Ready, Set, Goal! Turn Your Audience and Revenue Ambitions Into Reality Through Smart Goal Setting and Project Planning
4:30PM Aug 24, 2023
Speakers:
Keywords:
newsletter
goal
work
conversions
newsrooms
audience
organization
funnel
traffic
achieve
people
readers
great
feel
give
important
list
tasks
abby
team
Should they be using it during the session? Does it match with what you guys are doing?
They can use the back of it and then we can talk about what the front of it is. Okay, on just say
hello
just do this probably because I'm a podium person you're pacing
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.
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.
Thanks, Graham. So if you came in a little bit late, you might have missed Evan talking about the user funnel. If you know the hub, we love the funnel. And this is really just how we frame the user journey. It's kind of like a marketing thing that we've taken and applied to journalism. And so if you think about the journey of an audience member or reader, they join you at the top of the funnel. They maybe find you on Facebook because a friend shared an article or they discovered you in search when they were googling for information about their local election. In whatever form they find you they stumble upon your site, they read or watch something and then hopefully they start to develop a relationship with you and this is where we start moving them down the funnel. They become more loyal. Hopefully they read multiple stories. Maybe they pin your homepage, onto their computer, maybe they subscribe to a newsletter so that they can get regular updates directly from you. All of that is really important for them to build a relationship and get to know you and your team. As they read and watch more of your content. Then hopefully, eventually they move down to the bottom of the funnel. For many of our newsrooms, this is membership or donation. So this is someone making the ultimate commitment and giving you their hard earned dollars because they want to support your organization but depending on your newsroom, this might be a paid subscription this might be they attend a paid event, some other form of commitment. So you can see in the yellow here that we have metrics at each levels, each level of the funnel. And this is just to sort of track the user journey if you're thinking about setting high level organizational goals. If you are a publisher, executive, something like that. We recommend having a goal for each of these levels to really understand how the user journey is happening. And if you have any sort of shortcomings at any level of the funnel
so we are going to talk about goals here, obviously, and we're going to be doing some workshopping here in a second. But oftentimes I get asked questions about like, what could a goal be or what should a goal focus around, but it's helpful to think about in terms of metrics, and there are many many metrics that you could set goals around depending on your role, or your company. So if you are an audience person, maybe you are running newsletters, maybe you are running social media accounts, your goals might be related to growing, your Instagram followers or your newsletter, list size, something like that. If you are a membership person, you're probably focused on revenue. If you are an editor reporter maybe your goals are focused around number of stories published in a week or a month or source breakdown. Maybe you're thinking about who are your reporters talking to and trying to talk to more people of diverse backgrounds. So there's all sorts of different metrics, but these are how you make your sort of ambiguous goals more tangible by tying them to something that you can track. And then Graham talked about setting achievable goals and really how we go through this process with newsrooms is to first of all set good goals, which is what we're going to do here in a second. And then once you have set those goals, you're going to look back at previous years, and that previous data should inform your goals. So if last year you raise $100,000 from your audience, this year, maybe you could raise 500,000 but it might be more realistic for you to say this year. We want to raise 150 or 200,000. And in five years, we're working towards 500,000. So you want to use previous data to inform everything you're doing. And also look at that previous year data and make sure if there's outliers that you are factoring that in so if you had a huge breaking news story last July that caused your traffic to spike. You can't depend on another traffic spike in the future, because that was totally out of your control. And then of course, what activities will you undertake every goal you set everything you want to do is going to require tasks and work to achieve which we will talk about, but we know you're all on small teams, maybe you are a team of one, maybe your company has a limited budget. These things have to be realistic for you to achieve and hopefully you have support from your company and your leadership. But if you have a boss telling you we're gonna launch three new newsletters this year and you're sitting there you're like, how am I going to do that? I don't have any hours in the day as it is. Hopefully you can scale that back and say what's realistic for us to do right now? And maybe there's something that you can stop doing, hopefully, to offset the hours and the work that you're going to take on for any sort of new efforts.
I'm 100% in favor of stop doing things
yes. So now we're gonna get to the interactive portion. Hopefully you have a paper and pen or a laptop or even a phone. I would love for you all to just take a minute or two and think about write down a one sentence goal. So this is just like your first draft goal here. This could be for you yourself as an individual professionally or personally. It could be for your team if you run a team or for your organization as a whole. So there's gonna give you another minute, two minutes, write some things down, and then we're going to ask some folks to share so that we can workshop these.
All right, if you're still working totally fine, but if anyone has a goal that they are comfortable sharing, I would love to hear some things people wrote down. Can you just shout it out or raise your hand and I can call on you yeah. So up to grow our team's communities. So if you didn't hear that it was to grow her team's community engagement efforts. So that's a great starter goal. Let's talk about that one a little bit. We can talk about another one here in a second. What do we like about that goal? What don't we like I love community engagement efforts. So I think that's a great thing to set a goal around and really important for your organization's impact. What I didn't hear there were some of the more specific things and that's okay, because we're going to workshop and make these more specific, but I didn't hear if that was something that she wanted to do in the next month, the next six months the next year. And I didn't hear if there were tangible actions that she and her team are going to take to do that. So maybe that goal instead could become I want my team and I to grow our community engagement efforts within the rest of 2023 by doing X Y and Z.
