The Bedford Citizen has been reporting on its community, Bedford, Massachusetts, for over ten years. Board President Elizabeth Hacala and Executive Director Teri Morrow say the Citizen has survived because of the dedication of its volunteer board of directors, which has functioned as a “working” board since its inception. 

But over time, Elizabeth and Teri began to notice that these volunteers were burning out. They wanted to transition from a “working” to a “managing” board and streamline tasks and decision-making to pursue new revenue growth opportunities. So they applied for LION’s Sustainability Lab for help with this challenge.

The Results

Through conversations with LION Sustainability Lab coach John Davidow, two things became obvious: The Citizen needed more revenue and more capacity — a classic “chicken and egg” situation. By combining several of LION’s financial and revenue templates and worksheets, they developed a customized spreadsheet that provides a bird’s-eye view of new revenue opportunities.

It includes the essential information you would expect such a tool to have, like columns for calculating expenses and assessing the potential return on investment for each idea, but it also assesses mission alignment, resource availability, financial feasibility, and, most importantly, staff capacity. Starting off strong, this master spreadsheet revealed nearly a dozen new and reimagined ideas. 

They started implementing those that already had a foundation and were a lighter workload lift. For example, they had been publishing obituaries for years but never charged for them, so they created a pricing framework and an Airtable intake form. They then started charging for public notices, which are similar in scope.

In addition, they decided to develop a mid-level donor program to convert existing supporters into larger donors. They utilized their spreadsheet to calculate how much staff time they could dedicate to this initiative now and in the future. Doing so helped them realize they would need to free up some of Teri’s time to accomplish this project, but it was doable. They selected a mid-level donor program over another project that would have theoretically brought in more revenue, but the capacity requirement for the other project was too steep for their current staff.

Another focus area for the publication is The Bedford Guide, a “resource for life in Bedford” mailed annually to every residence in town — and a substantial undertaking. One board member, Gene Kalb, volunteers more than 160 hours a year to the project, so the team devised a plan to streamline his responsibilities and shift some smaller ad renewals to the operations manager to focus the volunteers’ time where it has the most impact. This year, editing was handled by a board member emeritus, a current board member, and the managing editor. Next year, they are hoping to use funds raised by the guide to hire a dedicated editor. 

Moving forward, they will continue to use their spreadsheet to explore and experiment with revenue-generating ideas and start budgeting for stipends to honor volunteers’ time and work.

The Wins

• Created a master spreadsheet to track all revenue-generating ideas and calculate the corresponding return on investment (ROI) and capacity
• Pursued low-lift revenue opportunities for public notices and obituaries, while also developing a mid-level donor program
• Shifted roles and responsibilities for board and staff members to avoid burnout

Have a success story to share about the business side of your news business? Email the LION team at hello@lionpublishers.com!

The post How The Bedford Citizen prioritized its internal operations to pursue revenue growth and avoid burnout appeared first on LION Publishers.

The Goal

Secure 50 new monthly supporters to hit 350 by the end of 2023.

The Approach

Leveraging $5,000 of their LION Sustainability Audit program stipend, they created a matching campaign to generate recurring monthly support. The campaign ran from December 12 to December 31, 2023.

The Impact

The Journal signed up 48 new monthly supporters, yielding $14,000 in projected revenue for 2024. Six months later, only one of those supporters has canceled their recurring contribution. ”This is why I love my Monthlies!” said Melanie. “Once they sign up, they are VERY faithful.”

How It Happened

On the heels of a successful Giving NEWSday matching campaign in November, The Journal launched the new matching campaign, appealing to their community across email, social media, and direct outreach. The campaign kicked off with an email to all subscribers with the subject line, “A Sustainability Grant of $5,000 has been set aside to award The Lansing Journal $100 for each new Monthly Supporter (up to 50) who signs up before the end of the year.”

The next day, they sent an email appeal to subscribers who had never given before: “If you’ve been enjoying The Lansing Journal, you’ve been benefiting from other people’s support. We need your support too, and now is the perfect time because of this matching gift.”

The Journal published a video on Facebook about the importance of the work, with an appeal for people to sign up as monthly supporters. Melanie and the managing editor popped up on Facebook Live throughout the campaign and asked people to give.

Melanie also used the campaign to deepen relationships with advertisers. She called local business owners to see if they would enroll as monthly givers in exchange for advertising, resulting in three ongoing advertising clients. Charging the advertising rate to their credit card as a recurring gift not only fulfilled the match requirement, but also freed Melanie up from having to sell and invoice advertisers each month.

The last few days of the year included a final flurry of email appeals:

• 12/27 – “This email is only 49 words”
• 12/29 – “Small gifts help too”
• 12/30 – “It’s New Year’s Eve and the matching gift expires soon”
• 12/31 – “New Year’s Eve afternoon”
• 12/31 – “New Year’s Eve evening – 11 more matches left”

While the initial concept of a matching campaign required some explanation, The Journal’s audience was ultimately eager to participate.

Melanie found appeals with a clear deadline – “Help us finish 2023 strong” and “Before you head out to your New Year’s Eve celebration, could you give one last gift” – and those that highlighted progress toward their goal of 50 supporters performed exceptionally well.

In addition to seeing what appeals resonated with their audience, Melanie learned what tools and processes best support fundraising campaigns. She tracks supporters in Mailchimp to ensure she’s targeting appeals accurately and in their CRM, Bloomerang, to manage donor and payment information. Keeping both up to date requires manual efforts, resulting in occasional discrepancies and another drain on her limited time. She also experimented with GiveWP, as it included a thermometer-style gauge to publicly track the progress of the campaign. She’s since moved away from that tool, particularly to avoid having another database to keep updated.

Melanie says the next steps are to get more efficient at tracking and managing data by setting up automations to connect her email service with her CRM and spending less time designing landing pages and giving forms. 

The Journal recently launched a new “summer promo,” where monthly supporters contributing at $15/month receive a t-shirt. An initial email to existing supporters prompted 12 to increase their monthly gift. A subsequent email to all subscribers yielded only two responses, perhaps suggesting that merch may be more motivating for engaged rather than potential supporters.

The Takeaway

The Lansing Journal took a unique approach to a fundraising campaign, setting aside $5,000 to frame a monthly support campaign as a matching campaign, motivating potential supporters to donate to unlock further support for the organization, which should yield nearly triple that amount thanks to the structure of the ask. Melanie also made repeated appeals to potential supporters on multiple platforms (email, Facebook, and Facebook Live for The Lansing Journal). 

The focus on cultivating recurring revenue is also important since that revenue is easier to forecast and plan against while also reducing the ongoing time devoted to raising reader revenue from one-off contributions.

Melanie’s final thoughts? “Matches work well. And repetition and a shorter time frame works well.”

The post How The Lansing Journal grew recurring reader revenue by 20% appeared first on LION Publishers.

The Challenge

With their 2024 planning period looming, Emma knew the growing organization would need a clear funding strategy. The team had historically focused on philanthropic funding but wanted to explore options for earned and donor revenue. They applied for the LION/GNI Sustainability Lab and were accepted into the program in September 2023.

After spending a couple of weeks researching and discussing revenue-growth ideas, a Knight-Lenfest Local News Transformation Fund representative contacted Emma and offered to match support to their VozColectiva newsroom through a $10,000 matching gift program. Emma and her team were open to this unexpected opportunity and excited to build the infrastructure they needed for their first end-of-year giving campaign. Madison Karas, 2PuntoPlatform’s chief product officer, was instrumental in setting up and executing the campaign.

The Results

They had never emailed their audience before, let alone launched an entire giving campaign, so Emma and Madison knew they had to lay some significant groundwork for their effort to succeed. LION Sustainability Lab coach Maria Archangelo helped them understand all the components of a campaign and outlined the steps to prepare for launch.

First, they needed to source platforms and services to make this project possible. Through Maria’s recommendation, Emma contracted with Indiegraf, a technology service provider for small and startup news publishers, to temporarily replace their outdated website with a dynamic donation page. All of their outreach efforts would point to this page, making it a critical aspect of the campaign’s setup. This page was then connected to Stripe, a payment processing platform that allowed them to accept and track donations. 

Next, they established a communications calendar to organize their content, messaging, and timing. This involved crafting compelling language and constructing email lists and segments. They then opened a Mailchimp account to send and monitor campaign emails. Already active on social media, they didn’t open any new accounts but worked on corresponding posts. One idea they implemented was featuring board members in short, 45-second videos explaining what 2PuntosPlatform is and why supporting its journalism is essential. They used these videos in emails and on social media. 

The campaign launched on Giving Tuesday (November 28, 2023) and concluded on December 31, 2023. Two substantial donations were received within the first two days, and support continued to pour in through mid-December. In total, the campaign raised $6,640. They received $1,725 in individual donations, and their Knight-Lenfest match was $4,915. One-time donations were matched dollar for dollar, and recurring monthly donations were multiplied by 12. Though they did not reach the maximum $10,000 goal, the 2PuntosPlatform team is proud of this project and learned a lot along the way.

One powerful takeaway? “People like hearing from us,” said Madison, noting that they now have a newsletter platform to share editorial content and create future campaigns. 

“This was a huge step in feeling comfortable. It was super cool to say, ‘LION gave us the confidence to do this.’ Otherwise, we would have been like, ‘Hey, will you maybe, maybe, consider supporting us?’” 

Emma also emphasized how vital Maria’s guidance was in undertaking this project. She’s met other publishers in similar situations who had the funding to conduct a giving campaign, but without the hands-on support, they were “lost” and “frustrated.”

“If you are a hyper-local minority with a language barrier, you definitely need support,” she said. “These opportunities are hard to come by for organizations like ours; we have some additional barriers we need to overcome. Having a coach is a luxury, and asking for help is so important.”

After the campaign ended, they began working on a new database of earned revenue and donor opportunities, continuing to flesh out ideas and experiment beyond email and social media outreach. “A 2Puntos end-of-the-year party? That may be something we see this year,” said Madison. “We’re excited for what’s next.”

The Wins

• Created a giving campaign and received a couple of major donations upon launch
• Built a donation page and system to receive and track contributions
• Established a new database to assess earned and donor revenue opportunities

Have a success story to share about the business side of your news business? Email the LION team at hello@lionpublishers.com!

The post 2PuntosPlatform created a first-ever fundraising campaign through the LION/GNI Sustainability Lab appeared first on LION Publishers.

