Marketing & Audience Engagement
A few months ago, I talked to my school's debate coach about the Southerner. He has worked at my school for over twenty years and said Southerner copies used to be coveted commodities among students. Several years ago, all the teachers knew that once the monthly copies were distributed, it wasn't worth even trying to get their students' attention for the rest of that day. All the students would be busy reading and discussing the paper.
Now, students still read our printed paper, but it's much less universal. This sounds like a regression, but it really just represents how we've adapted to the digital age. Instead of 2,000 people reading our printed papers, we have over 16,000 users reading our online articles every month.
Digital engagement
SNO analytics
Using SNO analytics, I track page views, story engagement and more. Over time, I have noticed some interesting trends.
1. Page views dip every Saturday to be about 200-400 lower than rest of the week.
WEEK RECAP
This is a week recap Instagram story from the New York Times.
SNO ANALYTICS
The purple circles represent Saturdays, when our website views are lowest.
In the future, I will try to make social media posts every Saturday that link to the stories we posted during that week. The New York Times posts Instagram stories every weekend with their stories from the week, so I would model this after them. This would drive traffic from our 1,400+ followers to visit the website on Saturdays.
2. Page views decline drastically over school breaks.
SNO ANALYTICS
Our page views decline during school breaks, when we aren't posting any stories. The circle on the left shows the decrease in readership during summer and then the gradual increase during the beginning of the year, when we still weren't posting because we didn't have any stories done. The circle on the right shows the dip during Thanksgiving Break, where readership was low for the week that we didn't post anything.
This can be explained by a few reasons, but the one we have most control over is posting during breaks. Especially during week-long breaks, we often have content available, but don't post anything. This lack of updates makes readers have no reason to visit our website. To drive engagement, I will start scheduling stories to automatically post during breaks. I will also manage a summer recap package for August of next year that covers school programs, trends and political events that happened during summer so those stories are available to increase readership when school starts in August.
Surveys
Integrating survey data into stories is a great way to interact with the audience. Survey respondents are more interested to read stories with their data because they will be curious to see how others responded and how the survey fits in the greater context of the story. Additionally, readers who didn't fill out the survey still find the story interesting because it has data from their community and feels more relevant to them.
On Election Day, we surveyed people at the polls to find out which issues were most impactful to their voting decisions. This not only gave us interesting information for the story, but we also got a graph of the data that we added to our night update as an additional multimedia aspect.
For my story about the cellphone ban, I included the responses to a Midtown teacher survey showing that cellphone use was their number one complaint about their jobs. This data provided context for the policy and made the story more engaging and personal to my school, rather than just being an argument against phones in school in general.
SURVEY RESULTS
We surveyed voters at different polling places and asked which issues impacted their voting decisions the most. It was used in the election night update story.
GSPA
We surveyed voters at different polling places and asked which issues impacted their voting decisions the most. It was used in the election night update story.
At GSPA, I directed students to view the Southerner's website, which contributed to increased web engagement.
GSPA
When I presented at the Georgia Scholastic Press Association on Thursday, Oct. 24, I used examples from my stories to teach other students about comment writing. By getting the Southerner's name out, I increased our website engagement. The following Saturday, our page views were about 50% higher than they normally are on Saturdays. That Sunday, our views spiked to their highest level for any day during the rest of 2024.
Print engagement
Topics that matter
Topic selection vital, as it ensures you're writing the stories your audience actually wants to hear. Last spring, a classmate approached me about a comment story I wrote arguing that voter turnout would likely be a decisive factor in the 2024 election presidential election and everyone needs to do their research and vote, even if they don't like either of the main candidates. The classmate said she read my story and, while she disagreed with my message, thought it was very well articulated. She was in AP Seminar and needed to choose a topic for a two-month long research project, and she told me she took inspiration from my story and chose to research voting abstinence for the sake of protest.
IMPACTFUL TOPIC
For this story, I researched voter turnout and explained concerning misconceptions about the importance of voting. This topic resonated with students and sparked debate about the ethics of not voting as an act of protest. By getting people to talk about the paper, the story helped drive audience engagement and encourage students to visit our website to view the whole story.
FAMILIAR FACES
With Humans of Midtown and Question of the Month, we are able to feature an additional seven students and teachers in our paper. These familiar faces make students feel more interested in reading the paper and looking to see thier friends.
Featuring our community
With Humans of Midtown and Question of the Month, we are able to feature an additional seven students and faculty. This makes them and their friends feel more personally connected to the paper, which helps drive engagement and encourage them to read our stories.
