Established Local Media and Interest Community Media

Established small local media organisations with a focus on community-engagement and a membership/donations model.

Current focus and actions:

✏️ There is a growing number but visibility of only a very few. They are also potential ambassadors. We need to show how they are successful with beabee. Show that beabee helps them to grow their revenue and engagement.

Action 1: Summarise strong use cases

Action 2: Make sure we measure what we want to help them do

Action 3: Test a training

Next: How can we bring more of them on?

Who is on beabee / in the Starthub

• Bürgerportal Bergisch Gladbach

• Greater Govanhill

• South West Durham News

• The Green Line

• The Bristol Cable (open source)

• Caerphilly Observer (open source)

• Kohero (community)

What they have in common

• Local

• 1 to 5 staff

• Some kind of community-focus

• Membership/donation model

• Working business model / sustaining themselves

• Want to do more engagement but don't have the time

• (some non-profit)

How many more of those are there in Europe?

About 300- 500?

What they pay

🐰 350- 1000 per year (1700 of those for 1000.000 revenue)

Why they come to us

• Payment solution for membership/donations

Features they appreciate / use most

• Payment module (under own URL, integrated in own website)

• Mailchimp connection, Sending emails to segments

• Central database (vs. spreadsheets) to see whole community in one place

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Starthub Germany value

• Exchange with other local media founders - New Local Media Alliance

  • exchange strategies, techniques and energy

  • best practice exchange /sharing

Starthub products they use

• meetup

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Why they choose beabee

• Brand ownership/Data ownership

• Fair Pricing (negotiable)

How they found us

• Events

• Personal contacts

• Pot.: Public speaking/online articles /

• Referral

Key to bring them on

• Easy set up: Minimal hassle/time commitment on their side

• No data migration needed

• Building Trust: Personal connection/demos

• Discounts / Cheap pricing

• Some: Shared values around co-creation etc.

Key to make them successful

• Time-saving features

• Focus revenue growth: Teach/show them how to "sell" membership to their audiences. Get their messaging right, run campaigns etc.

• Give them techniques for increasing their income: Email campaigns, ...

Other thoughts

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Open questions

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Hypotheses

• High potential in this segment to show how they can become more successful on beabee now. Show growth as they join beabee (through additional help)

• Potential to work with easy to adopt easy to analyse, high value engagement templates to move them towards more engagement (if we can integrate a revenue aspect)

• Potential to team up/collaborative experiments for small crowdnewsrooms/ investigations/campaigns - goal to grow the community.

• Keep them through community-focus / co-creation; fundraise together