Shasta Scout is an independent, nonprofit news organization that provides crucial news coverage of rural Shasta County, California—a region that traditional media often fails to serve, and where growing news deserts are increasingly problematic. With a conservative mega-church and an active militia movement influencing local politics, Shasta Scout’s work in delivering fact-based, independent reporting is more needed than ever.

From day one, Shasta Scout’s founder and Editor-in-Chief, Annelise Pierce, has prioritized building trust with residents. Given that focus, Annelise felt it would be worth experimenting with traditional direct mail outreach as a tool to capture hard-to-reach rural audiences, with the aim of leveraging that reach to foster an audience around Shasta Scout’s independent, trustworthy journalism.

Since digital outreach is often limited by platform constraints and audience trust, Shasta Scout experimented with direct mail as a physical alternative to reach and connect with rural residents. The results of this experiment, shared here, may now lend some insight into the effectiveness and sustainability of more traditional outreach tactics for local journalism.

Direct Mail Campaign

In January 2024, Shasta Scout utilized USPS Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM) to send a direct mail campaign to 6,977 rural households. The campaign targeted zip codes where trust in traditional media is especially shaky. These are also communities where skepticism toward “mainstream media” is entrenched (PNAS, 2020). In choosing these areas, the goal was to reintroduce reliable local news in areas shaped by nationalized distrust.

The 6.5”x9.5” print mailer delivered a clear, simple message about Shasta Scout’s dedication to independent, reliable local news, plus a call to action directing recipients to a special landing page, shastascout.org/free, which tracked visits and newsletter subscription conversions.

The campaign tackled an important issue identified in several studies: Residents across communities rely on local news that is “relevant to their daily lives” and reflective of their lived experiences and values. The American Journalism Project found that people prioritize news they can “act on”—such as actionable steps for navigating education systems, disasters, or housing. Additionally, residents emphasized the need for news to tell “the full story of their communities,” expressing frustration when coverage paints an imbalanced or overly negative picture of their neighborhoods. They want their perspectives represented, and for journalists to spend time understanding their realities before reporting (American Journalism Project, 2023). The print mailers were designed to bypass distractions endemic to all digital platforms and provide a tangible touchpoint with a local news source.

Direct Mail Campaign Outcomes

The campaign was successful in driving people from offline engagement to action. The outcomes as of January 2025 were as follows:

• Landing Page Conversion: 1.8% (about 125 unique users in total) of the recipients clicked on the landing page dedicated to the postcard after receiving it.
• Newsletter Sign-ups: 56% of those visitors signed up for Shasta Scout’s newsletter, resulting in 65 new subscribers directly attributed to the postcard. For context, Shasta Scout attracted 437 new subscribers from sources other than digital ads in 2024, meaning the postcard campaign was responsible for at least 15% of the publication’s growth outside of digital advertising.
• Cost Per Lead (CPL): The cost per lead was roughly $80 based on a total investment in the campaign of $4,479.93 (including printing, mailing, design, and staff time).

It’s important to note that attributing newsletter sign-ups to non-digital sources can be challenging. For example, a person who received the print mailer might not visit the specific URL provided. Instead, they might remember the name “Shasta Scout” and search for it later. Similarly, they might visit the URL but not subscribe at that moment, only to visit the site later via search or social channels and then subscribe. 

What can be observed from the data above is that 437 subscribers arrived in 2024 from sources not directly attributed to digital marketing (Facebook Ads) and it’s possible that some additional percentage of those subscriptions came from the print mailer.

Breakdown of Costs:

• Printing: $1,910.26 for 6,951 postcards (full color, 6.5”x9.5”)
• Mailing through Post Office EDDM: $1,869.67
• Postcard Design: $250
• Research & Writing Staff Time: $450

Such results support wider findings that more physical forms of communication like direct mail tend to work particularly well in rural areas, where digital engagement is hindered by unreliable internet access and mistrust of online platforms (State of Local News 2024). Though the cost per lead was high compared to digital campaigns, the mailers seem to have achieved the intended objective of reaching offline audiences, illustrating the potential of non-digital outreach to reach rural, skeptical, or under-engaged populations.

2023 Digital Outreach Campaign Comparison

As a comparison, Shasta Scout partnered with publishing technology and growth services provider Indiegraf earlier in the year to run a campaign using Facebook Lead Ads. Facebook campaigns were cheaper per lead ($3-$8) but faced typical digital limitations: rising costs over time and limited reach in offline communities.

Return On Investment

In June 2024, again partnering with Indiegraf, Shasta Scout ran a time-sensitive revenue campaign. The objective was to drive new financial support from Shasta Scout’s newsletter and website audience over the course of one week with an increasing sense of urgency.

The effort resulted in raising $6500 from almost 60 contributors, the majority of which came in through a series of four email appeals. These results signal that roughly 1.3% of Shasta Scout’s current newsletter readers converted from reading a free product to becoming a paid supporter from this one, short campaign.

Interestingly, a small number of contributions arrived via “direct,” “Organic search,” and “Referral” sources, which might suggest that some regular Shasta Scout readers also contributed. However, Indiegraf did report that “Website CTAs did not work as well as we’d hoped since we didn’t see any notable traffic or donations from that channel.”

Circling back to the challenge of tracking the source of subscriptions, it’s also challenging to perfectly attribute the source of financial contributions for all of the same reasons. In the entire year of 2024, Shasta Scout received financial support from 253 people and 47 of those people (17.8%) can’t be attributed back to digital ads directly. So it’s also possible that some percentage of those 47 people also received the print mailer. 

As of January 2025, these 47 people contributed $3,545 in 2024 between one-time and recurring donations (16 of these supporters began donating during NewsMatch). If those accounts with a recurring donation stay active throughout 2025, they’ll support Shasta Scout with a total of $4,200. 

Accurately evaluating Return on Investment for most publishers requires several years of contribution data to determine a consistent Customer Lifetime Value. Given this constraint, it is challenging to reliably assess the ROI for Shasta Scout’s at the date of this case study.

What we can safely say, given the 2024 data, is that it would be fairly safe to pay between $1.40–$2.80 per free newsletter subscriber based on the free-to-paid conversion rates and conversion values seen in the June 2024 campaign.

It’s important to note that the campaigns described in this case study were all underwritten by various industry-led, mission-driven efforts to support local news (Indiegraf), or funding to experiment with new mediums for financial support (INN). That means that Shasta Scout did not need to cover the hard costs of running these campaigns, which amount to almost $10,000 USD for the digital ads and $5000 for the direct mail postcards.

At first glance, spending $15,000 to raise $6,500 seems unbalanced, but long-term donor retention could change that picture. Documentable engagement by targeted rural audiences has value beyond direct donations in the ability to motivate or open other sources of funding. 

Lessons Learned

The direct mail campaign particularly emphasized that local news outlets can, and should, adopt both digital and non-digital strategies to engage rural audiences. Strong creative and compelling messaging are key. While the landing page copy was very effective at converting visitors into subscribers, future iterations of the campaign could see conversion rates increase even further by incorporating stronger calls to action (or incentives) on the print mailers themselves.

This experiment underscores the message that rural journalism efforts can’t exclusively find their audience through low-cost digital strategies. Different outreach approaches — direct mail is one example but it can come in other personal touch points also — become an important opportunity to rebuild trust, particularly in communities that harbor deep skepticism towards both the outside world and the media.

Future Directions

The success of direct mail has inspired Shasta Scout to further explore its non-digital activities. The organization will likely experiment with billboards, radio ads, and print flyers in the coming months — tools that rural communities rely on for both visibility and relevance.

Billboards and radio ads — proven strategies in rural markets — offer visibility and brand reinforcement. Print flyers or small publications—handed out at meeting places such as feed stores—could give local people a tangible, relevant source of news who may not seek it out on the internet.

Shasta Scout is also planning to launch a print monthly, biweekly, or weekly as a way to help bridge the gap between rural audiences and trustworthy local news. 

Conclusion

The direct mail experiment by Shasta Scout demonstrates the potential for non-digital outreach to meet rural communities where they are and to engage those underserved by traditional and digital media.While digital strategies scale efficiently, direct mail proved that physical outreach can close trust gaps and engage offline communities. 

The experiment also demonstrates the potential financial challenges in reaching rural audiences in areas without consistent internet without significant outside investment. The challenge for sustainability may include that the cost to reach and then serve those under-served communities outpaces the capacity of a donor and investment base. While experimentation, including this one, has expanded the options, a clear path to building a sustainable audience development strategy for rural-serving organizations may require significantly more experimentation still.