On August 31, 2021, the Membership Puzzle Project officially came to an end. Here we share our notes on sunsetting a public research project that began as an intervention.
“The project’s demise became a design phase like any other.”
Rather than just stop, throw a party, or peter out, we decided to be intentional about bringing the Membership Puzzle Project to a healthy close. In these notes we share how we did that. We’re not telling you how to sunset your project – just documenting our work as we have before.
An intervention in the field
Originally based at NYU, Membership Puzzle (MPP) began in 2017 as a grant-funded research project to study emerging membership models in journalism – in other words, news sites that were trying to sustain themselves by asking their fans and supporters to become members of the site.
Quick distinction: Subscription is a product relationship. You pay money on a recurring basis and receive a product that otherwise exists behind a paywall. In membership, you join the cause because you believe in the work, journalism that you most likely hope will spread to non-members – which means that membership does not require a digital paywall, which in turn makes good journalism accessible to more people.
The rise of membership models is happening around the globe. MPP was the first project that attempted to track it – but we did more than track it. We also gave the experiment material support.
In 2018 our remit broadened to include the Membership in News Fund, which gave out a total of $1.1 million over two iterations to support innovative work in member-driven journalism. MPP solicited the applications, and awarded 39 grants in the range of $10,000 to $40,000, spread over five continents.
In addition to the money to fund their experiments, MPP gave its grantees “venture support,” which included coaches and consultants who could help keep the project on track and fill in any knowledge gaps.
MPP is no innovation itself. It’s an intervention in a struggling field. By “struggling” we mean that almost anywhere on the globe, it is hard to sustain public service journalism. Outside of e-commerce, it’s very hard to make a profit on the internet; it’s even harder to survive as a digital publisher. The field is still struggling to find business models to replace print advertising and pennies-for-clicks digital advertising. Membership models in news were born of that struggle.
When we founded MPP in 2017, membership was just emerging as a distinct path to sustainability in journalism. It was not well understood. Our goal was to spread enough research, support enough experiments, and co-create a shared industry language around membership so that this “distinct path” would become more viable and more accessible for newsrooms around the world. If we could help it emerge for enough people, and enough newsrooms, then MPP could leave the stage and membership would keep going.
That would be a win.
When our first done-by date came in May 2020, we knew the field wasn’t there yet. The shared knowledge about how to do membership models was too incomplete and poorly distributed. So we continued the project with a major commitment from one of our funders, Luminate, and additional support from the Google News Initiative. A year and a half later the global momentum feels strong enough for us to sunset. Other organizations in the journalism ecosystem are supporting membership through funding and training, and newsrooms a few years into their membership journey are now stepping up to teach those who are just getting started.
We treated the planned demise of the project as a design phase like any other. We equipped others to continue some of the work, and tried to eliminate any gap between what we had learned and what we had published in usable form. In what follows, we share in detail our progress towards key objectives, we explain how the project evolved, and we describe what you can do to carry the work of membership in news forward.
MPP launched in 2017 with the following objectives:
Study the needs of the relevant news organizations and find out why their members support them;
Collect what's already known about making membership work by seeking out the people who have deep experience with membership models (including members themselves);
Research all the ways that community members can contribute to journalism organizations, not just with money, but with knowledge and expertise;
Support innovative membership models as part of a global experiment to identify best practices for sustaining independent journalism in the 21st century;
Synthesize the key membership lessons learned by journalism organizations around the world;
Develop our understanding of membership as a distinct path to sustainability, not The Answer but a thing to try for some sites.
Our work unfolded in three phases that often overlapped.
The initial research phase
An intervention planned for three years does not mesh well with the time horizons typical of academic research, especially when you consider how long it takes for social science findings to influence newsroom practice (if ever). We couldn’t afford to play in that game.
We decided on a human-centered research style that stood midway between journalistic reports about trends in the news industry and academic studies of long term shifts. (This in-between space has already been charted by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, the European Journalism Centre, Tow Center for Digital Journalism, among many others.)
