GNI Digital Growth Program Provides Handy Goal Setting Exercises for Membership and Audience Growth
Last week, the Google News Initiative (GNI) officially launched the GNI Digital Growth Program to help small and medium-sized news organizations develop sustainable businesses online. It’s an extensive collection of free resources and workshops developed in partnership with industry experts – including the News Revenue Hub – and we’re proud to have contributed. While the whole program is worth digging into, we’re excited to share some highlights with you here.
If you’re reading this, it should come as no surprise that membership is a key part of the new GNI Reader Revenue Playbook, one of the initial offerings of the Digital Growth Program. After working with the GNI on several projects, including a GNI Contributions Lab currently underway with Canadian news outlets, News Revenue Hub was eager to collaborate on a guide that goes further than simply compiling best practices (though it does that too). In the playbook you’ll find helpful exercises on long-term planning and opportunity sizing – tools that can help you establish goals that are sometimes difficult to pinpoint on your own.
At the Hub, we’ve been fortunate to partner with the GNI on several initiatives that are producing important learnings for the digital news industry.
You might remember hearing updates about our recently-completed GNI Audience Lab, which helped us hone our methodology for growing loyal audiences using GNI’s News Consumer Insights framework. (If not, you can learn more here and here.) We’ve also been excited to participate in two international GNI Labs: one in Latin America, advising on technology best practices for membership programs, and an ongoing GNI Contributions Lab in Canada, where we’re helping news outlets in Ontario and British Columbia develop membership programs from the ground up.
If you have any questions about how to apply GNI’s Reader Revenue Playbook or execute some of the exercises, please reach out to us. Or you can sign up for the upcoming GNI Reader Revenue workshop where the Hub will be a co-presenter.