Reader, Can You Spare a Dime? Or Maybe $25?

Email has become the go-to source for reader donations.

By Bill Mickey
Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Hard times are hard times, and when you’re flirting with rapidly declining to non-existent profits, revenue-generating tactics that previously never made it out of strategy meetings are getting a second look. While there’s not necessarily a “growing number” of magazine publishers that are resorting to soliciting readers for donations to punch out of the red, there are a couple that have had significant success at buffering hard-to-absorb costs, such as growing postal bills, and a widespread advertising drought.

At The Nation, a left-leaning political magazine, reader donations have been normal operation procedure for decades, so the team is particularly adept at it. Indeed, advertising makes up a relatively small proportion of revenues.

However, donations have taken on a particular immediacy of late—and other publishers are taking notice. “Most people laughed at us, they thought our model was not something to emulate,” says associate publisher, development Peggy Randall. “Now we’re getting calls all the time. There’s been more attention to it in the last year than in our whole history.”

In 2008, the magazine faced a $500,000 postal bill that it could not cover. It turned to readers and raised $375,000. This year, the magazine needed another $100,000 and raised that too.

The development team has always used traditional sources to market donation campaigns—direct mail, telemarketing, magazine inserts—but the email list has been the new star. “We’re suffering just like everyone else,” says Randall, “but every online campaign we’ve done this year has surpassed our goal. This didn’t exist two-and-a-half years ago.”

According to Randall, a 400,000-name email list made up of primarily non-subscribers has performed extremely well. “It’s a very different audience than our print subscribers,” she says. “The vast majority are reading our content online and they may not subscribe, but they give us money to defray our postal bill. It’s very interesting how they behave. We’ve been quite successful at monetizing them.”

Key tactics include segmenting subscribers and non-subscribers, as well as low, medium and high-engagement names. Promoting exclusive access as a reward for donations helps, too. A series of emails offering a conference call with two popular writers to discuss the state of print media did well, as did embedding a video appeal from editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel.