Growing the audience for nonprofit news is getting increasingly complex and resource intensive. INN gathered more than 75 member news organizations on Oct. 8 at CUNY’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism to work on what audiences are still “gettable” — and the strategies for winning over those audiences.
Americans increasingly say they get their news from social media and visit news websites less, according to the Pew Research Center, creating a challenge for news organizations that still primarily rely on someone visiting their website to understand their brand, sign up for a newsletter, or use a voter guide.
Sam Cholke, manager for distribution and audience growth at INN, and Ben Toff, associate professor at the University of Minnesota and visiting fellow at Pew, kicked off “The Gettable Audience” event with new research on how news organizations are overcoming these challenges.
“News organizations looking for new sources of easy, organic growth are increasingly forced to choose — they can have organic growth, but it won’t be easy, or easy growth, but it won’t be organic,” Cholke said.
In a morning panel, Richard Brown, director of strategic partnerships at Religion News Services, compared it to picking apples.
When making audience growth plans, newsrooms often think about the “low-hanging fruit,” which are audiences that might be interested in their work, but haven’t been reached yet. Brown encouraged newsrooms to consider instead grabbing the apples on the ground: audiences they’ve already engaged with but for whatever reason drifted away.
Emily Goligoski, the program lead for the J+ NonProfit News Business Certificate at CUNY, walked participants from Fresno, California to New Jersey, through the research now necessary to figure out what audiences could be lured away from competitors or social media feeds.
Participants spent the afternoon working directly on audience growth strategies for nine INN members.
Each group examined the volunteers’ existing audience, before identifying a potential audience that was the “low-hanging fruit.” These ranged from young professionals in San Juan, Puerto Rico, to farm owners in rural New Jersey.
The groups then launched into designing strategies to durably reach those audiences — including going beyond content strategy to think through the core distribution challenge that often means many in the target audience never encounter a news organization’s offerings at all.
For Centro Periodismo Investigativo’s (CPI) group, this meant more than thinking about influencers or reaching younger audiences. The workshop put those pieces together into how to use relationships with influencers to bring people to CPI events.
Cristina del Mar Quiles, audience and product manager at CPI, was one of 10 newsroom leaders who left the event with a 90-day plan in hand they could take back to their newsroom. The other attendees left with both the framework and materials to do it for their own organization and the experience working through an audience growth strategy for a peer much like themselves.
The event was the third annual INN Audience Studio Live produced in partnership with the Newmark School. These events bring INN members together not just for discussion but action, and leverages the expertise that exists across INN’s network of 500-plus newsrooms.
