How Montana Free Press found revenue growth hiding in plain sight

CASE STUDY:

How Montana Free Press Found Revenue Growth Hiding in Plain Sight

A case study in activating existing donors through better segmentation, ongoing engagement, smart messaging, and organizational alignment.

About the American Journalism Project The American Journalism Project is the first venture philanthropy organization dedicated to local news.

We make catalytic investments in nonprofit news organizations and partner with communities to launch new outlets. Since 2019, we’ve invested in dozens of local news outlets, providing them with capital, strategic guidance, and operational expertise to grow their reach and impact. By strengthening and scaling a sustainable field of local news organizations, we are working to ensure that people have access to the trusted, independent, local journalism they need to participate in civic life.

About BlueLena Founded in 2020, BlueLena empowers independent publishers to build sustainable reader revenue by delivering the technology, strategy, and shared services they need to own their audience relationships and grow their impact. We offer world-class infrastructure and best-in-class audience development and fundraising solutions to over 300 mission-driven news organizations across North America.

About this case study The American Journalism Project partners with mission-aligned organizations to strengthen nonprofit news across the country. BlueLena, an audience development consultancy, is one of AJP’s specialized support partners, providing portfolio organizations with the infrastructure, tools and strategic guidance they need to build sustainable reader revenue programs.

This case study shares concrete, replicable strategies that helped Montana Free Press, a member of the American Journalism Project portfolio, achieve significant growth in reader revenue. Montana Free Press increased reader revenue by 22% in 2024, not through expensive new campaigns or additional staff, but by taking a closer look at the supporters they already had and investing in smarter segmentation, organizational alignment, and donor engagement.

The case study focuses on four insights: building cross-team collaboration between editorial and development staff, designing tailored reader journeys with smart automations, crafting confident and urgent messaging for each donor segment, and treating donor engagement as an ongoing relationship rather than a one-time transaction. Together, these strategies demonstrate how newsrooms can unlock revenue growth with their existing supporters.

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Table of contents Lessons from the field

4

Insights

5

5 questions to strengthen your reader revenue strategy

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Lessons from the field Some of your strongest prospects for increased giving aren’t strangers — they’re the supporters already investing in your journalism. Montana Free Press (MTFP) proved this in 2024, finding $208,000 in new revenue by taking a closer look at donors who were already giving and asking them, strategically, to give more. That focus on existing donors drove a 22% increase in reader revenue to more than $757,000.

Here’s how they did it.

By prioritizing team collaboration, data-driven segmentation, and mid-level donors, Montana Free Press unlocked growth that many new organizations overlook. They reexamined their donor base and asked: who among our supporters is ready to give more? The answer came from a group that had long

been overlooked: mid-tier donors, who fall between new supporters and major gift givers.

For years, Montana Free Press concentrated on acquiring new donors and cultivating the small set who could give $1,000 or more. Both efforts mattered, but they overlooked an important segment: loyal donors giving at mid levels (gifts between $101 and $1,000). MTFP worked with BlueLena, an American Journalism Project partner and audience development consultancy, to identify this opportunity. BlueLena’s propensity modeling — which analyzes factors like engagement and giving capacity — revealed that this group had capacity to give more, prompting Montana Free Press to test a new approach.

The team segmented its 3,300 existing donors and made targeted appeals.

The results were striking: Total mid-tier donors increased

52% in 2024

Gifts between $101 and $1,000 grew by

$208,000 65% jump over 2023, representing 70% of total reader revenue.

Donations between $400 and $1,000 climbed

78%, representing just 5% of donors but nearly 20% of revenue.

That revenue growth translated directly into expanded reporting capacity. MTFP published nearly 1,000 stories statewide in 2024 and hired a data journalist.

By aligning development and editorial teams ahead of adopting new technology, designing campaigns around observable behavior, and treating loyalty as an ongoing relationship rather than a one-time conversion, MTFP built a sustainable engine for growth.

