How The Bristol Cable managed to get inches away from a £40k grant

For a decade, the Bristol Cable has set out to do local news differently — determined to create a membership model which keeps power in the hands of readers. Writing for Behind Local News, The Cable’s strategy lead, Eliz Mizon, shares how they’ve sought to overcome their most challenging 12 months to date:

This year our local media co-op, The Bristol Cable, is turning 10. We’ve survived a tumultuous decade against the odds by raising grant money and campaigning hard for membership income, one one primary message: our members, not press barons or shareholders, own the paper.

In 2023, we could see that the vast majority of grant money for truly independent journalism had dried up. So we launched an incredibly ambitious membership campaign, and our one remaining grant funder gave us quite the incentive to succeed: raise membership revenue by £60,000, a 50% increase, within a year.

At time of writing, we’re 82% of the way to that target, with one month left to go. To put this in perspective, we need just 100 more members to pay £120/year, and we’ll meet our target, and the campaign has just been nominated for an award. Here’s how we’ve done it.

We began the campaign at the end of September with a three-pronged strategy:

• Firstly we worked out that we could achieve the entire target simply by convincing every one of our existing 2,500 members to give £2 more per month across the year. We thought that might be a little ambitious, so we settled on a target of 25% of members making a £2 uplift, encouraged by direct email marketing.
• Secondly, to encourage new members at higher contribution levels, we embarked on a multimedia campaign and relaunched our membership benefit tiers. Previously, the only ‘soft’ benefit we offered was to send the quarterly magazine to members’ doors if they paid anything more than £3/month. We rearranged the tiers with a range of benefits at £5/month or more and £10/month.
• Thirdly, we added a tier for those people who can afford to pay a significant chunk more — £1,000/year or more — to pay it forward. Our new Patron membership, which preserves our democratic membership ethos (one member, one vote, no matter your contribution) means that people who can afford to pay more for our journalism can subsidise those who cannot.

By the end of 2023, with early momentum we had increased our income by a third: £20,000. We continued campaigning hard all through the first half of 2024 to get to our current 82% mark, almost £50,000 of the £60,000 target.

Last month, the Reuters Institute’s annual Digital News Report revealed only 9% of Brits pay for online news and around two thirds (69%) say they wouldn’t pay anything. The average Brit wants to pay between £2 — £5 for news, not a sustainable level for most local papers unless they have a huge base.

So we’re proud of what we’ve managed to achieve. The cost of living crisis has meant a significant amount of churn, so while our exact number of members has only increased slightly, our increase in income from new net memberships is currently £10,300.

More than 500 existing members have increased their contribution by an average of £3, and I have even spoken to members who have increased their contribution more than once during the year, as the campaign has progressed and they have been inspired by our success, with the total increase from members at £20,200.

And we’ve managed to attract 13 Patrons so far, contributing around £25,000. Famously, this is an unlucky number, and so I am making a strong appeal to you, dear reader — do you know our 14th Patron? Feel free to send them my way.

If we succeed, an extra £100,000 would mean one-to-two years more runway to continue building our membership, and develop further sustainable revenue streams now that our staff of ten is big enough to incorporate this. One more campaign like this, plus a couple more income streams, could see us able to break even for the first time.

If you’d like to help us get to the target, whether you’re Bristol-based or a supporter of our advocacy work for UK local journalism, find out more about the Cable’s annual membership and Patron membership.