As a comment editor, I help build the page with Question of the Month and ensure that we adequately represent our student body.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
This a letter to the editor written by a leader of March for Our Lives after the Apalachee school shooting and subsequent March for Our Lives walkout. Letters to the editor allow students to highlight the issues that matter most to them.
Letters to the editor
Each month, we print one letter to the editor, an opinion article written by a community member who is not involved with the paper. Letters to the editor allow our readers to have their voices heard and see their own stories in the paper. This is one of the ways we directly engage with our audience and make them feel more connected to the paper.
This also ensures we cover topics that are important to readers, not just ones that seem interesting to us as journalists.
Captivating design
The last way to encourage people to read our printed papers is improving the design quality. If we have interesting-looking pages with unique visual elements, readers will be more enticed to open the paper and stay engaged.
Each cycle, I work on page design and construction to make the most dynamic pages possible, and as I move into more of a leadership role on staff, I aim to expand our creativity in design.
Distribution
We order several boxes of papers each cycle to distribute around our community and to our subscribers. Each month, I work with a team of students to sort and address a few hundred papers for the post office, then distribute the rest around the school. Students and teachers can read papers in class, at lunch, in the library and any other frequently used spaces on campus.
I am currently being trained by a senior on staff to take over paper distribution next year, so I'm learning how to organize papers into different boxes by zip code, take them to the post office and decide how many to distribute around our school and our feeder elementary and middle schools.
Marketing
The problem
The Southerner used to be funded by Midtown's communications magnet program, but when the program was ended in 2015, our funding got cut off. We now use newspaper sales as our primary source of funding, but have been struggling to sell enough, which limits our resources for upgrading technology, entering competitions and attending conventions.
We currently sell newspaper subscriptions through a program called SchoolCash online, which is intended for parents to pay field trip and club fees, not the general public to purchase products. The tool is very limiting and doesn't allow us to ask for our subscribers' addresses, which means subscribers who don't directly tell a staff member their information never receive papers. Additionally, some subscribers have complained that they have no way to purchase more than one subscription through this tool.
BOOSTER CLUB PROPOSAL
Our use of SchoolCash Online to sell newspapers created a negative user experience, prompting me to collaborate with two other students and create a booster club. With the booster club, we can use our own website to sell papers, allowing us to run promotional events and bring in more cash.
Southerner Booster Club
My adviser told me we weren't allowed by the school to use another payment platform because we didn't have a booster club, so I decided to start one. I worked with two other students to write a mission statement, come up with a name, research the legal process for starting a nonprofit, recruit a team of five parents, come up with fundraising ideas and communicate with our adviser and school administration.
We now have a pro-bono lawyer and an accountant and are in the process of getting legally registered so we can start using our website to collect donations and sell newspaper subscriptions and Southerner apparel. We are onboarding a larger team of students this spring and already have several interested applicants.
Once running, this booster club will allow us to use more advanced payment platforms that make subscribing an easier, more accessible process. It will also allow us to run fundraising events and donation drives. I am currently compiling a database with information from past subscribers and staff members so we can reach out to them for subscriptions and donations.
Selling more papers is not just a helpful source of income, it also expands the reach of our work to a larger audience and will hopefully encourage staff members to care more about print design. Through the booster club and affiliated advertising campaigns, I aim to increase our subscribers from 200 to 500 in the next year.
BOOSTER CLUB PROPOSAL
This is the agenda for the meeting where we proposed the booster club to our principal.
Promotional plans
We often struggle to sell papers because we have a flat rate of $42 for a year of papers through May, so if people purchase a subscription in January, they have to pay the full rate, but only receive the four second semester newspapers. With the booster club, we have more freedom to run promotions and change the price of our paper, so we are running a half-off sale for the last four papers of the year. This way, people who are interested in subscribing mid-year can pay $21, which is a more fair price. This will drive sales during what is usually a low point in the year and provide a more accessible way for people to subscribe to our publication without investing $42.
Other fundraising plans include partnering with local restaurants to host Southerner dine-out nights, where we host an event at the restaurant and get a portion of meal revenue, and donation drives, where we contact previous subscribers with a particular fundraising goal in mind and raise as much money as we can in a short period. Our debate team's booster club recently did a donation drive that raised thousands of dollars in just a few days.
We are currently creating our first-ever Southerner newsletter, which will be available on the booster club website and emailed to our list of current and former subscribers and donors. By sharing monthly newsletters, we will show donors the practical application of their donations. Newsletters will share highlights from trips and conventions, new technology purchased, awards won, interesting reporting stories and behind the scenes content from creating each print issue.