5 Lessons for Building a Media Membership Strategy

A few weeks ago, I attended “Media Membership Strategies – Beyond Pledges and Paywalls,” a summit hosted by the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at CUNY that explored how media outlets are building membership models to diversify their revenue beyond advertising and circulation.

After piloting a membership program for a bank-owned digital publisher in the early aughts, I was interested in hearing how bona fide media companies were approaching “affinity marketing,” as we called it way back when. And, selfishly, who wouldn’t want to be immersed in a room of “real” journalists in a conversation led by Jeff Jarvis, right?

Here are some of my key take-aways from the summit that are also consistent with my experience:

1. Differentiate rather than duplicate. To operate a successful “freemium model,” you want your members to crave your content. One effective way for making your content irresistible is by focusing on the “white space” so that your content stands out from the pack, both in terms of what you say and how you present it (think format).
2. Go beyond content and create community through online and offline extensions that enable members to engage with each other and you. We offered a mix of in-person small-group fireside chats as well as tweet chats and Google+ hangouts – and always published a recap of key points for those that couldn’t join the event. To help cement a sense of community, we invited members to bring a guest (also a great way to generate warm leads) and allocated time before the event for members to network.
3. Ask and acknowledge. People like being asked for their feedback, whether it is enabling them to comment on articles, take a poll or simply answer a quick question. They also want to know that you, in fact, are listening to what they say, so make sure you acknowledge their contributions. When someone shared a particularly insightful comment on one of my blogs, I often would use that as the jumping off point for my next post, thanking the member by user name.
4. Curate rather than crowd out. In the pilot I mentioned, we initially only featured the “best” content from our own subject matter experts. And, engagement was meh. When we invited credible voices from outside our company, we saw a material uptick in our own trust and credibility scores – and a boost in member sharing.
5. Let your members peek inside. When we launched our pilot, we had by-lined articles, but we didn’t really share the backstory of the writers/bloggers and why they were writing about such-and-such topic. When we encouraged our writers/bloggers to share their own financial journeys and personal interest in a particular topic, be it saving for retirement or talking to their parents about money, we were better able to develop a shared identity with our members – and engagement went from barely 30% to 80%+.

What would inspire you to become a member of a media outlet – beyond a tote bag?

And, if you’d like to learn more about what was discussed, look back at the conversation on Twitter under the hashtag #membership. Also, Josh Stearns put together open, collaborative public notes from the summit that you can access here.

Last but not least, thank you to Kathryn Reichert, for her eagle-eye editorial review.