The Challenge

When the Canadian federal government passed the Online News Act (Bill C-18) this summer, Energeticcity General Manager Adam Reaburn suspected he would have to revise the organization’s funding strategy. Bill C-18 requires large tech companies to compensate organizations if they host Canadian news content on their platforms –– and Meta ultimately responded to this new law by blocking Canadian news from its platforms.

For the past three years, Energeticcity has been providing its clients –– small to medium-sized community businesses –– with digital marketing services. These services are critical to the British-Columbia-based news outlet as they fund its journalism. When Bill C-18 passed, traffic to Energeticcity’s website dropped by 30 percent, as its news was no longer being pushed on Meta’s platforms. With fewer people clicking through to Energeticcity’s website and viewing its clients’ display advertising, the outlet knew it could no longer rely on selling that service for revenue growth. Adam was right; the organization had to pivot to another plan.

The Results

Working with LION coach Richard Brown, Adam and his team determined precisely how much money the organization needed to raise by the end of 2024 to compensate for the lost revenue. The $150,000 figure initially felt daunting, but they worked together to break it down into more manageable steps. Adam created a dynamic sales spreadsheet to calculate how much a single client needed to spend, how much they could generate with existing clients, and how many new clients they needed to attract (knowing some would churn) each month. In the end, Adam was surprised at “how small that number became” when he realized they only needed to bring in 1-2 new clients per month to hit their goal. With this achievable outcome in mind, they could get to work on the plan.

The first step was to refine how they tracked and reported the performance of each campaign to their clients. They built an automated reporting system to help clients glean essential insights, and now have a staff member review monthly statistics and provide feedback. Showing how their services get results reduces client turnover, and by better understanding which clients’ campaigns perform best, they are more intentional about which businesses they solicit and work with.

Energeticcity continues to explore and expand its digital marketing services, working around display advertising to offer innovative ideas to its new and pre-existing clients.

The Wins

• Developed an annual revenue goal of $150,000 and a manageable plan to reach it
• Created an automated reporting system to track client success
• Revamped solicitation outreach and methods

Have a success story to share about the business side of your news business? Email the LION team at hello@lionpublishers.com!

The post Reimagining Client Services and Products to Achieve Funding Goals appeared first on LION Publishers.

The Challenge

As NRI Nation grew, Nikita needed help creating policies and systems to manage her dispersed team of contributors and ensure they weren’t continuously joining and leaving. She also wanted to eventually transition contractors to FTEs and sought advice on how to train and orient new recruits.

Nikita isn’t a trained journalist, and neither are most of her contributors, so she was spending a lot of time upskilling and training her team in the basics of accurate reporting. Finding ways to make training easier and more efficient became a top priority for Nikita as she navigated NRI’s transition from “project” to “growing publication.”

The Results

Those first months of launching a startup often feel breathless, heady, and fast-paced. However, with the help of LION coach Jennifer Mizgata, Nikita slowed down her decision-making and examined her current onboarding materials from the perspective of someone with no background or understanding of NRI Nation. This exercise led Nikita to craft a new employee handbook and orientation materials that meet new hires where they are and ground them in NRI Nation’s mission, values, and work culture.

She developed process workflows so that frequent processes like NRI Nation’s fact-checking methodology are documented for everyone to use. Now, the entire reporting and editing workflow is captured in a document that Nikita can share with new hires to quickly get them up to speed. This saves hours of Nikita’s time and ensures that all new hires receive the same information. 

Nikita also created a feedback process in the Asana documentation and management tool to set quarterly check-ins with her team members to document their progress toward goals and capture any feedback they have on how their work is going.

The Wins

• Created employee handbook and “How We Work” document
• NRI Nation continues to maintain a team of five contractors
• Won their first grant from ICFJ

Have a success story to share about the business side of your news business? Email the LION team at hello@lionpublishers.com!

The post Evolving a Project Into Full-Fledged Media Business appeared first on LION Publishers.

The Challenge

As La Converse continues to grow, Lela and her team wanted a better system to assess new hires and understand best practices for bringing them into the organization. As La Converse is an organization guided by its values, Lela sought to ensure that she could operationalize those values in the hiring process. She also wanted to grow the organization thoughtfully and adjust La Converse’s revenue strategy as needed to allow for future growth.

The Results

Lela worked with LION coach Ana Mina, whose background in organizational strategy helped Lela think through human resources solutions to benefit both Converse Media and École Converse. Together, they examined the people operations workflows for both organizations and worked through how Lela could optimize La Converse’s current recruitment, hiring, onboarding, and evaluation processes.  

As Lela prepared to recruit a junior journalist into their fellowship program, she worked on several deliverables, including an interview grid, job description, and interview process. Lela also completed a performance review template and a user manual to help onboard leaders at La Converse and help them more quickly understand the organization’s culture and values.

The Wins

• Created a performance review template and leadership user manual
• Overhauled interview process
• Developed new assets to support better hiring practices

Have a success story to share about the business side of your news business? Email the LION team at hello@lionpublishers.com!

The post Focusing on People Operations for Innovation and Training appeared first on LION Publishers.

People are unnerved by the Texas Tribune layoffs. That, to me, is appropriate. Anyone who’s not a little freaked out isn’t paying attention.

