Funnel discipline: Assessing the gaps in your newsroom
Tim Griggs,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: |