Who else please please up to $200,000 by the end of this year, so our
raise $200,000 By the end of this year. That's great. I think that's great. How ya see and there's the rub right? End of Your campaigning is always this this time of year as we start to get in October, we start to see a lot of people doing the end of year campaigning people are naturally conditioned to start giving at the end of the year. I think we've all learned that through the work that we've done, and I think some of us who give all also, you know are more likely to do so at the end of the year. So I don't think that is a you know, a bad goal. But I think now we need to figure out how do we get there and you know, $200,000 in raise it help raise it through individual donors, raise it through membership, raise it through subscribers, raise it through advertising, so you know, pinpointing exactly, and maybe it's all of those things. Maybe it's just overall revenue, and it can be it's just now pinpointing where are we raising that money from who's going to be involved in the stakeholders? And, you know, and then setting a more measurable, you know, identifying who would be helping do that and who you'd be trying to raise from.
Yeah, and for that goal, I would say looking back to previous years will be really important. So maybe last year, you raise $175,000. And you did that by running four fundraising campaigns and the four fundraising campaigns each had a website ad and five emails, let's say something I see a lot with newsrooms, is they raise let's say $100,000 this year and they come to me and they say, I want to raise $150,000 Next year, and I'm like, okay, great. What are you going to do different and a lot of times then they look at me like what? And that's like, if you ran three campaigns last year, you want to raise more money this year. Can you run four campaigns, can you run five campaigns, maybe you run the same number of campaigns, but you are getting more aggressive, you're sending more emails, you're making more asks of your audience. So you always have to think about like, if you're looking for growth, there's going to have to be changes in what you're doing. That's true with traffic as well. A lot of times, newsrooms want to grow their traffic and it's like, are you going to publish more stories? Are you gonna publish more of certain categories of stories that you know people really like? There always has to be work tied to whatever growth goal you're setting.
Who else? Now we have a microphone now we're putting people on the spot.
Design produce and launch a State House newsletter by January 2024.
Love that. Thank you for sharing your experience with this. Newsletter launching.
Yeah, I would say launching a newsletter is a big undertaking. I think doing it by January is absolutely possible. But it does require having a really firm timeline. Oftentimes, if you don't have a firm timeline and breakdown of what you're going to do each week each month. It's really easy for that timeline to stretch and stretch and stretch and suddenly something you thought would take three months take six months or nine months. And so I would really recommend working backwards from that end date and say okay, January 1, we're going to have our first issue sent out the door. Maybe by December 25. You are completely completely done so you can all enjoy your period before between Christmas and New Year's. So by December 15, you are doing a test launch internally by December 1, your template is completely ready to go. work backwards from that final goal date and save. Give yourself benchmarks every you know one to two weeks so that you are continually working towards that ultimate goal. Otherwise it can feel very overwhelming to be like, how are we going to go from nothing to this finish thing?
Yeah, it really helps to create a roadmap for the site for things like that, so that you can mark those benchmarks. You can say in this period of time, we want to get this done and these are the stakeholders are going to be able to achieve that thing. And so you can actually tangibly see your progress as you are getting the goal and then you also know if maybe you're behind or ahead and that will help you adjust your your goal line if you need to, or adjust the speed at which you're doing the things that will ultimately get you to your goal. Who else when we're solving newsroom problems here, come on.
I work for a really small, nonprofit newsroom. And so we're in kind of a cycle where like a bunch of grants or sponsors or fundraising money will just drop all at once. And then we get really excited and we do a whole bunch of work and then it tails off and then we have to get lean and I want to try and figure out how do we how do we kind of even that out so it's less like a roller coaster and a little more consistent.
Love revenue questions. So yeah, that happens to a lot of organizations that get those big grants all once sometimes at the end of the year, right in the beginning of the year, and then you spend it and I've been told it's called the spin down like I've had a couple organization called the summer spin down even where you get to that October month you're like oh boy, I hope you are and a year campaigning comes through because it's gonna get a little tight around here. I think the best way to do with a big chunk of money is to figure out exactly what you need to allocate it to before you do anything with it. And sometimes that's already promised right within your grant. You need to just similar to the roadmap that we were just talking about to launching a newsletter. It's the same way that you would articulate what you're going to spend that money on and how not to figure that you have no money at the end of it. And now you're in that panic situation. Again, you have to go back and get more money allocated over the course of months. I recommend a monthly budget. A lot of people do yearly budgets fiscal year budgets monthly budget to see exactly how much money you spend every month. How much money do you bring in every month? What does that balance look like? I think it gives you a greater look at the look at the amount of money that you may need in a certain month. It gives you clarity on what your your ebbs and flows are when you will have those down months and how you can make up for those downloads. So if you see that you're you're gaining a lot of money in you know, March, April, May and then you have no money come August, September, October. Well, how do we take what you're earning over here and allocate it out so that it is a more balanced situation within the structure of your budget. So really looking at monthly, you know, when maybe you need to campaign a little harder if you're doing campaigns or you need to be asking in those certain months, and also to talk to your grantees and they also will allocate money in different months if they have the ability to do so, to help you spread out that that is that in that revenue so that you know you don't get kind of pinned down in one month and then have nothing as the as the monster icon.
I would also say I'm sure there are many, many full time freelancers here maybe some in this room and I think they probably all know that very well just in their own personal budgets, so probably great to talk to them as well. Just move on to phase two.
One more, it's also about newsletters. So my one sentence was increase our weekly newsletter subscriber list by 30% while increasing the click through average from 5% to 7% by December and this is what's this is something that my boss actually wants to see. Accomplished.
Great. I love that one. I love how specific it is. Some thoughts that come to mind if you're thinking about increasing the clicks to your newsletter, give a really hard look at your newsletter design. Sometimes newsrooms have newsletters that are really optimized for opens but not necessarily optimized for clicks like if your product is designed so someone can read it in their inbox and get the information. That's probably how your users are treating it. So maybe they're not clicking not because they don't want to click but because maybe the design is not prompting them to click. Maybe they're like it's like a skim type situation where they can read everything they need, and go and that's not necessarily a sign that the product is bad. It's just that's what it's doing. I would also say thinking about LIS growth. There are many ways to do that. meant some works do paid acquisition, so they run advertisements. I personally really advocate for organic growth as much as possible. So looking at what your newsletter ads on your website look like, are they on every page? Are they very clear for users? What the newsletter is about when they're going to get it? All those sorts of things, and more creative ideas as well like partnerships. We've talked a lot about partnerships and collaborations at OMA this week. We are huge advocates of that. So if you have other newsrooms who you consider to be peers, whether they're in your market or maybe just covering similar things as you Is there an opportunity to share content, maybe you can have some of their links in your newsletter, and they can have some of your links in theirs. That can be a great way to get your coverage out in front of new people. And by default, hopefully they like what they're reading and they might subscribe to your newsletter. From there. So that's another great way besides like website advertisements to have that organic growth, be fostered.
I think goals also relate to products too, right? If you're going to start up a new newsletter that some of you have already indicated, why are you starting that newsletter newsletter? What is the goal of that newsletter is it to drive traffic back to your site isn't to be its own self contained, revenue generating product that has advertising and maybe it's long form? And so don't think of goals just as like things that you apply to yourself or to your organization. They also do apply to products, things that you're testing out within your newsroom. So thinking that's getting that same mindset as you're starting to talk about we want to launch a new whatever podcasts newsletter or anything like that, you know, it's the same kind of thinking of like, what is my ultimate goal? What is the ultimate thing that we want to achieve here by launching this new thing?
Alright, so we're gonna move on to the second phase of this, which some of you might have already been doing while we were talking. So we want to take that first goal you wrote and try to improve it. So if you've already made it more specific, great, but we want to add some sub tasks now to these goals. So in the example of launching a new newsletter, who is going to be the editor of that newsletter? Who's going to be the writer who's going to be the person that builds the issue every week? Maybe at one organization, that's all one person but at some organizations, those are three different people who's going to design the newsletter template. So take that goal and come up with two or three sub tasks that you know need to happen before that goal can be achieved. And hopefully you have someone in mind maybe it's you, maybe it's someone else who would be responsible for that. task.
While folks are writing I'm just gonna put Alejandra here on the spot. Alejandra works at Citi side. And she and I and their teams worked on launching a new newsletter earlier this year. And that was like about a six month or so process, maybe a little less four months maybe. But I just want to use that as an example to sort of like, go backwards with a real case study. So the city side team decided we want to launch a new newsletter. We wanted to focus on arts and culture coverage and events in our community. It was like great, let's work backwards. From that. We set a target launch day and we did the thing we made the roadmap and decided what we were going to do each week. But there were a lot of people involved in that process. Alejandra is the audience person at City side. So you know, we were thinking about is this going to be a brand new list or is this going to be using existing newsletter subscribers? We had to collaborate with their website, Guru Doug to help us with website calls. to action. So promoting the newsletter on the website. We had another person who was reaching out for organic partnerships to promote the newsletter to different community organizations. We had editors in the mix who were editing the actual content of the newsletter and to reporters on the team that were doing the writing. So there was a whole lot of different people in the mix there. I will hundra Do you have any like thoughts to share about like how that process went? And lessons learned now that the newsletter is out in the world?
Yeah. I think it's been pretty well received and it's doing really well. Some thing that we did decide to do was we launched this new news newsletter and didn't send it to the we sent the first send to the entire list, but we had an opt in rather than an opt out option. In the past, we launched a newsletter last year. With an opt out options, meaning that most of our lists was just converted automatically to this new newsletter. We didn't choose to do that this time around, which was kind of scary because we're we have a big list and so we just like we're kind of I guess, hoping to continue having a lot of subscribers to our noone arts newsletter. But what I've actually noticed this time around doing an opt in rather opt out is that the audience is much more engaged than just sending to our entire list just because it's people who really want this in their inbox. So we've seen pretty good click through rate. And the other thing that I've been tracking is subscribers that are unique to this newsletter. So right now we have about a third of them are brand new to our list. So I think that is like very exciting. Our goal was to have 1000 1000 new unique subscribers by cue the end of q3 and we just reached that I think, last week or maybe two weeks ago. So that was exciting. That's like, you know, small growth of our list, but like, I think it's important because it's people who weren't subscribed to any of our newsletters before.
Yeah, thank you so much. And I think, to Graham's point about always interrogating the why behind why you're doing something so cityside saying, we want to launch a new newsletter, you know, we asked why why are we doing that? You know, cityside overall is aiming to serve its community. And we were like, we know we can reach more people in this community, and maybe the people that we're not currently reaching the people who aren't currently readers who aren't currently subscribers. It's not because they're not interested, but maybe they don't want a daily news newsletter. Many people don't that's like a daily cadence is a lot for an inbox. Maybe they have news avoidance or news fatigue, but maybe someone would like a weekly arts and culture newsletter and maybe they would really value what cityside provides. But they just didn't have that product for them yet. And so, overall, we launched that product to continue to reach more people and serve a wider swath of needs in the community.
And one way you can get to those answers, you know, it seems it's not arbitrary, right? These are these are things that we hopefully know because we've surveyed because we've talked to our audience, we've asked our audience, we've looked at the numbers, we've seen where people are gravitating to, you know, just looking at the analytics, doing surveys, talking to our audience going out in the community and having new live sessions with your your audiences, fireside chats, q&a, s, things like that, you know, so that these aren't arbitrary things that we just start and hope they stick right. We want to know what is moving the needle for our organization. What is really resonating with the people we're trying to reach or maybe even the people we're not reaching yet. What will resonate with them. So really, you need to get out into your community, you need to ask the people that you're trying to serve, what do you need from us as a news organization? In the absence of that you're just sort of flying blind and hoping that the thing that you think they want is the thing they actually want? Really, you should be and this is something I gotta say that failed newspapers a long time ago, telling people what they should read instead of asking them to what they actually want to read. We should be more proactive in our efforts to talk with our audiences to engage with our audiences, to find out what is important to them and then figure out what of the work that we're doing. What are the products that we could potentially have or currently have will serve that need? So really getting out there and talking with the people who are engaging with you is really an important piece to starting any product journey. Who has something they want to share? Anybody All right, we can pivot. What else do you want to know? About? Where else are you stuck? What other things do you have questions about? Yeah. So I work on various nonprofit organizations, and I am the sole person on my team I work in like all sorts of strategy and audience development. And so I found that even with this exercise, I'm setting goals that are too big, and that have too many tasks that I need to do and you know that that follows setting that goal. So I'm wondering if you guys have any advice on setting like we talked about achievable goals, but like, what does an achievable goal really look like for a small organization that really needs to grow?
Yeah, that's a great, great question. I think, if it feels too big, one thing I might look at is the like time parameter, or sometimes it's like, you set the goal and you have a time bound, end date to it maybe ended 2023 And you have all the tasks and you're looking at that and you're like, how am I going to do all these tasks by the end of 2023? Does the end date need to be end of 2023? I think sometimes, in newsrooms, we get very caught up in the day, week, month cycle. And it's really hard for us to see the forest for the trees and set a goal that's like two years away, because it might be like, Wow, what's journalism going to look like in two years, but it's really good to set longer term goals like that. And then that can help make the tasks a little bit easier to achieve. And hopefully, I'm going to add the caveat that, you know, things change, you might get a new role. I hope that if you're setting these longer term goals, you are writing all of this down in somewhere that is shared and public. So ideally, if you need to leave in the middle of the project, the project doesn't die, and someone else can pick up the work and continue it on because hopefully we are building resilient organizations. And that a single goal or a single project won't fall apart if one person leaves. That's not always possible, but we try to do what we can in our control to do that.
celebrate your wins, you know, feel good about what you've accomplished. Don't. Don't look at the fact that maybe you're not to your goal yet as a setback. Think about what you've accomplished to the point and feel good about that and celebrate that. Keep that motivation going that you can ultimately get to that goal. I think that's really important. It's really important mentally it's really important if you're running a team, celebrating the small wins the small victories, how close we've gotten to this and we're just you know, we're just right there. We're almost there. I think that motivation is very key to keeping people on task, keeping people motivated, and, you know, trying to hit those goals, whether they're, whether they're long term goals. or short term goals. I mean, I think it's very important to celebrate the how far you've come at every stage and every benchmark that you have.
Yeah, I think I'm gonna let Evan speak here in a second. But I also think, sometimes when you're a team of one, it's like, you are doing so many things and you're like, I just cannot do more things. The stopping doing things is so so important. And I know that that's a hard thing to do, right? And you need sign off from your manager or maybe executive leadership to stop doing things. But ideally, if you can come to that conversation with a well thought out and metric or data driven plan that should be an easier conversation. If you say I want to launch a new newsletter. Here's why. Here's what the audience has told us. This is really what they want. And this is going to help grow our traffic. It's going to help grow our revenue. And I know we have this big organizational revenue goal. I'm trying to do something to achieve that. But I'm spending three hours a day posting on Facebook, and we're just seeing less and less traffic from Facebook. And so that's time that's not really serving me and not serving the organization. Would it be okay with you if I posted less on Facebook or maybe we automated our Facebook postings so I don't have to spend almost any time on it. And I think if you are going to those conversations, like showing that you are not just asking to stop doing something but you are trying to do something that's more useful. I'm a manager if someone came to me and said that I would be like great, I love that. Let's free up that time to do the thing that's more meaningful.
Yeah, I just wanted to echo what Abby was just saying. I think that it's a perfect encapsulation of like, the idea behind goals is not just to get to an endpoint goals are as much about the journey as they are the destination. So the goal itself helps you figure out your workflows, your sub tasks, what you need to do to get there and if you're sitting down and looking at all those things, and thinking like this is impossible, then that's something you should be sharing those of you who are working that as a direct report. That's something you should absolutely be sharing and collaborating with your boss and other departments with. Goals are pretty worthless. If you're squirreling them away and they're just in your own notebook. If your boss doesn't know about them, if the rest of your organization doesn't know what your goals are, then nobody can really work collaboratively with you on that and they become just this quiet little part of your own workflow. If you're collaborating and working on them with your boss, other departments, people as Abby just said, people can come to you and say like, Hey, I need help with this thing. And you're like, Well, this is my goal right now. This is my highest priority. How do I fit this into my workflow? Your boss can come to you with that and then you know, you should also be revisiting and checking in on your goals with your managers throughout the year. And having like discreet calendar check ins, so that you can report on this stuff so that you're not as you know, that can help you lower the anxiety around, you know, the distance between you and your goal. Make them as collaborative as possible so that you can get some help from other folks. To
anyone have goals they want to share questions or roadblocks they run into in this process.
Hi, my newsroom has a pretty robust content strategy system that we're undergoing right now we have three metrics that we're paying very close attention to you. It's publishing volume, total traffic and conversions. And we're going desk by desk and doing a real audit of things that aren't working things that are working so turning the knob really just revamping things moving beats it's it's a it's a big undertaking that I'm hoping to lead. One of the hardest conversations is around conversions. We're looking to increase conversions by quite a bit in the upcoming year. And sometimes I just feel like I'm banging my head against a wall of what else can we be doing besides just making everything premium? Right so I don't know if you can help answer any more specifics without knowing more about the audience. But conversions it's like a thing that keeps me up at night for sure.
So for your organization, is a conversion someone making a donation or what is that actual act? look like? It's subscribing. Subscribing, okay. Okay, okay. grams. Thank you. Well, yeah, it can definitely feel I don't know if like the conversion part of it is on your plate or not. And most organizations, you know, there are people working on the content, the publishing cadence, the strategy behind that, and then there's someone whose sole job it is to focus on the conversion. So I don't know if that's the case for you or not. But let's say you don't have someone focused on conversions, or even if you do, I previously was an audience editor. And so it was my job to do the social media, do the newsletters, do all those things. And so sometimes the attitude I got from other people was that that's Abby's job. So that's not my job. So there would be editors or reporters who were like, well, I don't need to think about SEO. I don't need to think about social that's what the audience seems there for. And there can sometimes be that attitude about conversions, right. It can be like, Well, I'm a reporter. I'm just here to write the stories. I don't need to think about conversion, but like, really, all of that falls to all of us. If you're a reporter, and you don't care if your stories are driving conversions. That tells me you don't care if your story is like really reaching people and resonating with them because that's what a conversion tells us. I mean, there are of course, like financial situations someone might really be impacted by a story and never able to convert and that's fine. But ideally, if someone's financially able, they are going to give because they value the work that you're producing. And we see that time and again, with our newsrooms. When people donate using our tech system, they're able to give a reason for why they give and people cite specific stories specific reporters when they give their say I'm donating because Ashley story on the school district like was so valuable for me as a parent of a school of a kid in the school. District, like people will cite specific staffers and specific stories. So like it really does all go back to the journalism and the storytelling. So even though yes, there's probably a development person, probably a membership person. It's everyone's job to care about the audience. It's everyone's job to care if the stories are reaching people and serving people, because it's, it's integral to our work in this field.
Not every story is going to convert not every topic is going to convert. And so it's very hard. I've done audits before a full on news organizations and and gotten rid of things that weren't moving the needle that people had traditionally just done, because that's what you do. You know, you cover City Hall because we cover city hall when we go to every meeting because we've got ever made. Sometimes people don't read that stuff, right. And so I think that when you talk conversions, it's really thinking about, you know, a lot what Abby said about how, you know, we ask, Why do you donate? I think it's really important to figure out what parts of your organization are moving the needle, is it sports, is it business is it you know, politics whatever, and then maybe shifting a lot of your effort, not necessarily in terms of what you're covering, but how you're placing your calls to action, the language that you're using in those in those certain calls to action on that certain content that you know is already very popular. You know, I was telling a story, I guess yesterday about I did a huge content audit when when I was in San Antonio, and there's somebody here from back this up totally tell you if I'm lying or not. And we were not getting the type of you know, we just weren't getting readers on health coverage. Oddly, this was in 2019 2020. So, see how this all went? But we weren't getting the we will have a financially back system or a position for covering health. We're getting the traffic that we needed to really come through on our promises there. And we needed to make a decision there. And you know, I was looking at all of these other content producing reporters and and how their stuff was going like crazy and so on. I'm like, What if we put health on business, and we put health in politics and we put health and education and so instead of just having one health writer, we instead put that out to the places where we were doing well and integrating that into that coverage? And we did we saw an uptick people were reading more health care stories, because they resonated with them because now we were applying health care to schools. We are applying health care to your environment, things like that. And so then we had better data to work with in terms of where now we're going to put our calls to action where now we're going to put our asks, How are we going to structure our newsletters? What story goes at the top of that newsletter? You know, if we're doing a daily newsletter, if it's an evening newsletter, what are we holding back so that we have something great for first thing in the morning? One thing you should all wishes do is have a structure to the stories that you're putting out even if you have to hold something back. You know, you should know that people are what is the first thing you do when you wake up right? Most of us grab our phone. I mean most of us do. Don't say you know, most of us do. Right so you grab your phone and you're usually going through your email that's when the newsletter should be hitting your your email think about your phone is your front porch. Newsletter is the paper slapping the door landing in the in the sprinklers or whatever. But that's the first thing you do. So tailor your content to hit people there at 7am 8am. Whatever your metrics tell you people on their lunch break, what are you doing, you're on your phone, hit people there, make sure you've got a brand new story on your site right there that people can read at lunchtime, when they're at home sitting on the couch at eight o'clock at night or they're sitting in bed you know, think about how your readers think about how you personally interact with your media environment. Like when do you read things? When do you check out newsletters and I don't care if it's a Abercrombie and Fitch newsletter or a newsletter or regular news company newsletter like when do you interact with these things? That's probably about the same time everybody interacts with these things. So you need to be able to meet your audience where they are and that will help put the right things in front of them and that will help increase those conversions because you're, you're you're putting the content that they want in a place that's easy for them to get and making it so easy for them to push that button to subscribe to donate to whatever you need them to do. Make it frictionless, you know, try and make them put them in a position where it's easy, and they have no choice but to just go Yeah, I really want to read this article, and I'll subscribe because you've blocked me from only like three paragraphs of it. And I really want to know what's going on because it applies to me, as a reader, as a parent, as a person of this community. All of those things.
I just wanted to add one more thought before we move on to another question. I think Graham made a great point when she said Not every story is going to convert. I think that's Ballard an example that comes to mind for me recently. I don't know if anyone from the Washington Post is in the room. But I saw that they recently had their most successful Instagram post ever was a static photo which is amazing in the year 2023. And it was about a story for an old man who just wanted to pet a dog on his birthday and hundreds of dogs came visit him and you all probably saw that post because it was their biggest post ever. I don't know if that post drove subscriptions for The Washington Post. But maybe that story was a success because it was their most successful Instagram posts and I'm sure the Washington Post has Instagram growth goals. They have an entire Instagram team. So every story doesn't need to have necessarily the same ultimate end goal. And depending on the story, the beat the audience, it might have a very different end goal. And I would also add that the story that the audience or the audience that the story is for may not be the audience that drives conversions. So I'm gonna use cityside as an example, again, because they're in the room with us and I'm looking right at Ella hundra. They published an affordable housing guide earlier this year. That was critical, important journalism, but the people who need the information in that affordable housing guide may not be the ones giving $50 $100 donations. But that's a really, really important piece of journalism. And they fundraise around that they sent it out to their list and they said hey, we published this affordable housing guide. This is critical. We want to print it and deliver it out into the community to the people that need it most. That will cost us this much money, will you help fund it? And the response to that was huge. People were so eager to donate to support that because it was a tangible good they could do I think an antidote to news avoidance is showing people how they can help. This was like journalism cityside had done and they were giving readers a chance they're saying if you could afford this, you can help your neighbors right now by helping us distribute this guide. And that was a huge fundraising success for them. So the people who needed that guide weren't necessarily the ones who are going to fund that guide. But that doesn't mean that it can't be funded in a different way.
Hi, you asked about blockers. And I was wondering if you could give any advice around when the blocker feels like it's a team that isn't one that you have direct influence over. So as another example, another newsletter base example. Got some newsletters, they've got growth goals. They've got business case for why we should have those growth goals but for some reason their funnel isn't working. There are probably some things we could do that would benefit from some help from the product team, for example. But all that justification around the objectives, the goals the business case, nothing happens and it's very difficult to get to the top of that backlog of list of things. But then the You didn't meet your goal falls back on say my team or someone else's team. And I've tried every which way about it to try and convince, persuade, explain why it would be useful to have some support to try and meet these goals but it's a team outside of my control. And I have limited influence with them. So it'd be useful to if you have any advice or tips or experience in that kind of scenario. Yeah.
So the impetus of the problem is basically that her team has goals that they're not necessarily meeting because other teams other people are blockers I'm sure we've all experienced that. So some advice there and this might be applicable to some of you, maybe not all of you. We at the hub have organization wide goals, and I find that really, really helpful for these kinds of situations. So we have a high level. This is our company goal this year, and then each team sets its own goals that all relate to that goal. So then hopefully if you are you have your team goals, you're like we need to do this because it's important, and another team is blocking you. You all have that same high level objective. Maybe that's something that's actually in existence and written out. Maybe it's not maybe you just like this ambiguous. We're all working towards serving our community. But I think reminding people that like you are all working towards the same goal and actually having that conversation is really important for those blockers because ideally everyone at your company is there for a reason and serving the same goal and so you all should be helping each other as much as possible. Anything you want to add grant,
I think reminding everybody that all the goals is Abby just said like, your goals are their goals. Even though they're not the same, they all should kind of complement each other. So the product team, the editorial team, the business side, the editorial side, however you all define an audience product or just business and editorial. All the goals should be cohesive, they should all meld together and while they are created by different people, they should be complimentary. And if they're not complimentary, then the conversation maybe needs to be about, you know, what are we here for? Why are we here? What are we doing what? And, you know, having that with a leadership team of saying let's all get together, let's all talk about why we're even in this room to begin with. And then the goals will start coming, the ideas will start coming. The reasons will start coming in. You feel like you have a lot more in common than maybe you thought you did when you first started. And then you can start finding common footing with that team that may have been a blocker, because maybe they don't understand what you do. But then as you have these conversations, they start to realize, oh, what you do is similar to this other thing that we do and maybe we can help each other. That's the ideal utopia. It doesn't always work that way. I'm not going to stand here and say that it does and there will always be a blocker or two or six that are stopping you from your goals. But the best way to try and overcome those blockers is to have a conversation and see what common ground you can find with another with another department with another person so that you can ultimately achieve a goal that you both think is the worthy goal for within your organization.
