There are many real issues and perceived issues concerning the state of media.  This is not that thought piece.

This is the one proclaiming that this is the perfect time for your organization to become its own media organization; for several reasons.

The costs of operating a media organization have never been lower. You could run it entirely online with owned assets and little-to-no marginal costs.  Audiovisual equipment can be as cheap as the phone in your pocket (although you will likely want to step it up a bit).  No one need buy ink by the barrel, at least to start.

You already have the raw materials.  You have stories.  Stories of heartache and hope, terror and triumph.

Your issues aren’t going to be covered any other way right now. The current foreign policy debate is over whether we should pre-emptively strike a country with nuclear weapons.  The current domestic policy debate is whether we should have a domestic policy.  And mass media is, well “mass” – looking for the largest number of clicks and eyeballs.  It’s nigh impossible to get sustained attention for ongoing clean-up in Puerto Rico or SNAP eligibility criteria or Veterans Administration mental health resources in the media tools of yore.

 But the people who want to hear from you want your news.  For the people you help and for the people who make your mission possible, those issues are vital.  They want to hear about them from someone.  Ideally it would be someone they trust.  You know… someone like you.  And if you aren’t going to fill that void, something else will – another issue, another organization, another way to spend time and treasure.

There’s value in being the media organization for your supporters.  At the top of the conversion funnel, we are running out of people who give who want to give to new issues and organizations (at least running out of them versus the number of entreaties they get to take on new organizations).  So, if you can’t get people who give to care about you, you must get people who care about you to give.  It’s a heavy burden to create the next generation of charitable donors.  But someone must do it.  Attracting people who have an interest in your issues sets the first condition for conversion.

At the middle of the funnel, someone who gets their news on an issue from you will trust you more than any other.  People who trust you are more likely to donate.  And, if they are donating to one of your news stories, you also know the types of content and interactions they are more likely to react to in the future.

And, once someone has donated, there’s still value in providing media to them.  Look at the case study of the NRA.  Not the politics of the NRA – the construction of identity.  I covered this a bit back in October.  The short version is that a study analyzed almost 80 years of American Rifleman magazine and found:

“[t]he NRA has cultivated an image of gun owners as having a particular set of positive characteristics: They are reputable, law-abiding, honest, patriotic citizens who are self-sufficient and love freedom. And gun owners are presented as different from several distinct out-groups, especially politicians, the media and lawyers.”

And

“Over this period, nearly three-quarters of NRA editorials framed gun regulation as attacking gun owners’ identities. Rather than using technical, evidence-based appeals to argue that gun control won’t reduce crime, the NRA argues that gun control disarms law-abiding citizens so that they’re unable to defend themselves and their country.”

And this was before I’d ever heard of NRA TV.  This is an organization that has found its tribe and shaped what they think about the NRA and about themselves.

There are three main objections to this out-of-the-box way of thinking at most nonprofits: 1) it’s not our business; 2) it’s too hard; and 3) it’s too expensive.  To the first, I recall Theodore Levitt’s Marketing Myopia, which argued that train companies failed because they thought they were in the train business when, in reality, they were in the transportation business.

We are in the business of creating the desire for action, then converting that desire into action itself.  That we can do that by building what would have been a media organization is irrelevant.

“Hard” and “expensive” are the real barriers.  They are significant.  But the prime challenge from the organizations I’ve seen isn’t creating stories.  Rather, it’s getting stories from where they are in the field to where good can be done from this.  You can try to do this two ways – either, neither or both:

Decentralized – empowering everyone who has the stories with the tools to tell them.  Whether it’s through access to your blogging platform or individual social media, this involves training your staff and volunteers how to put their own stories into the world.  This can be unpolished, but unpolished also means genuine.  It also gets the most content out there.

The perils are staff and volunteers can say things that are wrong, against your policies, or illegal (I once had a field employee do all three in one tweet, a 140-character record that stood until June 16, 2015).  You may also have some staff members that speak in their own language (e.g., if you have medical advisor or legal statements, you may want to have lay people take a look.  This may just be because I just waded through an article called “Using an epigenetic mechanism, romidepsin restored gene expression and alleviated social deficits in animal models of autism.”

Centralized – asking your folks to share their stories with the marketing/communications folks.  You will get fewer stories, but you can polish those you have and focus your energies more strategically on your priorities.

I’d say “both” to the extent you are comfortable with it is the way to go.  Remember, have a purpose for each piece of content.  It doesn’t have to be to get a donation every time, but at least try to capture a person’s interest – and information – for future correspondence.

We’ll have more on this in the coming months, but if you’d like to learn more, I heartily recommend the Content Marketing Institute and every book by Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose, two experts of the form.

Nick