We also felt it was important to adapt our work to the learning styles common in journalism, which place a premium on practical instruction as opposed to philosophical argument. Journalists want to see how other newsrooms did it, along with case studies that show people learning through both failures and successes.
In the research phase we began with a simple database of news sites that appeared to have membership in some form. We asked members of news sites why they joined and tried to understand their answers. We collected examples of when the practice of membership worked, and where it ran into trouble. We documented our approaches to brainstorming and user research so that newsrooms could steal them. We interviewed the makers of membership programs to see what they were learning – basic research, all of which you can find on our site.
The communities of practice phase
At a certain point, we realized MPP needed to do more than just document what membership can look like. It needed to be a stimulant of what we came to call “memberful” ways of working. We also needed to see how newsrooms were actually using our research. How else could we know if we were being helpful? So we organized a series of communities of practice.
The first, led by Emily Goligoski, brought together some of the earliest practitioners of membership in the U.S. and Europe to learn from each other and help us understand the field better. The second, called “Join the Beat” and led by Melanie Sill, brought together a group of newsrooms to explore the opportunities in networked reporting, where members helped in fact-collection. Ashley Alvarado led a second iteration of Join the Beat the following year.
The become-a-fund phase
In 2018, Luminate, a philanthropy that supports independent media around the world, came to MPP with a compelling offer to help design a new fund that would support creative work in membership at digital newsrooms across the globe. In other words, they asked us to take what we learned in our research and use it to fund plausible membership “tries,” our term for attempted improvements in member-supported journalism.
This became the Membership in News Fund. MPP was picked to run it.
Each of the chosen newsrooms received a grant, a designated coach, webinars, plus other types of venture support over the course of several months.
After funding these newsrooms and getting under the hood in 2019, we realized there were some things we would do differently if we had a second shot at funding membership experimentation. We also saw that some best practices and effective routines were beginning to emerge. There was not only knowledge out there, but wisdom, and it needed to be recorded more robustly.
As our 2020 sunset date approached and we reflected on our progress, we identified three key tasks that we needed more time to accomplish:
Document everything we were learning about the operations, not just the concepts, of membership practice – the daily routines, not just the flashy projects.
Build the bench of membership coaches who could spread best practices, while learning from success and failure at the sites they advise. We had some great ones, but needed more of them.
Support early adopters in regions where it took root later than others, or had less institutional support: Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Central and Eastern Europe, and Asia.
Fortunately, the Google News Initiative, which funded the Membership Guide, and Luminate (which had funded the Membership in News Fund and MPP operations) understood the importance of our three remaining tasks, and helped us extend the project for 16 more months. The big deliverables were the Membership Guide (more on that below) and a second iteration of the Membership in News Fund.
ariel zirulnick
Fund Director
JAY ROSEN
Director
Defining the “done” conditions
Once we had a new — and final — sunset date (August 31, 2021) we had to design the sunset itself.
For us, that meant figuring out ways to leave the field in a way that would support continued momentum without our involvement.
We came up with six of them:
Document and collect everything we teach in 1:1 consultations and workshops in one place. Archive it in such a way that newsrooms wouldn’t need an MPP staff member to help them navigate it. (The key words are “wouldn’t need MPP.”)
Find an institution that could be a knowledge partner, not just a fiscal home – one that could hold, or even help spread, the insights gathered throughout the project. There was no one at NYU to whom we could “give” MPP; a research university can house live projects, and warehouse them when dead. We needed an institution that could absorb our knowledge, while doing its own thing.
Develop a network of people who know MPP’s work deeply and will continue it without us through other roles and relationships.
Bring together the people to whom we turn the work over, and stage a symbolic hand-off.
Set aside money, time, and administrative support for a “soft landing.”
Talk about the impending closure often and with consistency, so that no one is taken by surprise. Make the parting message to journalism organizations explicit: this is your movement, not ours.