Yeah, and I would also add, I don't know your position, but I hope at your companies, there are performance evaluations and people have job descriptions and know what their role is and what they should be doing. But I do think like this is a step I often talk about with people is like so and so is not doing this thing I need them to do and I'm like okay, well have they had a performance review where they you have said as the executive like you need to do this or you won't have a job here anymore. And oftentimes they're like, No, and I'm like, Well, why if there's no like incentive, or conversely, like punishment or drawback to not doing a thing. People aren't really going to be motivated, especially if they are someone who's maybe burned out, has a lot on their plate. They might just be like, I cannot do this thing. I have too much going on right now and I'm just not going to do it. But hopefully they have a manager who's gonna check in and say, Hey, you really need to do this. And if you have too much going on, let's take something else off of your plate. So that might be like above your head but if you are an executive in this room, I really hope you are encouraging performance reviews and job descriptions and helping everyone know what their role is in the organization and how it ties into organizational goals because that's really important for happiness and motivation and knowing you know how your role fits into the larger company structure.
Okay, I think we have time for just one more if there's one more.
Specifically, frameworks, like Justin said key results. Have you had any experience? Have you had any experience with them that do they work? Good? Well, for newsrooms?
Yes. We love objectives and key results. We also love SMART goals, which Graham gave the acronym earlier. I think really, whatever framework you're using, it's all going back to that taking something that's really big and high level and breaking it into bite sized chunks that you can achieve on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. So whatever framework you want to use, we really like objectives and key results. I think that's just helpful for taking something that might feel overwhelming, and breaking it down and then giving people a task. So instead of saying we're going to raise $500,000 in revenue this year, that might still be your high level goal. But then for your membership person, they have a list of discrete tasks so they can say okay, in January, what I'm going to do related to this goal is I'm going to send some receipts to our donors and I'm gonna send them a thank you message for giving to us in December. And those are my tasks for January and they can go and they can check them off and they can be like, alright, I did those things. And that makes it really, really easy to understand progress to goal, what you're doing that's in your control. There's always going to be things related to your goals that are outside of your control that you can't predict. Or maybe there's a huge breaking news story in your community, that whether it's a good or a bad story, maybe draws a ton of traffic, it draws a ton of donations. You can't predict that. But you can predict and plan for things that are in your control. Like we're going to do this many fundraising campaigns. We're going to build a new newsletter in six months, and we're going to work backwards from there. Whatever you can write out and use a framework like OKRs is really helpful to sort of map out your year or even your quarter week depending on what time scale you're working on.
I am on the clock. Guy. And we are just about at time. So we want to thank you guys all for coming. If you have more questions about goals, come up and ask us. We're happy to help you workshop particular goals or just answer general questions. A lot of you I think I just want to go back to this slide right here. A lot of you it sounds like you know are having issues. I just wanted to point one thing out if you're having issues at the bottom of the funnel. One thing we've been talking about is making sure that you're checking in is having grammar both thing this checking in on these other metrics to make sure like that you aren't stuck here, here, here here and you don't actually have a problem here. And these might be in other departments. And if you don't have control over these, sorry, over these and you control this as Graham was saying earlier, there's not much that you personally can do about some of this stuff. And you've you've got to hope that your management team is behind you and that somebody is reporting that like the failure the choke point might be up here and not here. So the other thing to think about also I think is just make sure that you have in your entire funnel tried to sketch out so goals all along the way. We've given you all a scorecard as you came in, if you don't have one, we have more here. This is actually like a micro funnel itself. You notice there's monthly active users, there's subscribers, and then there's donors the idea being before you can even figure out how you get to donors. Our funnel goes through email, so we need to grow the email list. And to grow the email list we need traffic. So that's one example of just how you can sketch a little funnel here. You can't get to this conversion point without growing, getting traffic to the site. Getting people to sign up for the list, then you campaign to them and then you convert. So if you'd like to benchmark your newsroom, we have medians from working with over 100 newsroom so if you're a local newsroom, in this my peers in the hub side, we can give you benchmarks for where your peers are there and then we can benchmark your own newsroom and tell you what you might need to do diagnose maybe you need to do SEO, newsletter growth, more campaigning, we can help you figure all that out. We can do that. We probably can't we don't have our numbers here but we can. If you come over to our booth in the Midway we can do that and then I'll bet Abby has most of the medians memorized to so she can she might be she might be able to help me with conference bring. Alright, thanks, everybody. Thanks for being here. Feel free to come up if you have additional questions.
Part of the solution. I was the guy who left and right yeah, yeah, so I didn't want to him all day every day. coupons if you like Ha, square. Yeah, this is great. So I just Yeah, it's good. Yeah. Yeah.
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close this
out. More habitat. Habitat
thank you
all right.
Thank you I guess I just wanted to say that your presentation to them was one of the most polished, tight, professional and informative for the extension including the political thinker which was good but not great. And I'm well versed in setting. We are sorry, I was just like this
is my first time doing this one. Have you? Have you as a seasoned pro? coming up and saying that really appreciate that.
Remember, remember you asked? Yes.
