Dear reader,
Rohan Grover and Jennifer Kho, who led HuffPost’s membership program from 2018 to 2020, were initially surprised when members told them that the opportunity to join the HuffPost community was as important to them as the newsroom’s mission. This came through in surveys and member feedback, and also played out when they A/B tested various messages and ads for membership.
So they based their membership strategy on cultivating community through events, polls, reader callouts, forums, newsletters, and the comments section. Like many other newsrooms, they described their members as a community
But what exactly qualifies as a community of members? And how can newsrooms cultivate a healthy, successful membership community?
Across the dozens of newsrooms Membership Puzzle Project has studied since May 2017, that desire for community, “to be a part of something bigger than oneself,” has also consistently shown up as a primary motivator for both audience participation and membership. But the steps to cultivating a community among readers and listeners remain murky.
That’s why we were so excited when Rohan and Jennifer first proposed the research we're publishing today. In the report, Rohan and Jennifer share what they learned from studying how four newsrooms from around the world – the Honolulu Civil Beat in Hawaii, Krautreporter in Germany, The News Minute (TNM) in South India, and Tortoise in the United Kingdom – cultivated strong communities among their members.
Through interviews with both staff and members of these very different newsrooms, Rohan and Jennifer offer a nuanced understanding of what healthy membership communities can look like. Their report includes a detailed look at how these newsrooms use events, newsletters, surveys, forums, and other tactics to cultivate community, as well as the challenges and opportunities at every phase of the community development process.
Their report is not a step-by-step manual for building community. There isn’t a magic formula for success, no secret KPI to optimize for. Each of the four newsrooms Rohan and Jennifer spoke to had its own conceptualization of what community is and looks like.
However, by drawing from the experiences of four newsrooms that serve different audiences with different strategies, MPP hopes to equip you with the information you need to steer your newsrooms toward building healthy, robust, engaged communities that support and enhance your journalism.
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