Getting started with news events
Serve your mission and deepen your relationship with your audience on the cheap
Besides the question of how to earn revenue producing events, the second most frequent question I’m asked, and arguably the more important one, is how do we decide what to do? “Events” are ubiquitous so in a world of infinite possibilities, how do we zero in on what will be most effective for generating the revenue we need?
✍🏼 Live journalism
The Texas Tribune’s mission is to report on the state legislature. When I joined the team in 2012, I didn’t know any state legislators and many in our audience didn’t either. That lack of name recognition of representatives making statewide decisions, who are arguably more pertinent in daily life than national policymakers, proved the case for the Tribune's existence and provided a natural event hook. We traveled around the state hosting conversations with legislators in their districts.
In the spirit of using Evan Smith’s excellent recent interview as a springboard for a deeper discussion:
“You have to have people who are comfortable on stage in front of an audience, asking hard questions of the powerful and influential.”
In the early days, more often than not, people came to see Evan. Having been a leading figure in Texas media for decades before co-founding the Tribune, people knew his name and that he was an excellent interviewer, so that helped bring people in the door. We also targeted political and civic types who likely did know their representatives but did not have many opportunities to hear them being interviewed on the record.
Conducting real-time journalism for your audience is low-hanging fruit if your newsroom has someone who can command attention and conduct an interesting interview. This type of event is mission-driven and serves to deepen your audience’s relationship to the stories and topics your newsroom is already covering; it’s live journalism and an extension of what the newsroom does daily. And not incidentally, speakers, elected officials in particular, aren’t paid for their appearance as you wouldn’t pay for a story source. Speaking fees are more complicated with other event types but starting here keeps costs down.
🌟 It’s all about the program 🌟
If you don’t have a compelling program, it won’t matter what else you do. We regularly averaged 200 people over boxed sandwich lunches to hear Evan grill elected representatives, and over the years, we went back to those communities every two or three years. When we added livestreaming in 2016, we increased our real-time audience by 50% or higher because someone from Amarillo but living in Houston could tune in to hear from a legislator they followed.
Over hundreds of events, I never heard feedback like “the speakers were awful yet I can’t wait to come back.” Whatever minor mishaps may have happened in the production, or how spend-thrift we were, a great discussion won the day every time. We organically built audiences because they knew it was going to be time well-spent. And for the record, “program” can be interpreted loosely. Even for events focused on networking rather than speaker presentations, attendees should leave feeling they gained significant value that exceeded their expectations.
Expenses 💸
“I actually think there's a strategy for putting on events at a relatively low cost. And I preach this all over the country.”—Evan Smith in Second Rough Draft
Here’s a sample budget for an event like those outlined above:
Venue rental $1,000
Boxed lunch $2,500
Printing $300
Staff travel $500
Livestream $1,000
Total $5,300
I can’t overemphasize the importance of trading to lower costs. We asked colleges and universities to be host sponsors, i.e., donate in-kind venue rental, which included A/V support, a planning contact to help us navigate needs like parking, catering and furniture, and on-campus promotion. For similar events we hosted in Austin at the historic Austin Club (before the Tribune had their own venue, Studio 919), we negotiated a very low venue rental rate based on utilizing a morning time slot that wasn’t typically sold; there was no travel and only light beverages, so those events typically came in under $1,000 each.
You don’t see a marketing line item because we spent a lot of time reaching out to organizations asking for help with promotion to political parties, civic organizations, local government, etc. We asked local media outlets to help us promote events in exchange for benefits like tabling at the event or distributing their publications, our assistance in setting up interviews with speakers or plugging into our feed so they could create their own content, and sometimes, their journalists were tapped for moderating conversations when it made sense. We traded site underwriting for hotel rooms, airfare vouchers, and sometimes even food, to defray event costs.
Check out the Tribune’s media kit for ideas on how to present opportunities. It helped that we were a nonprofit so donations could be acknowledged for tax purposes, and the events were free to attend. Keep your expenses low to make an event profitable even with smaller contributions.
Revenue 💰
As Evan notes, the Tribune’s chief revenue officer April Hinkle is one of the best sales people in the country. She’s particularly skilled at crafting custom sponsorships based on client needs and she knows how to integrate brands into the Texas Tribune’s ecosystem. I’ve worked with a lot of organizations that haven’t yet mastered this kind of sales. It’s not ad sales and the people who do ad sales seem to have a hard time with sponsorship. I won’t pretend that building a revenue program is easy, and everything I might impart on this topic is included in the Nonprofit News Guide to Earned Revenue.
Understanding client needs and matching them to an event series or single events based on topic or geography, forgoing exclusive sponsorships, and being willing to craft custom activations (i.e., how a business is incorporated into the experience) are not beyond any outlet. It takes time to build relationships and it helps to have a body of work to point to as samples of what their presence at an event might look like, but consider the budget above and recognize that small sponsorships can cover costs, and trading defrays cash outlay. And therein lies the major selling point: contributing businesses enable important conversations with lawmakers in their community.
Each event is a development opportunity to connect with major donors and philanthropic funders related to topics or geography. We often asked speakers if they would be willing to come to an event a few minutes early to shake hands with our VIPs before the program. They would frequently agree because politicians want to know money people too. Sponsors and major donors always had reserved seating and any other perks we could manage to make sure they felt our hospitality.
We also thanked members from the stage and asked for attendees to become members during the program and in email follow-ups. When we used (free) Eventbrite for registration, I added a donation option to the registration flow and you know what? People frequently donated to that very passive ask. If they had been to a Tribune event before, they knew we served lunch and people told me that they wanted to cover the cost of their food. Find ways to leverage each event against all of your organization’s revenue lines.
I hope this breaks down how we were able to accomplish low cost, mission-driven events, but please share your questions and comments.
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🤠 Resources Round-Up
Sample Host Sponsorship kit and the Tribune’s underwriting kit
Watch past Texas Tribune Events to see this playbook in action