This is, unfortunately, a form of business cycle that affects nearly every company. Nonprofit is a tax status, not a business model, and nothing about being a nonprofit insulates us from the pressures of business cycles. That doesn’t mean cuts are inevitable, but it does mean you have to constantly look at how you’re spending and making money and make adjustments, and sometimes those are painful.

For instance, we’ve seen a lot of podcasts shut down after a couple of years. This is at a time when the industry thought podcasts were the next hot revenue stream, and some organizations built giant podcasting operations, only to learn that the only actual advertisers were mattress companies and the latest proposed miracle for saving journalism was as much of a mirage as the “pivot to video” or the BuzzFeed/Huffington Post insanely-high-traffic-and-banner-ads model. Would some of us say in retrospect that we could have seen that coming? Sure. Would we really have been confident enough in that vision to skip those trends? Eh, maybe.
I can’t authoritatively tell you what the Tribune should or could have done differently, if anything. I’ve heard things like, “It was stupid to budget higher revenue after a strong year and a CEO change,” but if they forecasted a lower budget for this year sooner, they would have had to make the cuts sooner. And it’s really hard to predict fundraising. Comparing their finances to ours is impossible without a deep dive into their books. This 2022 chart (see below) from The Texas Tribune’s Annual Report showing “revenue committed for this fiscal year” is how the accounting standards tell you to report it, but it doesn’t tell you anything about how much cash actually came in or how much they could expect to get in 2023 or 2024.

It’s impossible to compare apples to apples among nonprofits because every year is different and every organization is different.

For instance, we took in more than we spent last year. Several people said that if we had a good year, our raises should have been larger than they were. I wish we could have done that; the joy of running a nonprofit is that you get to put 100 percent of the money back into the business because there’s no f-ing bottom-feeding vulture hedge fund extracting 20 percent or more of it. (Ask me how I really feel.)

But the primary reason we had a surplus for last year is that one major donor, someone who had given about 8 percent of our annual budget over the past couple of years, told us 2022 would be her last year. She moved 100 percent of her philanthropy to have the maximum possible impact on a cause she’s now passionate about: food insecurity. That kind of shift is not unusual in philanthropy; it’s one of the reasons that nonprofit fundraising is hard.

Our Chief Development Officer Kate Looby and former Publisher and Chief Operating Officer Marcia Parker used some masterful fundraising jiu-jitsu to convince that donor to give us a smaller “step-down” amount in 2023 before winding down completely. To our great surprise, the donor sent it immediately, and it was another big gift. So our major-donor revenue for 2022 was higher than expected because of her large gift. We then budgeted less revenue in 2023 than in 2022, but that was fine because her extra money from 2022 covered the gap in our 2023 budget.

I’ve shared financial projections several times this year, which are unchanged. We’re on track to meet our 2023 budget and think we could break even without that extra 2022 gift covering the gap. That’s because, thanks to our development team’s hard work, we’ve brought in some new donors, and a couple of key ones increased their gifts. That would let us keep that 2022 gift in our reserves.

We’ll build our 2024 budget soon. That’s a painstaking project for the development team. They look at every existing and prospective donor and what they know about that person or organization’s donation history, their stated intent, and other factors to estimate how much they might give in 2024. On expenses, we’ll take into account lots of factors, like the current financial uncertainties (recession? inflation? rebound?), the election year, and the needs our Editor-in-Chief Kristen Go sees as she identifies gaps in our newsroom staffing. My guess is that we’ll budget for a slightly larger amount of revenue and an equal bump in expenses, projecting another break-even year.

Growing too fast is a danger, but so is standing still. People (readers, members, foundations, sources, peers, everyone) expect innovation and growth. If we get a grant to do something new, that’s not money we chose to spend on a new project. We were given money only because we proposed and wanted to do that new project. So it’s wrong to say that investing in Thing B and then having to cut Thing A was a bad decision; that money would not have been available for Thing A. Protecting Thing A is why it’s essential to keep a healthy amount of money in reserve. It doesn’t guarantee nothing ever changes; it just gives us months or years, instead of weeks, to gradually adjust and find new revenue if something does.

Our 2024 budget will include new experiments, likely including the ideas festival, a beefed-up TV presence that puts our coverage within reach of millions more households, more coverage in certain areas of the state, a more robust election guide and more activities to support it. None will be so big that they’ll hurt us badly if we don’t get the results we expect, but each is the kind of project you test and then decide whether to continue.

Just as we’ve learned from The Texas Tribune’s successes over the years, we’ll learn from their challenges. And we’ll continue to be the best partners we can to them and our other peer organizations, because we’re all in this together.

Learn more about CalMatters and its team.

The post CalMatters CEO on Texas Tribune layoffs: ‘Growing too fast is a danger, but so is standing still.’ appeared first on LION Publishers.

The Challenge

Though she was proud of her early success, managing the finances of her business created so much anxiety that she would often avoid bookkeeping and basic accounting work. She wanted to better understand how she was spending money and learn systems to build accountability.

She also wanted to create advertising opportunities and a media kit to use with sponsors. Given that she reaches rural residents across Ontario, she needed a way to communicate the value of her community engagement without relying on scale to sign partnerships.

