How to build circulation by hundreds and thousands of subscribers at a time
CASE HISTORY
The Chronicle of Higher Education is the newspaper of record for academe. The Chronicle of Philanthropy serves the same role for the nonprofit world.
Like most professional journals, both have been buffeted by the twin disruptions of audience development: An unfavorable economy and the decline of print. While a toxic combination for individual subscription sales, it’s an environment that has produced remarkable growth for the Chronicles in an often under-worked area of group subscription sales: site licenses.
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A subscription site license grants institutions — such as universities or charities — the right to circulate The Chronicle online over their own computer networks. It enables everyone in an organization to access, read, and use content without passwords or limits for a single annual fee.
When you think of a site license, think “bulk subscription sale” that can be priced in the thousands of dollars because the cost per user can be as little as a few cents a day.
As content has increasingly moved online, site licenses quietly and efficiently have grown into a reliable source of subscription sales for professional, technical, and business publications such as The Chronicles.
Quiet because the universe of potential buyers who have the authority and discretion to make large, organization-wide subscription purchases is small: Primarily librarians and department heads in higher education, and executive directors of nonprofits.
Efficient because these buyers can be sold in person at a handful of conferences like ALA and AFP. Or via direct mail to small lists of qualified professionals not reached at these events.
Even so, the growth in sales of Chronicle site licenses was not all organic and not the fortune of circumstance alone. It was the confluence of a creatively destructive trend and the early Blink recognition of the possibilities that The Chronicle’s Director of Audience Development, Associate Publisher Alvin Brockway, turned into a Tipping Point of subscription success.
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As this new century dawned, and the idea of traditional print subscriptions became less and less attractive to individual subscribers, the idea of a selling site licenses at higher and higher prices to entire organizations became more and more attractive to revenue-starved publishers.
This created pressure on audience developers to repeatedly promote site license sales among an ever-diminishing group of unsold prospects. In turn producing a thin, deeply-calloused marketplace of highly price-resistant potential customers. One conditioned by experience to expect online content to be virtually free.
So it doesn’t take a genius to see where this is headed today. Or to recognize the “safety net” of site license subscription sales is fraying fast. But back in 2000, few were as ingenious, bold, and decisive as Alvin Brockway in imagining a different future.
** Where every subscription could be made a site license.
** Where buying decisions are driven by the wide demand of end users made aware of the benefits.
** Where the cost of an organization-wide site license is made price competitive to the value of a single print subscription.
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It started with branding. Creating site licenses with named identities that define their role.
Chronicle Campuswide for higher education.
Chronicle Missionwide for philanthropy.
It meant positioning. Re-casting analog newspaper features as problem-solving online resources accessible to all readers from a ever-available cloud of benefits.
And now with dramatic pricing for small groups, it is marketing that reaches beyond the world of librarians and executive directors to promote “a Chronicle for everyone.”
Click on the thumbnails below to see the direct mail launch of this new strategy and creative initiative for The Chronicle of Philanthropy.
Just as Steve Jobs re-imagined the future of music marketing in ways that drew upon the old idea of 45 RPM records, Alvin Brockway is re-imagining the future of subscription sales to professionals in ways that transform the traditional idea of a site license.
It’s a future worth exploring.
Campuswide. Missionwide. Publishingwide.
