Ready, Set, Goal! Turn Your Audience and Revenue Ambitions Into Reality Through Smart Goal Setting and Project Planning | Otter.ai

Ready, Set, Goal! Turn Your Audience and Revenue Ambitions Into Reality Through Smart Goal Setting and Project Planning

Online News Association1h 12min

Speaker 1

00:00

Should they be using it during the session? Does it match with what you guys are doing?

Speaker 1

00:10

They can use the back of it and then we can talk about what the front of it is. Okay, on just say

Unknown Speaker

00:43

hello

Speaker 1

00:55

just do this probably because I'm a podium person you're pacing

Speaker 1

01:25

ready Hi everybody. Welcome. Hope you're having a good day so far. My name is Ivan mackinder. I work for the news revenue hub. News revenue hub is an organization that helps newsrooms create reader revenue programs membership programs, or we help newsrooms grow membership programs. We help newsrooms make money. What we have been doing over the last few years our bread and butter is obviously helping organizations do campaign work and fundraising. We've also developed a lot of work to help newsrooms at other stages of the funnel in particular, growing traffic, gaining newsletter subscribers, figuring out how to make those subscribers loyal, turning them into potential conversions for your membership program, but it's the same funnel if you if your newsroom has a subscription paywall, whatever it might be, you want to create loyalty, you want to move them down the funnel and you want to convert a lot of the questions that we get in the course of our work and working with newsrooms and we work with over 200 newsrooms is how much revenue is possible. And how do we set goals in the course of that funnel that I just sort of outlined? Without being arbitrary and without being just kind of throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticks. So we've developed some systems to help newsrooms set goals. I think today we'll probably talk about smart goals, and potentially even OKRs couple different types of systems of goals. What we're passing out for you here now also is our scorecard, which is actually a tool that we're using in the Midway at our booth. For for today, it's not necessarily going to map directly on to what we're talking about, but you can use the back if you because we are going to do an interactive purpose of this. And then we invite you to come down to the Midway and look at the health of your newsroom. We'll actually gauge we have data from working I mentioned we work with over 200 newsrooms. Many of those newsrooms have over 100 We have data for and we're actually like organizing them in tranches across the industry. So if those of you in local newsrooms, we have medians to say the median newsroom inside the news revenue hub that we're working with has this much average traffic. This is their average list size. This is the median loyalty for their newsletter list. So this is what we're trying to do to help them make these goals less arbitrary. Those are benchmarks that you all can use and say like okay, as we're establishing our own funnel, we actually have something to compare against a benchmark to compare against. So come by the midway. Our booth is in one of the left hand corners by where I'm told the bar will be later. And you can, you can we'll plug in medians for you and help you actually establish your funnel. Today, you're gonna hear less from me and more from these two very smart people. Abby Jingis is our Director of consulting at the news revenue hub. She works with hands on dozens and dozens of newsrooms and manages a team that works with dozens and dozens more. So she has a lot of insight into how to set goals and how to work through them and also, you know the process for hitting them. Graham Graham Watson Ringo is our senior director of success. Graham has run newsrooms and knows the editorial side but also those of you who are in the nonprofit industry know when you run a newsroom that you're doing literally everything so she has done editorial, but also audience funnel work set goals, all of that stuff. So you are in very good hands. I would be remiss if I were not to say that Graham is also running for OMA board, which those of you who are members can vote. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Abby and grim. Thanks for being here.

Speaker 2

05:37

Thanks, Evan. Good afternoon, everybody. While they came in hot, didn't it? As Evan said, my name is Graham. I am I've been with the news revenue hub for gosh since 2021. Prior to that, I worked at the San Antonio report, formerly the revived report in San Antonio, Texas. I was the managing editor there prior to that. Spent a lot of time in sports. So I know how to move things very quickly. I know how to operate very quickly. You know, write a read story on deadline five minutes, right. So you know what we're going to be talking about here today is basically how I think every news organization, every person should should work within their lives. I mean, why do we do the things that we do, right? We do them to accomplish a certain thing and those in the business world, we count goals. And so that's what we're going to talk about today. So why do we set goals? What makes a good goal? How do we keep goals on track and then we're going to do a little workshop so that we can all work on this together and and talk through some of the goals that you might have and some of the ways we can go ahead and achieve that. So what goals can we achieve? So when you think about goals, we want to be smart, right? Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, time bound, that's that fun acronym that we're always fed right? SMART goals. But it does make sense, right? I can say in 2024 I want to make some money. Okay, well, that's great, but when and 2420 24 and how much money do I want to make and how am I going to go ahead and do it? A more specific goal would be by the end of 2024 I want to achieve $1 million in Reader revenue. sounds huge, right? The hub has had some works, who have actually made that their goal and achieved it. So it's about setting your mindset to something and then focusing on that thing, and then plotting ways that you can achieve that goal. And that's what we're going to do today and we're gonna walk through it with everybody and we're gonna help everybody get to some pretty awesome goals and hopefully help you achieve those things. So what makes a good goal? Alright, you want to be aspirational? Right. Don't say, You know I think we should achieve. I'd love to achieve $300 this month. Well, if you've never achieved $300 before in any sort of revenue capacity from your readers, or subscriptions or anything like that, that's pretty good goal, but let's pretend like you have, so let's get aspirational. Let's think big. Let's think about where you think your organization can go, where you think your readers will meet you where you think your advertising can go, your subscription goals, any of those things. You know, we talk at the news revenue hub about setting a goal and then setting a stretch goal this would be more of your aspirational goal, that goal that maybe seems a little hard to achieve, but you should probably be looking at it anyway because that's really where you want to go and that's where you want to set yourself up for the next year or the next month or the next quarter or however it works within your organization. So yes, set a set a goal that feels manageable, that feels like this is something we can achieve, but then get aspirational, set a stretch goal, feel like how can we get here? How can we achieve this thing and then push yourself to try and achieve that? Whether you do or not, that's fine, but at least you've given yourself a longer target to try and get to and they definitely have to be measurable. Like I said, you know, make sure that you're you're specifically angling to a financial target or a date or something like that, because now we all need to hold ourselves accountable to something so if we are setting arbitrary goals, we're really not holding ourselves accountable to the things that we actually want to achieve. And turn it over to Abby.

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