The Results

Shauna embraced her vulnerability around finances and became less fearful of tracking how she spent money. Learning how to budget helped her realize she was blending her personal and professional finances and overspending on expenses (like conference travel) that weren’t necessarily leading to revenue growth.

Shauna also developed a media kit that emphasized her penetration into over 500 rural communities. She increased sponsor outreach and is working to hire students of color in 2023 to bring more young voices into the podcast.

The Wins

• Created a budget
• Developed a media kit focusing on reach and engagement
• Launched a members-only newsletter
• Signed a $20,000 annual sponsor

Have a success story to share about the business side of your news business? Email the LION team at hello@lionpublishers.com!

The post Taking Control of Finances Through Budgeting and Forecasting appeared first on LION Publishers.

The Challenge

Mack and Karen also recognized that they had been working so hard “in” their business that they hadn’t prioritized working “on” their business. As the team continues to increase its output of original reporting, newsletters and custom content for clients, Mack and Karen wanted to create some fundamental infrastructure to support their team members and make it easier to run the organization.

The Results

Mack and Karen wanted to focus on creating team-building training and support materials to improve retention of their team members. They also recognized, with a distributed team, that these materials had the best chance of being utilized if they were easily accessible. By participating in the 2022 GNI Startups Lab on Building and Managing a Team and with guidance from their program coach, Bene Cipolla, the Taproot team got busy. They created an intranet system, which now houses all of their orientation documentation, a new Taproot employee handbook and training videos. By creating this intranet portal, Mack and Karen feel like they’ve created a resource that will directly impact their ability to retain new team members.

They put their new assets to the test when they hired and onboarded a part time employee using their new intranet and materials. That employee is still part of the team – an important data point that suggests Mack and Karen’s new system is increasing employee retention and satisfaction.

The Wins

• Created an employee handbook
• Made and retained new hire
• Launched an employee intranet system and refined their onboarding process

Have a success story to share about the business side of your news business? Email the LION team at hello@lionpublishers.com!

The post Improving Employee Retention Through Systems and Documentation appeared first on LION Publishers.

In this conversation, Shah and Wei discuss how to reimagine the culture of newsrooms to be more supportive and sustainable for the journalists who work in them.

Ready to get together again for more conversations like this one? Our next in-person event is only a few months away! 

The Southeast News Sustainability Meetup in Durham, North Carolina this October will bring together publishers from across the Southeast United States, and it will also host the 2023 LION Local Journalism Awards Ceremony. 

LION’s 2023 News Sustainability Meetups and the 2023 LION Awards are sponsored by The Walton Family Foundation, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and The Google News Initiative. If your organization is interested in sponsoring LION’s News Sustainability Meetups or the LION Awards, please contact Chris Krewson, LION’s executive director, at chriskrewson@lionpublishers.com.

The post Reimagine newsroom culture and build more sustainable workplaces appeared first on LION Publishers.

At LION, we awarded $1.8 million in operational funding to news publishers last year through programs like the LION-Meta Revenue Growth Fellowship, the LION-GNI Sustainability Audits & Funding program and the 2022 GNI Startups Labs, and we can say at least two things with confidence:

• Money is good. We’ve seen how far that money can go in the hands of small, scrappy news businesses. Our program participants used their grants to launch new products and revenue streams, hire contractors, upgrade their websites, and make other critical investments in their businesses. 

• Money is not enough. The publishers starting or leading LION member businesses are more likely to have a background in journalism than in business, yet many of the challenges they face are primarily small business challenges. For example, only 28 percent of the participants in our LION-GNI Sustainability Audits and Funding program had a strategic plan in place when they started the program, and less than half had an annual budgeting process. 

To balance these distinct needs, LION provided direct funding to 160 publishers across our programs while also delivering personalized coaching and training to help them learn the skills and implement the systems that would make their investments stick. 

Here’s what we heard from participants in our GNI Startups Lab program on Managing Money and Risk about the value of the program, beyond the dollars themselves: 

• “I’m not a numbers person, I’m a words and story person, so getting a handle on and control over the financial part of my business was really intimidating to me. That’s what this Startups Lab helped me uncover and overcome.” —Shauna Ray, Radar Media

• “When I started my news organization, a plan was the furthest thing from my mind. The Lab helped me legitimize what has become a full-fledged news business. My work with my coach and the GNI/LION team forced me to set aside time to look at the most important aspects of my news organization–time I wouldn’t have spent otherwise. Now, I have a revenue and risk management plan, and I feel confident going into next year and beyond.” —Nicci Kadilak, Burlington Buzz

• “The Managing Money and Risk Lab is a program I have been waiting for! It gave me more confidence in our numbers and reignited my passion in the running of my news/media venture. The coaches, education and LION community are supportive and top-notch.” —Michelle Olvera, BoldLatina

Another insight from our 2022 programs is that publishers often make progress toward sustainability in small, incremental steps, with plenty of false starts and missteps along the way.

As my colleague Lisa Heyamoto wrote in her Nieman Lab prediction: “It’s tempting to think that the growth path for an independent news organization is consistent and linear. But after analyzing nearly 150 organizations over the last two years through LION Publishers’ Sustainability Audit process, we’ve seen this kind of “if/then” thinking doesn’t apply to the relative Wild West that is the independent news landscape.”

The goal of our programming in 2022 was to help our members navigate this “Wild West” landscape and make strategic investments to put their businesses on more sustainable footing. 

