By: Skyler Johnson
Black Owned Media Equity and Sustainability Institute hosted an educational marketing panel to help small businesses, primarily newsrooms, in getting people to donate money through membership.
Building Trust
There are many ways to build trust with the audience. The easiest way is to create habits through emails and newsletters. The phone is the modern day porch. People routinely wake up and check their phones in the same way they used to read the newspaper. They offer a way for companies to meet their clientele where they are. It’s important to be transparent about what the association is and what its goal is. A person may not know a certain magazine is non-profit.
They drew a comparison with dating apps. Potential members are the people swiping left and right. The goal would be to get people from casual hookups, people looking at random articles, to active viewers. The newsletter was mentioned as a consistent and direct channel to readers. Once you build up their trust, you can begin to ask for donations.
Welcome Series
A welcome series is helpful in this transparency. It lets them know why they need your newspaper in their lives. After the welcome series, now they can ask for money, which can and should feel uncomfortable and daunting. One should never be too cautious when asking for money. They recommended having monthly donations instead of one-time payments.
Surveys
When attempting to decide which content resonates the most with your base, survey was described as the easiest way to do so. These questionnaires should find out the basic needs of your patrons: where and how and how often they will read. What kind of news do they read? Publishing polls yearly help in seeing changes over time. And it’s important to include some questions gauging the emotional connection the patron has with the content.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the panelists explained, there’s no exact science for any of this. It’s hard to gauge whether something will work or not and it’s impossible to tell how many welcome emails are needed and how much you should ask for in donations. That takes practice, and with enough of it you’ll be able to secure donations easily.