How we fulfilled each of those conditions
1. Document and collect everything we teach in 1:1 consultations and workshops in one place
In September 2020, we published the Membership Guide, a tactical, practical guide to the newsroom membership journey. With only a bit of hyperbole, we might say it’s everything we know. And the Guide did what we needed it to do – requests for 1:1 consultations declined dramatically after publication because newsrooms were able to use the Guide to answer questions they used to ask us. In 2021, we published it in Spanish and Portuguese. The French translation is coming in a couple weeks. Read more about how we designed and wrote the Guide.
The Guide’s target user is the newsroom leader who needs to make decisions about membership strategy. But those newsroom leaders also sometimes need consultants and trainers who can help them on their specific membership journey – and we realized that there weren’t enough advisers with both firsthand membership experience and regional expertise to meet the growing demand.
So in July 2021 we published a rundown of some of our most tried-and-true methods for training member-driven newsrooms, as well as recommendations for how to use the Membership Guide to steer a newsroom from the outside as a consultant or trainer. The three coaches who worked with us on this project all make at least some of their income from consulting, so it might seem strange for them to share their work in such a way that others could “steal” their approach. But they were on board with our mission as a public research project trying to make itself redundant. So please, steal our coaching tools. They work.
2. Find an institutional partner (or partners) who will absorb the membership discipline and still be around when we’re gone
New York University was a great home for MPP when it started. The University and its journalism program have always believed in “interventions.”
But as we moved into funding newsrooms and providing venture support, we realized we needed a different kind of institutional partner. Our extension in May 2020 gave us an opportunity to move homes. MPP has always been a lean team – at our largest, we had two full-time staff members. Two can only provide so many skills and types of experience! So when we went looking for a new home, we sought an organization that could help us fill two key gaps:
Local expertise in our focus regions (Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Central and Eastern Europe)
A record of, and comfort with, deep involvement in the newsrooms they support, particularly in newsroom operations and finance
The Media Development Investment Fund (MDIF) fills those gaps, as well as providing one more key ingredient: they see the importance of membership to many of their clients, and care about helping the whole ecosystem, not just the newsrooms they invest in. Their commitment to continuing MPP’s work is stronger than we could have hoped when we decided to move there in 2020.
As the co-publisher of the Membership Guide, the Lenfest Institute for Journalism has also been a critical friend to the project. In partnership with RevLab at the Texas Tribune, Lenfest supported membership classes based on the Guide, which more than 100 newsrooms participated in. They also host a newsletter-based membership course that newsrooms can sign up for at any time, and, through Joseph Lichterman’s close work with our team, are helping to ensure that MPP’s research remains a part of the conversation on how we will sustain public service journalism in the U.S.
3. Develop a network of people who know MPP’s work deeply and will continue the work without us, through other roles and relationships
At its largest, MPP was a mighty team of two full-time staff members working closely with a global network of researchers and consultants. As we come to a close, those collaborators are still out there producing research and teaching others at places like the Lenfest Institute, Institute for Nonprofit News, American Journalism Project, International Center for Journalists, News Product Alliance, Sembra Media, Solutions Journalism Network, and Reuters Institute for Journalism.
We designed flexible ways to collaborate that allowed us to work with people who had full-time roles at other ecosystem support organizations, ensuring that MPP routines and lessons became part of the mix in newsrooms around the world.
As the venture support began for the 16 newsrooms we funded in 2021, fund director Ariel Zirulnick stepped down to part-time status. This freed up funds to build a more robust coaching bench for the sunset.
Doing it this way had two benefits: the newsrooms got stronger support, and because the coaches were working with the newsrooms and each other more deeply, we were able to spot trends and common challenges across different newsrooms and build a community of practice among several membership coaches that will outlast MPP.