Here are a few examples of what that journey looked like for participants in our LION-Meta Revenue Growth Fellowship. 

A solo founder finally gets to make their first hire 

Nuestro Estado founder Fernando Soto launched his Spanish-language publication in South Carolina like many LION members – as a solo founder trying to do everything at once. 

He built the brand, reported the news, edited stories from freelancers, and posted on social, and when he could find the time, pitched to advertisers. But it was too much for one person. 

“I was overwhelmed,” he said. “I thought ‘if only I could hire somebody, things would be different.’” 

The Revenue Growth Fellowship gave Soto that opportunity. The program helped Nuestro Estado and eleven other independent publishers cover the cost of a revenue-focused hire for two years, and Soto used that funding to hire a business development manager. 

The hope was that adding a business lead would help Nuestro Estado pitch more sponsors and close more deals, while also freeing up Soto to spend more time on editorial work. 

But that plan didn’t pan out. Despite the extra staffing, business leads never took off, and prospective sponsors that did enter the pipeline often wanted to deal with Soto directly, causing him to be stretched just as thin as before the hire. 

“Telling our story just hits differently coming from me as the founder,” Soto said. “My ‘aha moment’ was realizing that maybe I should take on that business work myself, even though it’s outside my comfort zone.”

After hiring and parting ways with two business development managers in 10 months, Soto has realized that the path to a sustainable workload isn’t just adding more capacity; it’s adding the right capacity – in this case, someone to help manage the editorial product so that he can focus on revenue. 

A big investment in reader revenue pays off with a holistic approach

RANGE Media used its fellowship funding to hire an audience and membership editor in May 2022 – and when it launched its first membership drive a few months later, the early returns were modest.

“In all, we were shooting for 50 members,” RANGE founder Luke Baumgarten. “We only had nine new members after five days.”

What happened next is why LION talks so much about these three pillars of news business sustainability – and how they intersect. 

In the span of two weeks, RANGE published some of its most impactful reporting of the year, including breaking news about anti-abortion laws and election interference. 

That enterprising journalism combined with the work RANGE had already done to market its membership program and strengthen its conversion funnel led to big results. By the end of the campaign, RANGE had added 80 new members, beating its goal by more than 50 percent. 

“The stories were the seeds, the marketing was the plough,” Baumgarten said. “Without both, nothing is going to grow.”

Ultimately, figuring out the right combination of investments to produce results is as much a strategic problem as it is a resources problem, and we heard from RGF participants that the personalized coaching they received helped them navigate these big decisions. 

“It’s really good to have someone who’s done this work before and can help identify what RANGE is uniquely good at, and what we’re uniquely well positioned for,” Baumgarten said. “That support has been really, really helpful.”

A team grows faster than the operational foundation to support it

Dallas Free Press founder Keri Mitchell says she cried when she found out her newsroom had been selected for the LION-Meta Revenue Growth Fellowship.

“I was scared shitless when we launched, I was so afraid,” she says. “It wasn’t until we got the RGF invitation that I thought, ‘OK, this is going to work out.’” 

Like other founders in the program, Mitchell hoped the new hire would help get most business work off her plate so she could focus on leading the editorial strategy.  

But like Soto, she learned that the organization’s fundraising work wasn’t something she could simply hand off, even to the most capable colleague. 

“My coach told me, ‘You are not looking for the person who’s going to sell, you’re looking for the person who’s going to provide structure and organization around the sales process – but you’re still going to have to be the person making the sale,’” Mitchell said. “That was really bad news for me.”

Despite Mitchell’s reservations, she continued to play a large role in fundraising even after hiring a development director, and this new staffing model has already shown signs of success. 

In 2022, Dallas Free Press quadrupled its fundraising haul on North Texas Giving Day – from $5,000 to $21,000 – and Mitchell now expects to be able to pay herself a salary next year for the first time. 

Of course, the challenge with this rapid growth is that Mitchell now has a much more complex organization to run, with multiple staff members and contributors to manage and a growing list of projects and deliverables to execute. 

Mitchell recognized that she needed help keeping the organization on track, and she credits her decision to hire a fourth full-time employee – an operations and programming manager – to the lessons she learned from the RGF program. 

“The cohort helped me realize that we won’t do our work well unless we have the right systems in place,” she said. “The program’s handbook and coaching gave us the guidance to know what we need to do [from an operations perspective], but we still needed a person to do it.”

What’s ahead for LION in 2023

Looking ahead, we believe LION’s role in the local news ecosystem is to help independent publishers build and run stronger small businesses. Our challenge next year is figuring out how to do this work at scale, so that more LION members can succeed in and serve even more communities. 

We’ll have more details to share about our 2023 programming soon, but in the meantime, you can get updates on our work and what we’re learning by subscribing to LION’s weekly industry newsletter. 

Want to learn how to support our members next year? Drop us a note at hello@lionpublishers.com, or email our executive director Chris Krewson to learn more about funding opportunities. 

The post Why dollars alone won’t save the local news industry appeared first on LION Publishers.

My mother, an immigrant, talked about missing family members in our home country and not being able to travel to see them. My husband explained that he needed to hire for three positions at his job, but he didn’t have enough funding for all of them. 

