How nonprofit news sites can build loyalty and sustainability in the current crisis

Our seven tips — from SEO to Email Newsletters

By Elizabeth Hansen & Emily Roseman

As local citizens seek out critical news during this public health crisis, nonprofit newsrooms are doing incredible work under extreme circumstances to meet the information needs of their communities.

This current crisis is placing many layers of stress on the news industry: ad revenues are plummeting, reporters are putting their lives (and their loved ones’ lives) in danger to cover their communities, and newsrooms are operating with not enough resources and round-the-clock demands. As the economic outlook darkens, news leaders are starting to face painful budget and staffing cuts even as they are experiencing surges in traffic. This is especially true for nonprofit newsrooms that keep their coverage open to all and rely on various forms of philanthropic support for most of their revenue.

In this moment, how can nonprofit news sites build the loyalty of their digital audiences and drive for sustainability in the midst of worsening economic conditions?

We have drawn on our collective experience studying and consulting with digital newsrooms to highlight a handful of high-impact digital revenue and engagement strategies that newsrooms can implement immediately. These strategies will build the infrastructure for sustainability now and in the months ahead.

1. Ask for Support in Email Newsletters: ASK FOR SUPPORT on all your digital platforms — especially over email — and use campaign segmentation (if you can) to target your requests. Ask early and often.
2. Ask for Support on Your Site: Run custom donation calls-to-action on your story pages and websites.
3. Ask Your Audiences What They Need: Spin up an audience survey to understand what your audience needs most from you right now and where they need it.
4. Make Your Content Searchable: Up your SEO game. People need to find your coverage.
5. Capture Email Addresses: Capture as many new newsletter subscribers as possible. Turn your site(s) into newsletter subscription machines to get the most out of your spikes in traffic, being careful to abide by opt-in privacy practices.
6. Launch or Rebrand a Daily Newsletter: Launch a daily local COVID email newsletter, or re-format your existing daily to be a place for keeping up-to-date on COVID in your community (if accurate).
7. Use Your Editorial Voice: Speak with an editorial voice. Use the power of an editorial voice in your newsletters to build your audience's loyalty and trust. Get away from RSS-generated newsletters.

See below for more details on each point.

1. ASK YOUR NEWSLETTER AUDIENCE FOR FINANCIAL SUPPORT, and use campaign segmentation if you can to avoid spamming your existing donors and members.

• It’s a great idea to ask your digital audiences for financial support early and often. Not everyone will be able to give, but the more you ask, the greater the likelihood that those who can give, will. Remind your audiences of your mission and the critical, free service you are providing, and ask them for support to enable your newsroom to continue the work. One of the best ways to make this ask is over email, to your newsletter subscribers.
• We really like CT Mirror’s email newsletter appeal here. If you have any examples of a coronavirus-specific newsletter appeal for a donation, please let us know and we will add it to this document.
• If you are afraid of blasting your list too many times, we recommend segmenting your list (and moving recent or large donors you want to avoid spamming to a “do not solicit” list for this campaign). See Newsletter Knowledge Share for a crowdsourced and curated list of newsletter resources on segmentation and other technical tips (this is curated by Annemarie Dooling, the newsletter pro at WSJ). See also Right Message’s Brennan Dunn The Beginner’s Guide To Segmenting Your Email List.
• For more inspiration and reassurance on why you should ask for support over email more often, see Common Causes’ Jesse Littlewood’s great piece on Five Reasons Why Nonprofit Media Should Ask Their Audience for Support via Email More Often. It’s a great piece on how digital newsrooms can learn from advocacy organizations on the frequency of appeals.

2. Run periodic custom donation calls-to-action on your story pages.

• Especially in perpetual “special coverage” time like this, run periodic custom donation calls-to-action on your story pages. This is a good way to garner support from a surge in site users when your ad revenue falls. You may not get many click-throughs, but with the volume of users you’re experiencing, this is a way to attract some extra revenue.
• We’ve noticed Crosscut has had great examples of this in the past few weeks with the below story page modal (pops up to the left-hand side of a story after the user is already scrolling). Send us your examples or other examples of this, and we will add them to this page!

• The News Revenue Hub is really the pro on periodic calls-to-action on story pages. If you aren’t already a client, we’d recommend checking out their a la carte services to access some of their excellent fundraising templates.

3. Ask your readers what they need from you.

• Audience surveys, especially in high traffic moments like this, don’t have to be onerous or take lots of time. Consider spinning up a quick survey to understand better what kinds of stories and newsletters people would like to see from you. You can run it on your site and in your other newsletters for a couple of days and mine the insights before you launch a new product or tailor an existing one.

A few key questions to ask your readers right now:

Audience Survey Question Suggestions

• We noticed WNYC and WAMU are circulating this radio survey.
• For more information on crafting audience surveys, see hack our user research materials by MPP, the Engaged Journalism Playbook, and how our audience surveys inform membership from the News Revenue Hub. See also the Membership Puzzle Project’s library of survey questions, with additional resources on conducting an online survey.

4. Up your SEO game so people can find your coverage.

• Google is offering free Ads credits to small businesses and nonprofits — check your account to see if you’re eligible.
• Create and maintain a list of ~50 core search keywords for your website. Now, those keywords should be coronavirus related. These keywords can be added into the first paragraph of the story if possible, or if you can’t do that, they should be added to the meta description of the article in your CMS.
• Headlines to stories should be 55–75 characters or less. URLs should be kept short and should include keywords if possible. Anchor text within any stories (the text for hyperlinks) should be a keyword or a clear indication of what the user is clicking on (see here for more SEO 101 tips from SEO expert Kelly Delay: Optimizing for Audiences — SEO 101 for Nonprofit News.)
• For tips on integrating SEO best practices into your newsroom workflow, learn about how the Texas Tribune does it with specific slack channels to track and include keywords in headlines, etc.
• When co-publishing a story with another newsroom, SEO becomes even more important. See this post on Four SEO Questions to Ask When You’re Co-Publishing with Another Newsroom, which describes how to ask for the ideal blurb of text that the partner newsroom can and should put at the top of your story page that appears on their site.

• (Also, in case you missed it, see here for the Solution Journalism Network’s database of stories about COVID that are up for being re-published.)
• If you have a bit of time, it would be worth making sure your past evergreen or high-performing stories are properly optimized for SEO. See our guide on How to Retroactively Optimize Your Site’s Top Stories, which involves using the tool Moz (which has a nonprofit rate) to identify the right keywords to add after-the-fact to your older stories.

5. Turn your site(s) into newsletter subscription machines to build a deeper relationship with the users coming to your site.

• We recommend treating your site, especially your homepage and any high-performing article pages, as email newsletter subscription machines. Newsletters are the best way to build audience habit and loyalty and the best forum for asking for support.
• Take a look at your traffic — if most folks are coming to you via story pages, make sure your story page has calls to action to sign up for your email newsletter. If you have the CMS capability, you can experiment with calls to action for weekly, daily, and specialized products, or a general sign-up call to action that takes users to a newsletter selection page.
• Make sure your homepage has a newsletter sign-up prominently displayed — meaning it is noticeable to the scrollers (bold colors, larger in size). We really like the Texas Tribune’s newsletter sign up box, which advertises their evening roundup as a great place to get coronavirus news specific to Texans (notice how they also showcase a link at the bottom to their other newsletter products):

• For more on this and tactics to grow your email list, see Section 5 of The Newsletter Guide. See also the section on Article Pages and Site Structure in the Guide to Audience Revenue and Engagement.

6. Understand the different types of newsletter audiences and make sure your newsletter products are covering the bases.

• If you have the content and staffing to do it, we also strongly recommend creating a daily coronavirus email, or re-branding or customizing your daily newsletter as a mainly coronavirus update. This is the public service journalism that so many people want right now. And this is also where an editorial voice can really shine — a reassuring voice to cut through the noise and tell you what’s important that day in local developments.
• Link to other newsrooms’ coverage. Become a one-stop-shop for your newsletter audience for coverage from around the community.
• We’ve found in working with digital newsrooms that some audience members just really, really don’t want to open a daily email. But they also don’t want to unsubscribe completely. As a secondary priority, consider introducing a weekly newsletter product for those sometimes-openers and for new visitors to your newsroom who might not be ready for a daily. Even if your weekly newsletter starts as just a collection of links of the best-performing stories of the week (though you should aim for some editorial content in each), get it launched. A weekly product gives new subscribers an on-ramp to your newsroom. And it’s another place to ask for support when you need to.
• You can also rebrand existing newsletter products to better suit the current moment. There are many examples of this — we appreciated how the 19th changed their newsletter to a twice-weekly (instead of weekly) product, and explicitly listed coronavirus updates in their email sign-up page.
• For more information on the different types of newsletters, see Section 3 of The Newsletter Guide, and Want to start a newsletter? Read this first. See also Not a Newsletter: The Archives by Dan Oshinsky for a ton of newsletter tips and resources to consider.

7. Take advantage of the power of newsletter editorial voice for building audience loyalty. Get away from RSS-generated newsletters.

• If at all possible, get away from RSS-generated newsletters and use this moment of audience attention to build an editorial voice, narrative, and a brand in your newsletters. This will do wonders for the quality of your service and your digital fundraising.
• The advantage of an editorial newsletter product is that it keeps readers in the email inbox rather than clicking away. When you offer a compelling narrative experience in the newsletter, there is a better chance your subscribers will read all the way to the end. If your newsletter drives readers away from email and onto your site, the risk is that they stay on the site or click away without going back to the email. As a user, it can be difficult to click back and forth between email and web applications, especially if your traffic is coming from mobile.
• Building an editorial newsletter means either having a reporter write the newsletter in their voice, or write the opening paragraph of the newsletter and then following up with a series of curated links with short explanations and/or story excerpts. See below for a simple checklist we recommend following to get the newsletter closer to a “targeted positioning.”

Newsletter Positioning Strategies Checklist

• In general, targeted positioning strategies in newsletters lead to better loyalty metrics than generic ones, increasing the likelihood of conversion to membership. We recommend assessing your current products again the checklist below: