How we built our membership program at Frontier Myanmar
CEO Sonny Swe says you should start by asking your readers an inconvenient question: What do you want from us?
Takeaways
Membership models aren’t about transactions; they’re about relationships. It’s important to keep talking to your audience and your members about how you’re doing and what they want.
There’s no “copy and paste” membership model that can be ported from one organization to another; neither is there an end-point. You have to be constantly iterating and testing, offering new packages or products, adjusting the model to fit the market.
Context
Frontier Myanmar is an English-language magazine covering a transitional Myanmar, ranging from current affairs to long-form investigative journalism and analyses. After four years of operations, Frontier Myanmar was looking for a different business model, and founder Sonny Swe decided to launch a membership program
It was no longer enough to rely on advertising as a business model, especially in an environment like Myanmar, which is still in the midst of a democratic transition.
If publications like Frontier can’t survive or maintain their independence, then readers will be deprived of a high-quality source of responsible and reliable journalism in a polarized market — a state of affairs that will have implications for Myanmar’s society and democracy as a whole.
Frontier’s journey to a membership model
Frontier was awarded a $100,000 Google News Initiative grant to roll out a membership program, with Splice as consultants
Frontier built on the fact that it had already amassed a core of loyal readers over four years of operations. Drawing upon these readers, they organized focus groups, of about five to 15 people, to find out what problems people needed solved, which then informed the products that Frontier chose to provide.
Based on five personas — diplomats, journalists, academics, NGOs, and businesses — that they had identified as their core target market, Frontier built products and packages that would meet their needs. Examples include daily email briefings on current affairs, or reporting on the upcoming elections.
Surveying audiences and collecting feedback busted assumptions that the Frontier team had about what people wanted from them: for instance, they had initially thought that people would be excited about conference calls or Slack channels, but these ideas were rejected in focus groups.
These proposed offerings were later replaced with other products, such as data and reports, that directly met the needs of Frontier’s readers.
The organization was profiled as a case study by the Membership Puzzle Project.
“Because of Covid, we are now an innovative newsroom. If not for Covid, it would have been difficult to change.” — Sonny Swe
Testing and iterating
There is no “one size fits all” membership model that can be easily transposed from one context to another: everything needs to be tailor-made to suit the needs of the organization and its audience. It’s incredibly important to test and be in constant conversation with the community about what they want and need — sometimes, something as small as changing the colour of the “subscribe” button could lead to different results.
This sort of work requires the buy-in of the entire team, so that everyone is working towards the same goal.
There are also more practical and technical challenges, such as the testing of payment platforms and gateways. For instance, Frontier Myanmar faced many teething problems with platforms like Pico and Stripe, due to the country’s underdeveloped banking and e-commerce infrastructure.
There will always be a need for adjustments for different segments. While expats or members of the diaspora might be able to pay, there are many in Myanmar who would find it difficult to afford a standard membership; something different will therefore have to be offered. Frontier is now considering different packages at a range of price points for students or government officers in Myanmar.