Asking questions for 15 minutes required a constant fight against my desire to offer solutions to both problems. But unsurprisingly, by the end of both conversations, my mother and husband had come up with their own solutions — and none of them looked like what I had imagined. (Side note: I tried to replicate this with my toddlers, and it didn’t go so well, but that is a story for another day.)

This kind of conversation is at the core of our coaching philosophy at LION: We firmly believe that the people closest to the problem are the closest to the solution, and we have designed all our programs in the last year with that philosophy in mind. 

Most recently, we brought in experts from across the industry for our GNI Startups Lab program to support LION members on their path to sustainability in three specific areas: managing risk and money, building and managing a team and planning for revenue growth.

The feedback from participants on the coaching they received has been overwhelmingly positive:

• “The training through the News Entrepreneur Academy paired with the expertise of my coach set me up for success for the year to come and beyond.” -Travers Johnson, Queerency

• “The coaches, education, and LION community are supportive and top-notch.” -Michelle Olvera, BoldLatina

• “Bringing in leaders from the field who both know what they’re talking about and can break down their process step-by-step is exactly what we wanted out of this program and it’s exactly what we got.” – Gabe Schneider, The Objective

We heard feedback like this across all our programs that offered personalized coaching, including the LION-GNI Sustainability Audits and Funding program and the LION-Meta Revenue Growth Fellowship. Here are a few takeaways about why this type of coaching is so important and how other organizations can build it into their own programming. 

1. Coaching and training meet different needs for news publishers — and should be paired together.

Last year, we soft launched the News Entrepreneur Academy to offer LION members self-guided courses on small business topics such as accounting and planning for revenue growth. We built these courses into our GNI Startups Lab curriculum so news leaders could learn new skills and build a shared foundation of knowledge. 

However, we know that no two news businesses are exactly alike, and context matters when it comes to translating a best practice into an actual practice. That’s why we paired these self-guided training courses with personalized, one-to-one coaching. 

“Coaching is the critical link that helps publishers incorporate their newfound knowledge into their big-picture and day-to-day efforts,” said Lisa Heyamoto, LION’s director of programming, member education. “Our program design makes that relationship even more explicit.” 

Pairing coaching with training meant that our coaches could spend their time with participants discussing how to effectively apply the training. From our coaches in the Managing Money and Risk program, we learned that the trainings:

• Became an ongoing coaching tool. Coaches felt they could refer participants back to the videos to gain more clarity around key concepts and frameworks, instead of spending precious coaching time revisiting them on a call. 
  
• Made coaching conversations more productive. When participants were grounded in the concepts before meeting with their coaches, it was easier to make progress on problem-solving than when participants had not seen the courses.
  
• Were especially relevant to early stage organizations. For many of these organizations, the content in the NEA courses was entirely new to them, and it helped them catch up with organizations that had more small business administration experience.

“Coaching can be awesomely specific and useful so long as there’s a foundation of knowledge to build on,” said Anika Anand, LION’s deputy director, “and that came from our NEA courses in this case.”

2. Attracting highly qualified coaches with relevant experience starts with an intentional recruitment process.

We received 56 amazing applications for 12 GNI Startups Lab coaching positions this year, and the strength of our coaching pool started with the design of our recruitment process. 

Here are the steps we followed to make sure our process was fair, competitive and equitable:

• Accept applications: We didn’t just want to invite big names in the industry to be coaches, because we know there are many professionals with relevant experience we’d miss out on. By opening up applications, we gave these professionals the same chance to prove themselves as other candidates.
  
• Be transparent about pay: We believe no candidate should enter a contracting process without knowing compensation information beforehand, and this transparency also helps inform standard industry rates that other y peer organizations, funders, and news leaders can benefit from.
  
• When in doubt, err on the side of advancing a candidate: This helps guarantee that people from disadvantaged backgrounds or outside journalism support organization networks get a chance to show who they are, which sometimes takes more than one interview. 
  
• Think hard about your application criteria: We started by deciding what skills are must-haves and what are nice-to-haves. We also articulated the program’s target population and personas so we can ask candidates if they have relevant experience serving that group. (Sidenote: Highly qualified candidates sometimes don’t have relevant experience in newsrooms, but their experience mentoring local businesses makes them uniquely qualified to be coaches and foster out-of-the-box thinking).
  
• Make yourself available during the hiring process: Taking the time to talk with potential candidates allowed us to clarify expectations for good candidates who felt they may not have relevant newsroom experience. This is even more important if you’re trying to provide coaching in areas such as financial planning and human resources because they aren’t specific to the news business. We recommend stealing Outlier’s hiring hotline idea and making sure you set aside time for 1:1s. The questions you receive from the first candidates that reach out to you can inform a Frequently Asked Questions document.
  
• Make a plan for reaching beyond your own networks: If we’re only reaching out directly to people we know or posting on Slack channels full of people in our network, it is easy to reproduce the same privilege and inequality that permeates our industry. That’s why we use these questions to guide our outreach strategy:
  • To the best of my knowledge, is this pool of candidates varied in terms of race, ethnicity, gender identity, religion, geography, experience, education, etc.? 
  • Do we have people with diverse backgrounds?
  • Do we have people from different organizations?
  • To the best of my knowledge, do people from historically marginalized communities have access to this place or are members of this organization, Slack channel, etc.? If not, how am I addressing this through direct outreach and word-of-mouth?
    
• Evaluate and iterate: As with every process, there will always be imperfections and room for improvement. Take the time to answer emails from candidates who were not selected. Make sure to create a space to evaluate and for your team to provide feedback on these processes. Reach out to candidates and ask them about their experience.

3. Coaches need to understand the goals of their coaching sessions.

Our programs have repeatedly taught us that a single person doesn’t have all the answers – no matter their level of expertise. That said, a single person who knows how to ask the right questions can help news leaders solve almost any challenge, which connects back to our core coaching philosophy: The people closest to the problem are the ones closest to the solution.

Building on that philosophy, the main goals of our coaching program are to:

1. Build organizational capacity: Coaches focus on developing the participant’s skills and helping them shore up the structures, workflows and strategies that support their work.
   
2. Foster independent thinking and problem solving: We want participants to not only solve specific business problems in our programs, but to develop the skills and confidence to tackle future challenges independently.
   
3. Generate momentum toward measurable goals: As a process gains momentum, it begins to happen more quickly and becomes less likely to stop. Our coaches help news businesses set realistic and achievable goals that can create momentum and discourage “planning to plan.” 
   
4. Model applying the same framework to new, similar problems: A framework is a structure intended to support or guide future designs and decisions. By helping leaders develop a framework instead of prescribing a one-time solution, participants can build long-lasting skills that are transferable to new, similar challenges.

Central to this approach is tailoring the coaching to the organizations’ particular goals and progress. We don’t want organizations to meet program goals for the sake of meeting program goals. Instead, our aim is for each newsroom to move the needle in whatever way is relevant and feasible.

For the Startups Labs, coaches worked with participants to adapt the program deliverables to their specific needs. That was especially true during our Building and Managing a Team program where it was more relevant for some participants to work on building a budget (to set a strong foundation for making the next hire) or produce a performance review document or leadership readme than to pursue our suggested deliverable of a staffing plan and employee handbook.

4. Coaching works best when it’s a team effort.

It takes a village to boost and support news businesses, and we work hard in our programs to make sure participants are benefitting from the collective expertise and experience of the whole coaching team. 

How do we do that?

• We think about building a team of coaches, not just hiring individuals: We intentionally hire coaches with different and complementary skill sets, and we prioritize hiring people who are good team players.
  
• Host weekly meetings to workshop challenges: We don’t want these weekly meetings to be another space to repeat the information we gather from written coaches’ reports. Instead, we designed a Rose/Bud/Thorn system to make sure we have time and space to address and workshop specific challenges and share resources.
  
• Provide a Coach’s Handbook to help set expectations: We created this living document to provide an easy reference point for our growing group of coaches across programs. The handbook familiarizes coaches with the principles, values, and theory of change that guide LION Publishers so we remain consistent across programs. It also explains responsibilities and sets clear expectations so coaches are better equipped for success in their role. 

5. Setting coaches up for success requires a lot of hard work behind the scenes. 

We want our coaches to coach, not to spend their time drowning in administrative work, so we do a lot of heavy lifting in the background to make that possible, including:

• Sending a welcome letter to help acclimate our coaches to the program and our coaching processes at LION. 
  
• Writing one-page background briefs on all our program participants and sharing those with the coaching team. We heard from our coaches this year that they want even more of this kind of information to better understand where organizations have been and where they want to go.
  
• Setting up a light-lift coaching report template that coaches can complete and submit in Slack. The coaching reports are designed to take less than 15 minutes to complete, and they help us collaborate as a program team by providing visibility on the common challenges that participants are facing and the questions they’re asking.

How we’ll incorporate coaching into LION’s work in 2023

We are still working on the retrospective for the 2022 GNI Startups Labs, but we know for sure that we will keep building coaching into our education programs. We are interested in talking with even more coaches from diverse experiences and backgrounds, so (per learning #2!) don’t hesitate to get in touch with me at elaine@lionpublishers.com if you’re interested in working with us. 

Meet the coaches from our 2022 GNI Startups Lab

Managing Risk and Money

Eric Johnston, chief executive officer at Sonoma Media Investments, LLC

Graham Watson-Ringo, senior director of client success at News Revenue Hub 

Ingrid Marielos Marthy, former director of the Women’s Business Center, an SBA-sponsored program, in Fayetteville, NC, and San Francisco, CA

John Davidow, founder of Media Bridge Partners and acting chief of staff at the National Trust for Local News

Building and Managing a Team

An Xiao (Ana) Mina, executive consultant and coach with over a decade of global experience 

Mary Benedicta Cipolla, former editor-in-chief and publisher at Chalkbeat

Richard Tofel, founding general manager and first employee of ProPublica from 2007-2012, and its president from 2013 until September 2021

Jennifer Mizgata, senior media consultant specializing in digital innovation, leadership development, and organizational change

Planning for Revenue Growth

Maria Archangelo, chief revenue officer at Open Campus

Sam Gross, co-founder of Stacker

Scott Rosenfield, chief of staff to the CEO at The Atlantic

Todd Stauffer, association manager and digital specialist for the Association of Alternative Newsmedia

Elaine Díaz is LION’s senior manager of coaching.

The post What does it take to support news publishers with personalized coaching? appeared first on LION Publishers.