4. Bring together the people to whom you are turning the work over
One of the key things MPP did over four years is introduce people who were on similar journeys but might not otherwise meet. Through our network, newsrooms in places as disparate as Buenos Aires, Colorado, Cape Town, and Bangalore met and began swapping advice and ideas on common challenges. But each interaction still relied on MPP to be the connector – and that indicated to us that our progress was incomplete.
We needed to give newsrooms the tools they needed to build connections with each other directly. The first step was publishing the case studies in the Membership Guide. There are 37 of them today, and that number will continue to grow. Filters on the case study section allow users to limit their search by region, newsroom maturity, newsroom size, and other factors, making it easier for users to find newsrooms with whom they have things in common. When you publish a case study, you make common knowledge out of a single site’s experience. As we said: this is how journalists like to learn.
The second step was launching casual community calls among our 2019 and 2021 grantees and coaches. These calls were optional, unrecorded, and focused on providing a low-pressure space where membership practitioners could present works-in-progress for feedback, or talk about common steps in the membership process. Critically, MPP was merely a facilitator and notetaker for these calls. Participants had to leave their name and email address in the notes document so that others could easily reach them to follow up on something they heard, and participants could pitch topics for future calls as well.
The third and final step was hosting a global summit to point membership practitioners to newsrooms and people who will lead the way going forward. The free, online, five-day event drew speakers and participants from six continents and an average of 100 people joined us live each day. All the recordings from the summit are now available.
5. Set aside money, time, and administrative support for a “soft landing”
MPP’s work will not come to a full stop on Aug. 31, 2021. First, our website and the Membership Guide will remain live indefinitely, and we’ll do our best to make sure all the links stay current. We have an email address – info@membershippuzzle.org – that will continue to be monitored. We’ve already spoken about MDIF’s commitment to supporting membership in the newsrooms they work with. If you’re working on membership in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Central and Eastern Europe, or Asia and the Pacific and are seeking advice on membership strategy, reach out to them at mas@mdif.org.
We set aside some funding in our 2020-21 budget to be spent beyond MPP’s official end date. Those funds will support future presentations about our work, updates to the Guide, and the translation of those updates.
6. Talk about the impending closure often and with consistency
We began talking about our sunset in August 2020, when we announced our extension – and for the last year, we never stopped talking about it. We shared updates on our progress toward our goals and communicated about what remained to be done. Six months ago, we shared what our final projects were – and as of last week, we’ve completed them all. (Insert joke about journalists and deadlines.)
There have been a lot of jokes in the last couple months about when we were going to announce another extension of our project. But there will be no further extensions. They are not necessary. We are closing shop because we have embedded this work in enough places and with enough people that MPP is no longer needed.
As the sun sets on the Membership Puzzle Project, we encourage you to look for new ways to follow that distinct path
Post-Project Essentials
Membership Puzzle Project has come to a close, but our support for the membership movement will not. Below are shortcuts to some essential resources and information.
Looking for a clear explanation of what membership is and how it differs from donations and subscriptions? We’ve got that.
Want to interview the former MPP team or have us present at your event? We can still do that sometimes. Email us.
Are you a newsroom seeking advice? Check out the Membership Guide, which includes 37 case studies and step-by-step processes for the stickiest parts of the membership journey. It’s also available in Spanish and Portuguese, and will soon be published in French.
Interested in taking a newsletter course on membership? We co-designed one with the Lenfest Institute. Sign up.
Are you a media coach or consultant looking for inspiration? Steal our coaching resources.
Missed our summit? Catch up with the recordings.
Trying to fInd other newsrooms to talk about membership and membership-adjacent topics? Head to the Gather and News Product Alliance Slack workspaces.
Want to republish a piece of our research? All of our work is available for republication and translation. Let us know what you’re republishing and where.
Want to keep tabs on future updates to the Membership Guide? If you don’t already get our newsletter, sign up.
If you are a newsroom in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Central and Eastern Europe, or Asia and are seeking advice on your membership strategy, you can contact the Media Development Investment Fund (MDIF). They will continue to host occasional membership training opportunities for newsrooms in those regions.