MTFP’s experience shows that investing in clarity, curiosity, and systems that match the mission can yield outsize results.

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INSIGHTS

Key takeaways for employees at news organizations For leaders and others in strategy roles:

For development and fundraising teams:

Define reader revenue success in terms of dollars raised alongside expanded journalism. This ensures investment from both business and editorial teams while keeping the mission and impact central to sustainability.

Segment users by past giving and revisit segments regularly to identify donors who may be ready to increase their giving.

Then ask directly — and boldly — for upgrades, especially from mid-level donors ($100 to $1,000).

Make experimentation a cross-team practice through monthly meetings with business and editorial teams that are focused as much on sharing goals as on sharing ideas for campaigns driven by editorial coverage.

Treat each contribution as the beginning of an engagement loop, and work with the whole team, including editorial, to surface opportunity paths as team members engage with donors and learn more about their motivations for giving.

Make a priority of spotting untapped opportunities for reader revenue and to empower teams to explore them. Often, those opportunities come through existing donors, identified with smarter goals.

Use automations for timely thank-yous, follow-ups, and alerts that support donor stewardship.

For editorial teams: Join all-staff meetings where business and audience insights are shared so you can understand them and brainstorm campaign strategies from your coverage. Take time to learn the link between audience engagement and membership revenue.

Listen for donor feedback that can help your development team improve campaigns. You can help them identify compelling coverage areas that can become opportunities to inspire donors to continue and increase their giving.

Contribute to donor stewardship by thanking supporters, sharing impact directly, and reinforcing why their gifts matter. This could take the form of emails, phone calls, or even handwritten thank-you notes.

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Insight 1: Build a shared focus on audience and reader revenue across development and editorial teams John Adams, Montana Free Press founder and executive director, is quick to point out that this success did not begin with technology. It began with culture.

“We started by asking, ‘What does our audience actually need from us?’ And then, ‘What do we need to do internally to deliver on that promise?’”

— John Adams, Montana Free Press founder Adams considers himself the “narrator,” constantly connecting departments across the organization.

For Montana Free Press, that meant breaking down walls that often separate editorial and development teams. Monthly all-staff meetings became standard, where business updates and audience insights have been shared openly. Reporters have come to understand why development team members asked them to write fundraising appeals tied to their work, while development staff members celebrated the journalism that inspired donors to give.

“It’s important everyone understands where the organization stands and the role they play in sustainability,” Adams said.

For development, it also means locking into the

work editorial produces. Adams and Audience Director Nate Schoenfelder lead a separate meeting focused on results. Objectives and key results tied to audience engagement are reviewed alongside membership revenue, creating a link between what the newsroom publishes and how readers respond with support. Montana Free Press’s Development Director Kristin Cordingley highlighted that this practice ensures that “everything lives in one space” — donations, newsletter data, engagement signals — so campaigns can be built on a complete picture of audience behavior.

MTFP’s internal teams meet monthly for business and audience updates. While newsrooms are often shielded, or excluded, from these discussions, Adams says it’s important everyone understands where the organization stands and the role they play in sustainability. In turn, this supports the teamwork needed to build successful campaigns around MTFP’s award-winning journalism.

This culture of transparency and collaboration built trust across the organization. It also created fertile ground for experimentation. Rather than seeing segmentation as a technical process tucked away in the development department, staff began to treat it as a newsroom-wide language for understanding readers.

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Turning gifts into growth Montana Free Press grew reader revenue by 25% in 2024 by engaging existing donors and asking them to deepen their commitment. Donors responded with more donations. Here’s how they moved donors from the funnel into an engagement loop that fueled their growth.

Ask again

Create together

MTFP asks donors to deepen their commitment, encouraging one-time donors to make recurring gifts and recurring donors to give more.

Audience and development staff align on creative ideas, ensuring editorial integrity and fundraising goals move in sync.

