How to develop a relationship with your audience: lessons from the Membership Guide
Building a comprehensive guide on Membership takes time and care. The team behind the newly published Membership Guide explained to Hacks/Hackers London how their final handbook is relentlessly ‘user-centric’, was built on reviewing a specific set of recommendations and what they call ‘user personas’. But that was not all: they also explained how they presented the content of the guide and how they created a specific style guide appealing to any audience.
In a world of algorithms and data where tech giants harness much of the online audience, newsrooms are facing a crisis of sustainability. The need for an alliance with readers is now more important than ever. There is no doubt that the data exists, but it is not clear how publishers can use it to update their strategy and harbour membership models.
To address this gap, the Membership Puzzle, a public research project started by Jay Rosen in 2017, created a free handbook, The Membership Guide, which was presented at Hacks/Hackers London on October 21.
Ariel Zirulnick, managing editor of the Membership Guide and Yvonne Leow, product manager of the Guide, told Hacks/Hackers London how they created a tactical and practical guide to implementing membership and the strategy behind their handbook.
User Personas
The Membership Guide actively engages with user requirements; it is “relentlessly user centric”, Ariel told the Hacks/Hackers LDN crowd on Zoom. To do that, they carried out research across newsrooms and mapped the users “distinct needs, constraints and opportunities”
Design choices were paramount for this philosophy. Yvonne described their design discovery process, and how they used the ‘user personas’, essentially analysing who the users would be and what they would need exactly as well as reviewing committee recommendations to create an informative yet simple style guide.
The Guide brings together the existing data, with more than 3 years of research all in one place, to provide simpler access without the reader having to scroll through a sea of information.
With only a bit of hyperbole, we might say it’s everything we know.
Behind the scenes
From elements like the Menu bar to Navigation, the Guide is user friendly so that anyone can use it and figure out which stage they are at straight away- and following as the process moves forward.
The ample content is organised in various layers for user ease.
They also added elements for efficient reading such as glossary terms which provide the definition of data jargon to make sure users aren’t back-tracking.
Yvonne highlights the editorial tone and voice; how the team emphasised the “we” to make it more of a collaboration between MPP and the user to add humility and trust in the branding.
The Membership Guide provides a simple solution to the decade long question; how to actually talk about membership?
It seeks to bridge that gap between the audience and newsrooms through membership and effectively uses the information that already exists to make an efficient and informative tool for newsrooms.
It is a data and audience driven tool for a sustainable future of public service journalism; Ariel said that it is about understanding
“Member driven newsrooms and how they should be incorporating people in all stages of their work”.
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