Marketing & Audience Engagement
Last year, my school's debate coach told me something that changed my outlook on student engagement with the paper. 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. We have over 20,000 users reading our online articles every month, so our overall readership has drastically increased. However, I've made it my mission to improve student engagement and interest with the physical paper, by improving the subscription process and creating a paper that is relevant and interesting to students.
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.
I came up with the idea for our social media team to post weekly wrap ups on Saturdays, directing people to read 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 drives traffic from our 1,600+ 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've led my staff to schedule stories to automatically post during breaks. This year, engagement has been significantly more consistent.
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 is 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.
Distribution
We order several boxes of papers each cycle to distribute around our community and to our subscribers. Each month, I label all 480 papers, organize them into crates by zip code, and take them to the post office. This year, we've increased our sales enough to have an entire crate of 30306 papers, significantly reducing our mailing cost. Then, we distribute the rest of the papers around the school. Students and teachers can read papers in class, at lunch, in the library and any other frequently used spaces on campus.
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 for years, we struggled to sell enough, which limited our resources for upgrading technology, entering competitions and attending conventions.
We previously sold 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 didn't allow us to ask for our subscribers' addresses, which means subscribers needed to tell a staff member to add them to our database, or they wouldn't receive the papers they paid for. 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 an established booster club with parent and student boards, and we've been able to recreate our subscription and donation processes with express checkout using Apple Pay. Also, our tool automatically collects shipping addresses, removing the issues from last year. We've raised $23,000 for the program this year.
Selling more papers is not just a helpful source of income, it also expands the reach of our work to a larger audience. Through the booster club and affiliated advertising campaigns, I've been able to increase subscriptions from 200 to 450.
BOOSTER CLUB WEBSITE
On the booster club's website, customers can purchase newspaper subscriptions, literary magazine copies, senior quotes and more, all in one place with an expedited checkout process.