Independent Media Europe

Media organisations that are stable and want to establish a membership/donation business model (usally for the first time)

Current focus and actions:

✏️ They are the ones who can pay and get a lot of value out of beabee. They are also our potential ambassadors. We need to show how they are successful with beabee. Next: How can we bring on more of them. Positioning: Independent tech by and for independent media.

Action 1: Test a training and do a strong onboarding now (with some publicity)

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

Action 3: Summarise strong use cases

Next: How can we bring more of them on?

Who is on beabee

• Fumaca

• IRPI

What they have in common

• Investigative newsrooms in growth phase

• Non-profit

• Around 10 staff (not all full-time)

• Digital first products

• Have tech people on their team

What is their reach and potential reach

open

How many more of those are there in Europe?

• Project Oasis: 120 (How many don't have reader-revenue stream yet? How many have one, but use tools they could migrate from?)

• Engaged journalism accelerator: 160

What they pay

🐰 1000 - 5000 per year (350 of those for 1000.000 revenue)

Why they come to us

• Want to start a membership /donation based revenue stream

Features they appreciate / use most

• Payment module for membership/donation including

  • brand ownership,

  • different payment types,

  • donation option,

  • own Stripe accounts

• Cheaper than other tools, still possible to negotiate pricing

Why they choose beabee

• Need a payment tool

• Customisation they can implement themselves (even with SaaS solution), direct contact with developer: Join flow; MyIRPI connection.

• Appreciate the values of data-ownerhips, open source, independence

• Trust built through Reference: Part of the independent media community

How they find us

• Reference Network / Independent Tech Alliance

• Events

• Pot.: Public speaking/online articles /

• Referal

Key to bring them on

• Building Trust: Personal connection/demos

• Discounts / Cheap pricing

• Some: Shared values around co-creation etc.

• No data migration needed

Key to make them successful

• Current experiment: Onboarding training.

• Upskill on engagement and connection between engagement and membership: Provide them with techniques to build out their expert database, establish memberfull routines like feedback surveys, allow them to track better how to turn engaged users into paying ones, one-off donors to recurring ones, etc.

• Potential to teach them on how to do crowd investigations (upsell trainings/campaign templates)

Other thoughts

• Potential to use them as ambassadors for their countries. Local media / new small media copying their models and tech stack.

Open Questions

• Value: Not clear what value they see in CRM and survey tool

• Pricing: There is a chance they grow out of our pricing model (becoming too expensive quickly)

Hypotheses

• We need several early touchpoints to build trust - personal connection is important

• New founders look up to these organisations and copy their tactics

• High customer lifetime value, they invest a lot to come on, so won't easily switch

• They are pro but learners. We can provide extra value through peer-to-peer community exchange and trainings

• They are support intense as they have tech people on the team and interest in customisation. (Potential for dev support package on top vs. doing that for free?)

• The independent Tech Alliance will help us to bring on more of this type of organisations: Positioning of independent tech by and for independent media.