Editor’s note:
Every year, INN brings in a young audience person as a fellow and helps them develop the skills and perspective to think strategically about what a nonprofit news organization needs to do to grow its audience.
Jasmyne Ricard came to us from the Marshall Project well equipped to thrive in the planned trajectory for the fellowship when things changed dramatically in ways that forced us to come to grips quickly with what it really means to be able to think strategically in the interest of an institution that may have limited resources and bandwidth to quickly pivot when the world changes.
As Jasmyne was starting her fellowship, tech companies were rapidly limiting the reach of news on their platforms, aggregators were becoming more difficult to join as a publisher, artificial intelligence on the rise and algorithm updates were roiling search.
With seemingly a crisis on every side and an election fast approaching, it was a challenging decision to pick where the focus of her work for members. I strongly believe she made the right choice and am eager to share the resources and tools for succeeding on search that she helped develop during her time working with members.
— Sam Cholke, Manager for Distribution and Audience Growth, INN
Audience growth of nonprofit newsrooms: from social media to SEO
By Jasmyne Ricard
I spent years as a digital producer at an NBC affiliate broadcast news station focused primarily on creating social media content and writing for the website homepage. My training and job focused on preparing me for a world where social media was the main focus. I left for a role at the Marshall Project that focused on reaching journalists, professionals and audiences interested in delving into intricate data. This shift required a new approach to outreach and amplification, but was still largely focused on social media, which increasingly didn’t feel sufficient for the mission-driven work we were doing.
As a Gen Zer, social media has been an integral part of my life growing up, but I was quickly learning the platforms were evolving dramatically to deprioritize news. I was seeing the crisis firsthand and wanted to both better understand it and work on helping news organizations survive and thrive.
The Institute for Nonprofit News’s audience research fellowship provided me with a space to understand the true shape of the audience challenges for news and equipped me with both new tools to grapple with it and the perspective to think strategically about what can be done.
My fellowship consisted of two main themes: newsletters and audience metrics, and SEO strategy and audience data. My previous experience as a data reporter helped me make data-informed strategic decisions and navigate the sometimes overwhelming world of audience data.
The first half of my fellowship focused on newsletters. My participation in the survey bootcamp gave me the chance to engage with a variety of newsrooms and their unique audience goals. I learned that audience strategies are not one-size-fits-all, and experimentation is crucial to both organizational growth and audience engagement. Assisting nonprofit newsrooms with newsletters and surveys also emphasized the value of building a community around audience strategy. Explaining their work to colleagues and other professionals fostered a strong sense of support among those working toward shared audience goals.
The newsletter surveys helped me adopt a long-term perspective while assisting INN members to leverage data for crucial decisions, such as removing the paywall. By guiding members on how to segment their audiences, I helped them uncover the key motivations behind their readers’ engagement with the publication’s content and donations. I discovered that it wasn’t just the content driving donations, but rather the shared values of supporting responsible and reputable journalism. The insights from the surveys were instrumental in supporting the members’ sustainability, empowering them to remove the paywall with confidence. They gained a clearer understanding of diverse revenue options, while still seeing continued donations.
After completing the survey bootcamp, my fellowship shifted to focus on search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. I created SEO strategy reports, a new product set to be available to the INN membership in the coming year. These reports will help INN members make data-driven strategic decisions by providing comprehensive, digestible insights. They focus on various SEO components, shedding light on the evolving landscape of referral traffic, algorithm changes, and the growing impact of AI on search. Through consultation with top SEO experts in the field, I learned how to make evidence-supported decisions through SEO metrics. The reports I created allow members to see big-picture performance on search, while highlighting opportunities to improve performance. Most importantly and effectively, these reports highlight evergreen opportunities that members are not taking advantage of, and specific stories in which the member is the only reputable news source providing content in which the newsroom can identify a niche, and begin to capitalize off of. These reports equip members with storytelling features to better inform their reporting, editing, and mission.
Through both the survey bootcamp and SEO work I have done, there are a few main takeaways that are crucial for newsrooms to begin to understand:
- Treat your audiences as segmented, not fragmented: Audiences include multiple groups, and it’s a long-term benefit to understand how the organization best serves each one.
- Find your niche, and capitalize off of it: Identify Evergreen content as older stories can drive a lot of news discovery.
- Language is important: How reporters talk about topics and how people search topics can be very different, so it’s important to include phrases that people are likely to look up.
- SEO is connected to newsrooms’ mission and can be a valuable tool to show that it’s the only reliable news source in search results.
My combined experience, along with my work at INN, has equipped me to think not just tactically about what a newsroom needs to do today, but strategically about the longer term decisions that need to be made to grow the audience over time. While audience goals across newsrooms may differ, they share core similarities. It is vital for newsrooms to understand when their organization’s value is on full display for its audience. Audience strategy requires both trial and error and creative thinking. Continuously building on what you already know and refining your approach is key to discovering nuanced ways to engage, grow and sustain audiences.
