How Bridge Michigan turned Instagram engagement into meaningful audience action

This is the first post in a series highlighting how independent newsrooms are putting Civic Studio strategies into practice. Asha Lewis, digital marketing specialist at Bridge Michigan, shares how her team used automation to turn social media engagement into meaningful audience action. 

For many newsrooms, social media operates like a one-way street. Audiences consume news on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, but getting them to visit your website or take a specific action — reading a full story, subscribing to a newsletter, or making a donation — feels nearly impossible.

Bridge Michigan wanted to challenge that.

As one of five newsrooms in the inaugural Civic Studio cohort, Bridge worked with News Revenue Hub coaches to strengthen its social video strategy and turn social engagement into deeper audience relationships.

Throughout the six-month initiative, Abbey Gingras, the Hub’s VP of consulting services, met weekly with Bridge’s social team to track experiments, troubleshoot challenges, and discuss strategy. Early on, she suggested the newsroom try Manychat, a platform that automates direct messages to users who comment on social media posts.

Asha Lewis, Bridge Michigan’s digital marketing specialist, said the newsroom hadn’t used the platform before — and wasn’t convinced it would fit their needs.

“Now,” she said, “we use it every week.” Even after the Civic Studio pilot ended, Lewis noted that Manychat is still part of the team’s social strategy.

“Having a tangible change in our workflow is one of the best parts of Civic Studio,” she said.

The shift didn’t happen overnight. Bridge’s social team used Manychat to test different stories and calls to action, refining its automated workflows over time. Not every experiment succeeded, but regular coaching sessions encouraged the team to keep iterating instead of abandoning the idea after a few setbacks.

“Having Civic Studio to keep us accountable helped us get through the hiccups,” Lewis said. “If something didn’t work, Abbey would help us troubleshoot and say, ‘Try it this way.’ That was a really integral part of making it work.”

The coaching went beyond technical troubleshooting. Lewis said the standing meetings gave Bridge’s team dedicated time to step back from day-to-day publishing and think strategically about social media. Reviewing performance data and discussing broader industry trends helped spark newsroom-wide conversations about what content to create.

“We don’t carve out that time for ourselves, so having a set meeting with an expert was very helpful,” she explained.

One of Bridge’s most notable Manychat experiments centered on the launch of its new Outdoors Life newsletter. Reporter Laura Herberg appeared in an Instagram Reel that prompted users to comment “outdoors” to receive a direct message with a newsletter sign-up link.

The newsroom also used the same comment-to-DM workflow to drive readers directly to articles, helping the team learn which stories and calls to action were most effective at encouraging audiences to leave Instagram and engage more deeply with Bridge’s journalism.

Over the course of Civic Studio, Bridge tested the workflow across 24 Instagram campaigns. Those experiments generated 307 comment sends and 147 link clicks, with an average click-through rate of 48%.

Lewis called the Outdoors Life campaign “the perfect storm of success,” with Herberg’s engaging videos, enthusiasm for social media, and a compelling newsletter aligning to drive sign-ups.

Still, she cautioned that moving audiences off social platforms remains a challenge.

“It’s an uphill battle,” she said. “Getting people off-platform is still a difficult thing to accomplish.”

But the experiment reinforced an important lesson.

“When a story is important enough to a person, they will leave [social media] and sign up for a newsletter or read the whole article,” Lewis said. “It’s what we always say in the newsroom: it comes down to the story.”

Bridge’s long-term strategy is to grow audiences on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, then guide those audiences toward newsletters — where they can develop deeper relationships with the newsroom and become more likely to support Bridge as donors.

For Lewis, it all starts with meeting audiences where they already are. Social media helps Bridge reach younger and more diverse audiences, while video allows the newsroom to tell stories in a more visual, empathetic way. 

“We’re showing the human impact,” she said. “It all comes down to sharing stories and sharing them as widely as possible.”