Inside the 2025 AI Campaigns Cohort: Experimenting with AI to boost membership operations

When the News Revenue Hub partnered with the American Journalism Project (AJP) to launch the AI Campaigns Cohort earlier this year, the goal was clear: help newsrooms experiment with AI to save time on repetitive tasks, analyze data more efficiently, and unlock potential for more consistent, creative membership campaigns.

Funded through an OpenAI grant with additional support from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, AJP’s Product & AI Studio is testing practical applications of generative AI and other emerging technologies in local news. As part of that effort, the Hub is leading a cohort of four newsrooms — Cityside, El Paso Matters, Capital B, and San José Spotlight — to explore how AI can propel membership operations.

“Our most successful organizations are the ones that campaign the most consistently, keeping their membership and readers engaged throughout,” said Sophie Ho, the Hub’s director of product and insights. “The question we’re asking in this cohort is: how can we make experimentation more approachable?”

From onboarding to experimentation

In the first half of the year, the Hub focused on getting cohort members comfortable with AI tools, including enterprise access to ChatGPT and GlueLetter, an email analytics platform. GlueLetter’s AI features translate metrics into newsroom-friendly language and surface actionable insights, lowering the barrier to data-driven decision making.

By Q2 of 2025, cohort participants were applying AI to real campaign challenges:

• Cityside used ChatGPT to run a “reasons for giving” analysis, uncovering patterns in donor messages to inform strategy.
• El Paso Matters, Capital B, and San José Spotlight used AI for copywriting prompts, drafting appeal language, and identifying trending topics for segmented outreach.

The results were promising. Newsrooms reported faster analysis, quicker first drafts, and more bandwidth for small-scale experiments — like testing topic-based audience segments.

For Alyshea Johnson, development and events director at El Paso Matters, the benefits are tangible. “AI hasn’t replaced any of what we do, but it has become a sort of teammate to work with, get feedback from, brainstorm with, and analyze data and techniques,” she said. “It’s also a huge time saver when it comes to drafting or refining copy for appeals.” 

Crafting the right prompts — the specific instructions, questions, or statements given to an AI model to guide its outputs — is key, Johnson said. “My biggest takeaway is how much difference a well-crafted prompt makes in the quality of the response.”

El Paso Matters plans to continue using AI after the cohort ends. “It’s another tool in our toolbox to help us do our jobs,” she said.  “It has definitely complemented our work and helped make some processes easier.”

Changing the conversation about AI

While skepticism about AI exists within the news industry, Ho said the cohort participants have been eager to learn and experiment from the start. She encourages newsrooms to consider AI as a tool to build capacity, complement existing work, and facilitate better decisions.

For Jennifer Morrow, audience engagement specialist at San José Spotlight, joining the cohort was an entry point into using AI for fundraising and audience work. “We hadn’t done a lot of AI experimentation before — and definitely not related to our revenue goals,” she said.

Morrow said her team’s main goal was to find ways to save time as a small staff running fundraising campaigns — and the cohort has delivered on that. “Using ChatGPT has been helpful for giving us more time, generating ideas for campaigns, and still keeping everything in our voice,” she said. “It’s also been pretty seamless to integrate into our workflow, which surprised me.”

She also noted that the benefits go beyond writing. “We’ve experimented with segmentation and used GlueLetter to better understand what topics our audiences care about. Instead of pulling raw data and trying to interpret it manually, GlueLetter speeds up that process and gives us actionable lists for targeting emails.”

Like others in the cohort, Morrow sees AI as a long-term part of her workflow. “It’s helpful for getting started with copy or brainstorming bullet points when I’m short on time. I never use what it generates verbatim, but it’s a great jumping-off point,” she said. “We’ll also keep exploring data analysis, segmentation, and automation — those are high-impact areas for a small team like ours.”

She added that the program has shifted her attitude toward AI. “I think I’ve been less stubborn about using it,” she said with a laugh. “It’s helped me broaden my understanding about the technology and has made me more curious about tools that can help with data analysis or audience insights — not just text generation.”

Looking ahead

The cohort, which will wrap up at the end of 2025, meets quarterly as a group and regularly with Ho to share updates, swap ideas, and learn from each other’s experiments. 

In the months ahead, they’ll focus on accelerating the pace of tests, refining segmentation strategies, and continuing to explore how AI can work alongside people to strengthen membership campaigns. 

Maggie Cogar, a consultant with AJP’s Product & AI Studio, explained that the goal of the initiative is to help newsrooms learn how to weave AI into their daily operations. 

“The biggest shift so far is how newsrooms are beginning to see AI and data as powerful tools for shaping fundraising strategies,” she said. “Working with News Revenue Hub has allowed them to harness generative AI to create campaign messages and analyze data quickly, so they can transform insights into strategic action.”

Mary Walter-Brown, the Hub’s founder and CEO, said the cohort reflects the Hub’s larger philosophy about experimentation. “We’ve always encouraged newsrooms to test ideas, track what works, and iterate,” she said. “This program has shown that when you give newsrooms the tools, training, and freedom to explore, they’ll find smart, ethical ways to integrate AI into their work.”

AJP will compile the cohort’s findings to share with the wider industry, adding to the growing body of knowledge about AI in local news.

“I think it’s an exciting innovation that has a lot of useful applications in a lot of spaces including the development work I’m doing,” Johnson said. “This experience has reinforced that feeling.”