How our coaches help newsrooms navigate their membership journey

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Since Membership Puzzle Project launched in May 2017, our team has helped more than 50 newsrooms around the world design, launch, and develop their membership program and memberful routines.

As we prepare to sunset in August 2021, we are focused on transferring all of that knowledge to the industry. First we published the Membership Guide in September 2020, a tactical, practical guide to membership models in news (available in multiple languages). Its target user is the newsroom leader who needs to make decisions about their membership strategy. 

More and more, those newsroom leaders are seeking consultants and trainers who can help their newsroom on their journey – and there aren’t enough with firsthand membership experience to meet the need. So we’re publishing a rundown of some of our most tried-and-true processes for training member-driven newsrooms, as well as recommendations for how to use the Membership Guide to steer your own newsroom or one that you’re coaching. 

Of course, each of the processes or frameworks shared below needs to be adapted for each newsroom’s context and needs. There is no one-size-fits-all approach. But if you don’t know where to start, this should help.

These resources were put together by Ariel Zirulnick, Membership in News Fund director and Membership in News Fund coaches Federica Cherubini, Jessica Best, and Javier Borelli. If you have questions about anything below, you can contact Ariel at ariel@membershippuzzle.org, and she’ll make sure your question gets to the right person. 

 

jessica best

Membership Coach

javier borelli

Membership Coach

federica cherubini

Membership Coach

ariel zirulnick

Fund Director


 

INDEX

  •  The membership journey:

    • Pre-launch tasks, activities, and resources

    • Post-launch tasks, activities, and resources

    • Things you can do any time

    • Troubleshooting membership hiccups

  • Steal our tools

    • The membership readiness audit

    • Challenging audience assumptions exercise

    • Evolution of a value proposition exercise

    • Membership design and viability survey template

    • Membership program design worksheet

 

 

The membership journey

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.

Task: Assess membership readiness 

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

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. 

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. 

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

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.

Task: Set objectives for your membership strategy 

Set measurable, mission-aligned objectives for your membership program

Task: Design your membership program

Get a membership program MVP on paper

Task: Refine your draft membership program

Collect feedback on the membership program from potential 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

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

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

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. 

 

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

Task: Retro the first 90 days of your membership program 

Identify how you are doing with management of the membership program

Task: Plan your one-year membership growth campaign

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

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  

 

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

 

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.

Your churn rate is too high.

 
 

 

Steal our tools

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. 

Membership readiness audit

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.