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Funnel discipline: Assessing the gaps in your newsroom

What gaps do you have in using audience funnel discipline? Take this quick assessment to find out.

Ask folks in the newsroom to use this assessment – then meet together to compare answers on individual items and overall scores:

Yes No
1.     Some of our newsroom staff believe the job of attracting and retaining paying users belongs outside the newsroom.
2.     Some of our newsroom staff believe the job of attracting and retaining the audiences attractive to advertisers belongs outside the newsroom.
3.     We have reporters and editors who do not understand the audience ‘segmentation’ and funnel methods for audience development.
4.     We don’t know how many total digital news consumers there are in our local market.
5.     We do not know the total size of any audiences we are targeting that reach beyond our local market.
6.     We do not know how many of our potential customers we reach currently.
7.     Less than all of our staff have easy, actionable access to the data and analytics needed to reach, attract, retain and engage our target audiences.
8.     We do not know how many users experience our products, services and/or content in any given month, and/or how that number is trending.
9.     We do not have a clear picture of how users find, use and experience our content, products and services.
10.  We lack a clear and shared definition for the loyalty of our digital audiences.
11.  We don’t know how many of our digital audiences are loyal users.
12.  Not all of our reporters and editors understand and use tactics that are effective at making our digital content ‘stickier.’
13.  We don’t know the conversion rates for users – that is, what percent go from random to habitual users and what percent of habitual convert to subscribers. And we don’t know how those rates are trending.
14.  We don’t know whether (or to what degree) we’re delivering the audiences most valuable to advertisers.
15.  Our newsroom lacks a continuous test-and-learn culture and related habits/skills.
16.  We do not routinely set and hold reporters, editors and others in the newsroom accountable for audience growth and engagement.
17.  We do not have a widely understood and practiced process for experimentation followed by implementation of ideas that work.
Total: