win them back, but you can learn valuable information that prevents losing others for the same reason. 

Below are frameworks and tools that we have developed and tested over time with the newsrooms we coach, as well as links to download them so that you can bring them back to your team. 

The four of us worked together to develop a robust membership readiness audit. We first used it with some of our Membership in News Fund newsrooms to assess their existing level of engagement with their audience and their membership readiness at the beginning of our work together. After a few tweaks, it’s now ready for public use. It’s designed for consultants who need to quickly grasp where a newsroom is at the beginning of a consulting engagement.

If you’re actually a part of the newsroom that is trying to assess membership readiness, this audit might be excessive. You already know most of these things about your newsroom! In your case, we recommend the Membership Guide section “How to know if you’re ready for membership,” which includes a worksheet that can guide you through assessing your readiness gaps.  

Audience assumptions exercise

Part of getting ready to launch membership is getting clarity about who your audiences are, particularly the gap between who you think they are and who they actually are. 

To help bring your whole newsroom along, coach Javier Borelli designed a process for testing audience assumptions. He first used it with his own newsroom, Tiempo Argentino, as they transitioned from a traditional ad-supported newsroom to a worker-owned cooperative financially supported by its members. 

First, Javier surveyed the staff. Then Tiempo surveyed its supporters. After they received all the survey results, the team compared their answers with those of their supporters. 

Javier found this process valuable because: 

• It showed the gap between journalists’ assumptions about their audiences and who their audiences actually are, in a non-accusatory way. 

• It involves your journalists in the membership process without adding too much to their existing workload.

• It stirred staff curiosity about Tiempo’s audience, which continued after they launched their membership program. 

The results of this procedure are not just useful for getting to know your audiences better, but also identifying your value proposition and marketing your membership program.

Value proposition exercise

A member-driven newsroom needs to be able to tell a compelling, accurate story about its mission. This story makes it easy for audience members to understand how your work improves the world they live in and how they can play a role by supporting you, whether that’s with their time, ideas, expertise, connections, or money. All of this begins with defining your newsroom’s value proposition, then your membership value proposition.

A strong value proposition, whether that’s for your entire newsroom or just for your membership program, is grounded in audience insights. It sounds intimidating, but it’s actually a fairly simple process if you use the step-by-step process articulated in the Membership Guide. 

Coach Jessica Best likes to have the newsrooms she works with identify their value propositions on their own, before they conduct audience research, and then refine them based on the feedback they get from audience members. It’s a good way to draw out any gaps between the newsroom’s perception of what audience members value about them and what they actually value about them. 

She documented the process with an Eastern European newsroom she worked with in 2020 that shows how to evolve a newsroom value proposition from first draft to guiding principle.  

Membership viability and design survey

If you’re considering launching a membership program, you’re going to want to find out three things: the depth of your relationship with your audience members, what they value about your work, and what they would value in a member experience. 

There are dozens of questions you could ask to find these out. To give you a starting point, fund director Ariel Zirulnick created a membership viability and design survey template. It includes advice on assessing membership viability and designing the membership program, and specific questions you can ask.

For examples of questions to ask for other important variables, such as news consumption habits or their experience as a member, browse former MPP research director Emily Goligoski’s larger supporter survey question library.

Design the membership program

There are a lot of things to consider when you get to the stage of designing the membership program: benefits, pricing, what you’re going to call it. The foundational work you’ve done, such as identifying your membership value proposition, should make it easier… if you can figure out a way to keep it front and center during the design process. 

To help newsrooms do that, Ariel created a membership program design worksheet that gives you one place to store all the decisions you’ll make along the way.

We hope this collection of resources and pointers helps you on your membership journey. We welcome any feedback you have on the above. Get in touch with Ariel at ariel@membershippuzzle.org.