MONTANA FREE PRESS’S DONOR CYCLE

Welcome & relate

Listen & reflect

Use automations to acknowledge donations and introduce donors to the organization. Segment donors for targeted newsletters.

MTFP holds monthly all-staff meetings updating reader revenue strategy. Editors and reporters call donors to gather feedback and thank them for support.

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Insight 2: Design reader journeys tailored for the segment, with smart automations and workflows Montana Free Press’s technology journey mirrored its cultural one. The team had long used Salesforce and Mailchimp to manage donor records and email campaigns, but those systems proved too heavy and inflexible for the kind of nimble experimentation they wanted to pursue.

The exact thresholds mattered less than the practice itself — defining clear groups, aligning messaging to each, and revisiting segments often.

This repeatable framework turned generic campaigns into intentional journeys that led to clear outcomes.

The migration to a new platform provided a new set of workflows. They sought a unified customer relationship management system, email platform, and automation engine tailored to the needs of publishers, and BlueLena’s implementation of ActiveCampaign focused on that.

In August, for example, MTFP Local Reporter Katie Fairbanks wrote a campaign targeted to users in Missoula, where she works. She wrote, in part:

With this new infrastructure, the team could run short, precise campaigns without fear of over-contacting supporters. Propensity modeling helped identify donors not only by likelihood to give, but also by financial capacity. Automations saved staff time by sending alerts when someone gave above a certain threshold or by triggering reminders to follow up with major donors.

The platform allowed MTFP to build email journeys triggered by real behavior: newsletter sign-ups, site visits, and giving history. With help from the BlueLena team’s tagging and automation guidance, they could test and scale campaigns without overwhelming the team.

This helped position segmentation less as a technical function and more as a shared language — and goal — across the organization and its different functions. Staff members began brainstorming reader journeys together, linking editorial products, fundraising flows, and outreach strategies with a unifying goal: make every message feel like it was meant for that person.

“I was lucky enough to have been freelancing for MTFP for several months before getting hired, allowing me to hit the ground running to report on city and county budgets and the impacts of the July 2024 windstorm. Reporting on Missoula full time has allowed me to dedicate more time to cover local government and major local issues such as housing, homelessness, and mental health.”

The August campaign, targeted to about 8% of MTFP’s email list, raised $3,000 in support of the organization’s local initiative.

Another example of the platform opening a new channel: direct mail. In Montana, many supporters still prefer to give by check. The BlueLena team helped MTFP segment high-value users and send out mailers to optimize the campaign’s return on investment. A holiday campaign that cost $2,500 yielded nearly $10,000 in return.

As Cordingley put it: “We finally had a system that matched our size, speed, and ambition.”

It can be tempting to consider segmenting by demographics or interests. MTFP found donor behavior a more practical, and possibly even stronger, predictor of readiness to give more. From that insight, they focused on three groups: • • •

Loyal donors ready for upgrades Engaged readers invited into recurring support Higher-level supporters receiving personal stewardship

Donors were grouped on the platform by past giving, loyalty signals, and capacity cues. Each segment received tailored email campaigns: upgrades for longtime mid-level givers, personalized outreach for higher-level supporters, and recurring asks for highly engaged readers.

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Insight 3: Develop confident, edgy campaign messages that speak urgently to each segment Segmentation empowered the team to sharpen its appeals.

Messages became more confident, more direct, and more personal.

Instead of treating every supporter the same, the team wrote campaigns that acknowledged past giving, gave clear examples of how reader contributions supported the newsroom, and invited donors to increase their giving.

“We got head-on with our appeals,” Cordingley said.

“More confident. More direct. And we saw immediate results.”

This new approach shifted the tone of fundraising away from broad, generic appeals and toward messages that talked to supporters with urgency. One appeal, sent only to donors, read:

— Kristin Cordingley, Montana Free Press’s Development Director

Montanans, periodically subjected to parachute journalism from one coast or the other, well know that you have to take the trouble to get to know a place before you can responsibly report on it. The only way to get more reporting from more of Montana with the staff MTFP has, I decided, was to send our reporters out of their comfort zones and into new-to-them corners of the state.