So oh my god, that is not a problem anymore because we don't work with you. That's good. Yes, she still runs that newsletter but our education
is much important about that
now, because you did a shift in audience shift to serve educators trying to get them to users graders in the classroom. Yeah, and they were already anonymous. Really, Archie. Were not formally pursuing them. That will serve to further the persona. So this is what happens. We saw in 2021, we hired a director of education, the early days of the education project in Hollywood. But then we hired the Director of Education, we can afford that person to measure Okay, and then we took like, the operation to a whole other level, like our audience, or users or freeze sources for the videos, we get a different part of the website for educators with lighter standards and all that good stuff. So it's growing really fast growing. And then that newsletter was like kinda like parallel to that was also growing very, like slowly and steadily but rattling in between. Something happened. Something happened you this year. That we're starting to like, see, our year over year growth is negative year over year plans, really so yeah, so that has been intriguing to me a lot, because that has been consistent since we launched our educational initiative. And now it's like well, or July traffic, which is always bad because of weighing the question and making the summer but it's worse than it wasn't 2020 wise. So what has happened?
I'm sure everything's getting like personal issues or kind of thing. That like, is impeding people from receiving. Like, I know, you don't necessarily do that. But it may be worthwhile to make sure you add our email to your address book, or something if you don't want to, maybe some of the times. Remember emails have changed like the legality around like all those changes. So you really do have to articulate to your audience I know I get our emails, you should add it to your address. Right. That may be I mean, maybe some of you are totally not in control, because if you've seen a dip like that, right, it feels to me that it wasn't like people set it up. Because it feels like maybe there was something within the processes that that maybe has failed you that maybe you're gonna have to kind of sleep so maybe worth dropping that into emails, not only not only those people but like at home. Making sure like if you're not receiving an email from us that you think you shouldn't be receiving. So like, I have bigger email where you have a larger list. If you are not receiving an email that you think you should be receiving, you know, make sure you're whitelisting on the right answer that you're getting. These things are only gonna get tighter and tighter. All right, so it's gonna be much harder for customers to get was kind of nice to meet more people and that was getting getting more and more difficult. So we've seen We've actually seen this a lot. And I'd encourage you to talk to Abby because I know she's actually worked with some organizations that have experiences where stuff is getting locked down or disappearing. Or people should be synthetic drugs. And times they are based on the fact that someone's going to spam junk for people or you know, or whatever. It's like leaving the list and all these people anyway and then six months so and then the second that's how that list to go. So right you really have to be proactive about asking people make sure that you're able to read this by you know, making fun of where you're at. Right?
That makes sense. Yes. And with the draft then it's like they made this goal of reaching like 100,000 100 Yeah, symmetric tables, like the last one that they wanted. So last year, they decided at the end of this year was to have 50,000 monthly unique users money that is not going at all and like I said like it trauma. Right. So it's like,
based out of the or overall stripe traffic we're based out of the
news. No, the website traffic interesting because what I feel like it's happening and I don't have any evidence is that we used to have a bigger general audience that is, might not be coming to us anymore. Because we reality our website didn't need to change that someone would go there was like, oh, there's for educators. So I'm going to be forever and not really bad. But I think maybe stop doing some things that don't do that much but aren't doing that much, but you had articles out there. And when we pivoted to education, we kind of like well, that's not this doesn't serve educators. Gonna find the newsletter circuitry phrasal verbs focusing on so maybe we're not getting that journal news audience anymore, but that's also part three of growth, but then how do I make the case that we need to return with those articles that serve in the general audience? When our goal is educators like can you
look at the past article, look at the traffic that those articles were getting the general articles the ones the education are so many people can compare? Like, we're getting hyperactive here. We're getting okay traffic here when we took this out, so obviously, there's going to be an overall drop in traffic that we're doing so I think you can make the case through data. Right, we're up here and these are here and they're doing just fine for what error correction like John McAfee or whoever, yeah, and so they're always gonna have a much bigger you know, much bigger pockets often Yeah, the nice article here because I really like her in your audience. I think you're probably really spot on on that. To make the case to make them come back. I think just showing them the data is like overdosing and now we're doing this because so cumulatively, we're seeing a lower traffic package. Let's see, if we slowly start introducing this element. It's gonna probably take a little bit of time, because now we need to get the audience re acclimated to the fact that we're back to news. So it's not going to happen on its own magic bullet. But once you start reintroducing these more general articles back start telling your audiences rather than using your social channels to do so using the newsletter to do so. And whatever other communication methods you have, then I think if you see a spike Yeah, lucky show. Yeah. I think that's when you're
looking at 10 to 20 long, like burn a lot of stuff going on somewhere else. I think we add the articles and education that's why I was gonna look for the data to cover for now, so much always
needs your help. How are you doing? Good, how are you? I'm so glad you're there. Seems like a really good job. Yeah, it's been fun. How long have you been with them? 21 I was like, regarded at 2020 That was it. Yeah, what are you doing now? I'm executive director of ire MIT Museum. I'm still in San Antonio. And then also my people. We're gonna have an office in zoom and I go there at least once a month.
And so it's kind of here I'm just visiting. I visit all the conferences now. Yeah, that's awesome. This is great, but claiming
to be that this is my necessary
so it's good to see you once more. But since I really just want to say thank you for doing that. Yes, I still live in San Antonio. Right. It is nice. I think you did this. Yes, charger