“The way we raise the money at The Guardian is different than any place I’ve ever been”
Steve Sachs is managing director of The Guardian U.S., a role he assumed in October 2022. He also serves on the board of the Texas Tribune, and has worked with Cityside and other nonprofit news orgs. Previous roles included leading tech start-ups and a significant stint on the business side of Time Inc. Last week we met to talk about the Guardian’s remarkable success with reader revenue. The conversation has been edited for length, clarity, and accuracy.
The way we raise the money at The Guardian is different than any place I’ve ever been. This is truly a jointly owned responsibility among the business side and editorial. What does that mean? We have a team of four people in the U.S. on the business side whose whole role is to generate that $33 million. But in addition to that, on the editorial side, we have a senior editor who reports to our U.S. editor, Betsy Reed. Jane Spencer is our deputy editor and head of strategy, and one of her primary responsibilities is to work with the reader revenue team on the business side. She has one person reporting to her who is devoted entirely to reader revenue.
What does this mean on a day to day basis? We have a daily report that tracks not just total reader revenue, but also what stories and what platforms generated the most revenue yesterday.
Let’s dive into the numbers. We have both recurring and one time contributions, of course. In terms of revenue our mix is about 80% recurring and about 20% one-time. In terms of acts of support it’s actually opposite: 68% of acts of support are one-time, only 32% are recurring. Our average value of a single contribution in the U.S. is only $34, and our average recurring gift is $51 annually. In November, we had, for the first time, more than 250,000 recurring supporters in the U.S., and we’re up to almost 270,000 as of right now. Reader revenue in general is growing; we grew it last year by 14%.
CAPTION GOES HERE.
An example of the Epic.
When I got here about 18 months ago, one of the first things I looked at was email. In my experience, I would expect, as with most mission driven or nonprofit news organizations, that email is the most important channel, that’s typically 80% plus of your reader revenue. But at The Guardian, when I got here, it was 7%.
So to me, two things came out of that. Number one, oh my God, we’re getting 93% of our revenue off of the web. Nobody knows how to do that. Number two, it’s only 7% — are you kidding me? It needs to be triple that. We weren’t paying attention to email in a way that most U.S. news organizations or even most nonprofits do. We have focused a lot on building out email. We’re now up to 24% instead of 7%. But that still means that 76% of our acquisitions are from the web.
By the way, when I say web that includes Apple News. Apple News is an important channel for us; in a given month, it could be 30% of our pageviews. We do very well in Apple News, because we are not paywalled and because we are high quality, so you don’t have to subscribe to Apple News+ in order to get really great information. We’re also very good at converting those readers.
So the Epic is number one, but number two in terms of source of contributions on our web site, at 23% of total revenue, is what we call the Banner. That’s when you come to our homepage and also to some other pages, and you have what some people would call a “toaster” that comes up from the bottom. You know, “You’ve read X number of articles over the last year. Please give…” That is responsible for 23% of our total acquisitions in the U.S.
Christmas all the time
Of the $33 million that we did last year, a little more than $2 million of it came from our year-end campaign.
We’ve gotten very good at converting people who are not so loyal to The Guardian, even frequently off of one story.
Then we have what we call a moment strategy. So a “moment” is basically a marketing campaign. We pick out times throughout the year that we know are going to be particularly news heavy in a way that’s important to our readers, and we build a campaign that might be as short as only two weeks, but could be as long as 10 or 12 weeks. In February and March we knew that people were going to be thinking about primaries, so we built out a primaries moment that drove more than $400,000 in contributions.
We are planning one now around the Supreme Court rulings in June, or we might do something around the conventions in July and August.
Implications for others
I think it needs to be integrated across the organization, in a way that we talked about at scale for the Guardian. You want to have the editorial soul of the organization and the mission baked into the process in a way that’s compelling. But you also need to do smart things on email marketing on the business side, and merge those two things together.
The second thing is you need to invest money to make money. It is going to take an investment of either hiring somebody in house or hiring one of the organizations that specialize in this, like News Revenue Hub.
The third thing, I think, is paying attention to what does your audience care about. You need to understand what it is that is causing people to want to voluntarily support you.
That doesn’t mean that everything we do is going to always be available for free. So, for example, in the U.K., we still print the newspaper. We don’t give that away for free. You have to pay for it. We have launched a paid food app called Feast globally; we will launch it in the U.S. and are testing that right now. We will continue to look at those sorts of opportunities, because we don’t feel like it’s in conflict with our mission.
Richard Tofel was founding general manager (and first employee) of ProPublica, and was its president from 2013 until January 2022. This post originally appeared on Second Rough Draft, his newsletter about journalism — subscribe here.
Related Knowledge Center: Climate economics
Climate change is now a driver of the world’s economy. The impact is profound:
- Catastrophic weather events — hurricanes, floods, droughts, high temperatures — are more frequent and more extreme. The cost can be measured in both the initial damage caused and the longer-term impact on the economy.
- Vulnerable communities are increasing climate-related investments, hardening infrastructure and taking other protective measures.
- Investment in carbon capture and storage technologies is increasingly rapidly.
- Governments are making investments and crafting regulations to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
On top of all of this is the cost of uncertainty. As the Fourth National Climate Assessment, released in 2018 by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, says, “The assumption that current and future climate conditions will resemble the recent past is no longer valid.”