Your support is what makes collaborative projects like this possible. Thank you. If you’d like to make an additional year-end gift today, your tax-deductible donation will be doubled thanks to a match from generous local donors.

In another, the team encouraged one-timer donors to start recurring plans. The appeal read, in part: With our spring membership campaign kicking off today, we want to take a moment to thank you for helping our newsroom thrive. In a news cycle that can feel fast and furious, we’re proud to be your refuge for rationality and we appreciate that you help us foster meaningful understanding and connection among all readers.

It is our privilege to do this important work every day, and your support helps make it all possible. If you’d like to make an additional contribution today on top of your existing membership, we’d be so grateful.

These targeted emails, the first to all donors and the second to one-time donors, were opened 30% more often than general sends and clicked twice as often.

Seventeen readers started recurring donations following the campaign, totaling $750 in monthly recurring revenue.

“Segmented, intentional messaging works,” Cordingley said.

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Insight 4: Treat donor engagement as a relationship, rather than a funnel, with opportunities for ongoing feedback to improve development strategy One of the most important mindset shifts at Montana Free Press was redefining what donor engagement meant. Rather than treating giving as the endpoint of a funnel, the team began to see it as part of a loop. They aren’t just executing campaigns, they are building a relationship engine.

Sometimes the most meaningful moment for a donor, Cordingley explained, wasn’t the ask but the handwritten thank-you note that followed. Or the phone call from a reporter. Or the story shared in the team’s Slack about why a donor decided to give.

These touchpoints and insights turned giving into an ongoing relationship rather than a transaction.

That feedback loop shaped future campaigns.

Donor stories informed segmentation rules.

Campaign results sparked new experiments. And experiments generated more insights to be shared across the team.

“We have an active Slack culture,” Adams said. “People share feedback constantly — a donor story, a campaign result, something another newsroom tried. It’s made segmentation a living part of our operation.”

That shared strategy also means MTFP’s data rules aren’t set in stone. They’re flexible, evolving tools based on what the newsroom is learning about its audience and about itself.

Now, MTFP is testing more refined paths: messaging that’s specific to content verticals like education or climate and loyalty flows that connect deeper reading behavior to giving likelihood. The focus on loyalty and existing donors continues to deliver.

While MTFP maintains a deliberate balance between its editorial and fundraising teams, Cordingley said donor connection doesn’t have to compromise independence. One standout initiative has been pairing recurring donors with reporters for personalized thank-you calls or handwritten notes.

“It’s been a culture win and a revenue win,” she said — evidence that smart relationship-building drives both loyalty and giving.

Having proved the value of mid-level donors, MTFP is now turning its attention to retention. The team is building new systems with BlueLena to track churn and test reengagement flows. They are experimenting with on-site personalization and impact storytelling to remind donors why their support matters.

As Cordingley put it: “We’re just scratching the surface of what our system can do. But we have the cultural foundation. That’s what makes everything else possible.”

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YOUR TURN:

5 questions to ignite revenue collaboration in your newsroom Ready to level up your reader revenue journeys?

Bring these five questions to your business and editorial teams to facilitate a conversation about how you can apply the lessons from Montana Free Press to your newsroom.

1

How often do our news and audience teams sit down together to connect the dots between great journalism and the dollars that sustain it?

2

Which of our loyal supporters might be ready to step up their giving, and how are we inviting them to do so?

3

Do our appeals speak directly to supporters in a bold, personal way, or do they still sound one-size-fits-all?

4

Are our tools helping us test, segment, and automate smarter, or are they getting in the way of creativity and speed?

5

Beyond asking for gifts, how are we showing gratitude and building lasting relationships with the people who make our work possible? How are we learning from them to strengthen our campaigns?