Does audience engagement-focused reporting actually improve a news organization’s revenue?

After much investment and research, it is still unclear as to whether engagement-focused reporting helps in improving a news organization’s revenue.

Four major journalism funders pooled the money for a fund to support a variety of outlets’ attempts at connecting the use of audience engagement and transparency tools with increased reader revenue.

A report was compiled with three basic findings by Dot Connector Studio impact evaluators Jessica Clark, Katie Donnelly, and Michelle Polyak in a review of the Community Listening and Engagement Fund.

They wrote:

“Our research found that Hearken and GroundSource can both be used effectively to deepen community engagement, open up relationships with new audience members, and shape editorial coverage, if

1. managed by motivated staff members

2. in newsrooms with ample support from leadership

3. and enough time to employ the services well”

They further added:

“Little data is currently available from CLEF participants’ reports that connects use of these services with increased revenue or membership. The majority of newsrooms did not report seeing any evidence of increased revenue within the time frame of the CLEF initiative, but there were exceptions. One grantee reported: “The content that comes from our Hearken content absolutely converts to paying [subscribers]. We have both actual and anecdotal evidence.”

The Lenfest Institute, Knight Foundation, Democracy Fund, and News Integrity Initiative all contributed to the fund that supported 34 newsrooms. The fund further supported between 25 and 85 percent of the first-year costs.

CLEF was pitched as a way to help newsrooms produce more relevant and trusted coverage, but the project was also a way to examine the impact of these tools at scale after planting seeds in the industry.

“Our initial thinking was we would give newsrooms a stipend to use the tools for a year and in a year we’d be able to see the results and how that ties to business sustainability. Thinking that that would all happen in one year was not realistic,” said Cheryl Thompson-Morton, program manager at Lenfest. “We also saw with our grantees — and I think this is an issue throughout the industry — that all of these different services aren’t talking to each other.”

The impact report authors wrote:

“While journalists are often encouraged to become entrepreneurs and develop innovative new ways to connect with audiences, there is a gap in dollars for adoption of new tools and services. This can be frustrating to grantmakers, who spend years supporting development only to see promising services fail to thrive. What’s more, because foundations tend to support nonprofit outlets and organizations, for-profit newsrooms and service providers are often left out of the puzzle. CLEF subsidizes the cost of using the services by way of the newsrooms and then support flows to the service providers. In turn, the service providers have not only more income but a new cohort of users to help refine their offerings.”

Other highlights from the report included:

1. “Newsrooms generally reported increased levels of engagement and higher-quality conversations with audiences. Nearly all of the grant reports we reviewed reported increased engagement. Lenfest’s internal analysis of CLEF from July 2018 found that engaging community members in reporting results in them engaging longer with newsrooms and more with public-powered stories, and spending a longer time on the page than average.”

2. “Embedding these engagement services on their websites also led to an increase in newsletter subscribers. However, while some larger newsrooms were able to add dozens or more new subscribers, overall these conversion rates have been inconsistent.”

3. “Newsrooms also reported that the services help give reporting a longer life, rather than disappearing in social media or in the churn of digital headlines. This allowed newsrooms to resurface and repackage older content that addresses community questions and needs.”

4. “Some newsrooms found the cost of the services and related staffing prohibitive and were unclear as to whether they would be able to continue to use them after the grant period ended. As one grantee put it, they ‘can afford either the tool or the dedicated staffing for it, but not both.’ However, as of May 2019, seven of newsrooms have signed up to continue to use the services after the grant period ended.”

5. “Overall, in CLEF’s first year, the creation of a collaborative funder coalition signaled a strong message of support to the field at large. Newsrooms noticed, and applied.”