Designing membership for a virtuous engagement-revenue cycle
David Akst, The Lenfest Institute,An audience-first mentality includes constructing membership benefits that stoke engagement, build community, and reinforce trust while making products sticky. Página/12 has made commenting, or as they term it “contributing” to articles a feature, rather than a cost-center with tedious moderation demands. Their newsletter subscribers are already ratifying the feature’s value with more than 7,000 paid subscriptions in the last 5 months.
Implementation details were key. The team invested in tools (Talk from The Coral Project and Slack integrations) to connect their internal systems with their audience-facing site in a way that allows them to loop journalists in with readers and narrow the distance between audience and their team.
“The crux of the membership system is that it allows members to engage with one another and with the paper’s journalists. The commenting system is central to that. Página/12 uses Talk, from The Coral Project, to run its membership and commenting system.”