A look inside the local media co-op’s ambitious membership campaign. This article is part of the People-Powered Storytelling collaborative series.
In 2024, The Bristol Cable, a local media co-op delivering independent, investigative journalism alongside the city’s communities, turned 10. We’ve survived a tumultuous decade against the odds by raising grant money and campaigning hard for membership income, with one primary message: our members, not press barons or shareholders, own the paper.
I say paper, but we also produce podcasts and video, online journalism, a weekly newsletter and social media updates as well as our quarterly magazine. We continue to adapt, as is necessary in any industry, but we know that for many of our members receiving a hard-copy of a paper they can consume cover to cover, full of in-depth journalism, is one of the primary reasons they support us. Rather than seeming antiquated, it’s in fact one of the things that sets us apart for many readers.
In 2023, it was becoming clear that the vast majority of grant money for truly independent journalism, that the Cable had relied on to fuel growth, had dried up. So we launched an incredibly ambitious membership campaign, and our one remaining grant funder gave us quite the incentive to succeed: raise membership revenue by £60,000, a 50% increase, within a year, and they’d contribute a grant of £40,000 on top.
After a year of blood, sweat and tears (well, only two of those, thankfully), we succeeded and hit our target, unlocking the bonus grant. This money will take us way into 2025, allowing us plenty more runway to continue building membership and diversifying our income. And a cherry on top: the campaign strategy was nominated for an award from Press Gazette.
Here’s how we did it.
The campaign began at the end of September 2023 with a three-pronged strategy:
First, we worked out that we could achieve the entire target simply by convincing every one of our existing 2,500 members to give £2 more per month across the year. We thought that might be a little ambitious, so we settled on a target of 25% of members making a £2 uplift, encouraged by direct email marketing.
Second, to encourage new members at higher contribution levels, we embarked on a multimedia campaign and relaunched our membership benefit tiers. Previously, the only 'soft' benefit we offered was to send the quarterly magazine to members' doors if they paid anything more than £3/month. We rearranged the tiers, maintaining a ‘pay what you feel’ system, with a range of benefits that kicked in at £1/month, £5/month, or £10/month or more.
Finally, we added a tier for those people who can afford to pay a significant chunk more – £1,000/year or more – to pay it forward. Our new Patron membership, which preserves our democratic membership ethos (one member, one vote, no matter your contribution) means that people who can afford to pay more for our journalism can subsidise those who cannot.
By the end of 2023, with early momentum we had increased our income by a third: £20,000. Following this, there was an anticipated lull – both in income growth and our energy levels – but we continued campaigning hard again from spring 2024 to the final month to get to 95%, around £57,000 of the £60,000 target.
Earlier this year, the Reuters Institute's annual Digital News Report revealed only 9% of Brits currently pay for online news and around two thirds (69%) say they wouldn’t pay anything. The average Brit wants to pay between £2 and £5 for news, which is not a sustainable level for most local papers unless they have a huge base.
So we’re proud of what we managed to achieve. The cost of living crisis meant a significant amount of churn, so while our exact number of members has only increased slightly, our increase in income from new net memberships – given that the average contribution from new members compared to old has risen sharply - has been significant.
More than 600 existing members increased their contribution by an average of £3, and I have even spoken to members who increased their contribution more than once during the year, as the campaign progressed and they have been inspired by our success. In addition, we’ve managed to attract 14 Patrons so far, contributing around £27,000 of the total.
A week before the final deadline, we succeeded, unlocking the bonus grant offer of £40,000 (meaning an extra £100,000 in total). This means we now have one-to-two years more runway to continue building our membership, and develop further sustainable revenue streams. We’re now a team with plenty of experience and we’ve developed a number of proven, replicable processes. One more campaign like this, plus a couple more reliable income streams, could see us able to break even for the first time.
But, ultimately, this work is incredibly difficult to do without an incentive like the one we were given by our grant funder. The team is exhausted, and perhaps our members, who have been asked for increased contributions and provided with updates for the last year, are too. I’m doubtful we could achieve the same success if we tried to replicate this again any time in the near future.
But the truth is, this industry is in immediate need. A huge, system-wide change is needed if organisations like ours are going to become profitable. We need to continue to work hard to build membership, but this must come with a nationwide culture change in which people are willing to pay for quality news, and those who can afford it are willing to pay it forward for those who can’t.
Until that happens, the few grant funders willing to back independent journalism could be the deciding factor in making or breaking what is left of independent journalism in the UK.
If you’d like to find out more about the Cable’s membership and Patron membership, and all our previous funders, you can find all the details on our website.
Eliz Mizon is the Strategy Lead at The Bristol Cable, and is a writer and organiser working on innovation in the media industry, specifically sustainable business models for local news, press ethics and climate coverage.
This article is part of People-Powered Storytelling, a new collaborative series showcasing the transformative impact of community-centred media initiatives in the UK. Read more about the series, and the other contributions that are part of it, here.
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