Membership at Qcity Metro gets a makeover

In January 2025, QCity Metro marked its 16th year of serving the Black community of Charlotte, N.C. What started as a startup by longtime reporter/editor Glenn Burkins has grown into its value proposition: telling stories that convey the richness of Black Charlotte and training the next generation of mostly young, female Black journalists.

Glenn and his team embraced the Newspack Reader Development Program (RDP), throwing themselves into a ~6-week sprint focused on reader revenue that ended in November 2024. The results were extraordinary and a testament to the team’s efforts.

As Bethany Lane, QCity’s revenue strategist, put it in her inimitably humble way: “It feels really good to step back and see how big a jump we made. We did put some effort in, and we got what we put in.”

So, how did they do it?

1  Overhauled CTAs, default amounts, and squeezed their purchase flow:

Under the mentorship of Blue Engine coach Ryan Tuck, Glenn, Bethany, and the team reviewed all of the Newspack tools they were underusing. They made sure that readers saw their donation asks “again and again until they were almost tired of it,” Lane said.

The team built a backlog of tactical ideas before zeroing in on the most promising ones. “And then a lot of times, we just did it in a few minutes,” Lane said, pointing out how “easy” Newspack is for people like Glenn who prefer to do the work themselves.

In particular, the team relaunched a new call-to-action (CTA) at the bottom of every article to include more personality and a “Guardian-style editor’s note” that featured Glenn’s picture and emphasized why donations are crucial to QCity Metro.

Additionally, they noticed that many of their donations were one-time, so they tweaked the bottom-of-article CTA to show one-time options only. Users can also now select their payment amounts in the CTA, reducing steps and overall “friction” in the purchase flow. And not for nothing, they increased the default pre-selected amounts.

Building on this strategy, the team also began dynamically triggering CTAs tailored to different reader segments, such as distinguishing between first-time visitors and repeat visitors.

Lastly, they tweaked the dedicated “donate” page and their general purchase flow to reduce friction overall. This included ensuring payment tiers were the first and only thing readers would see, especially on mobile. Everything else was put “below the scroll,” including team photos and more information on how donations help QCity.

“QCity really is a model now for teams looking to have super-squeezy purchase flows and persistent asks across their website,” Tuck said.

2  Got creative and used time-limited messaging:

Thanks to the Newspack program and a grant from Press Forward, the team sketched out a months-long series of email- and video-heavy messages to promote their 16th birthday, which culminated in a donor-only event on Jan. 23. These were far from your “typical” messages and videos. You have to see them to appreciate them.

Curious about how raccoons and pigeons helped them hilariously reach out to ex-donors? Check out this one:

Curious to see if Glenn can dance and whether Bethany can deliver her message with a straight face while he does? Check out this one:

They also recorded videos and sent emails from the perspective of other team members AND donors. Check out YouTube for all of them.

The bottom line is that they were not afraid to try different things. And to be persistent, most of all!

Also, something outside of the team’s veritable comfort zone, which worked resoundingly? Sending more emails than they ever have in the past – and “remails” (that is, sending additional messages to readers who opened the original email but didn’t give, among other follow-up segments).

One email, in particular, challenged readers in a direct and exceedingly honest way.

The team was initially nervous about sending the directness of the email, as it was a departure from their style. Bethany, feeling frustrated by the low donation rates among newsletter subscribers, found inspiration in an unlikely situation.

“I was looking at all these messages around the [California] wildfires and other things, thinking how a lot of people might look at requests for support and think, ‘Oh, I don’t need to do it. Someone else will,’” she explained. Motivated by this insight, she switched things up: “So I wanted to say, super clearly: ‘Other people are not doing it. You need to support us!’”

The Jan. 13 email brought in 22 new donors, including six recurring ones.

3  Got agile and made data-informed decisions:

Embracing agile experimentation, the team implemented over a dozen targeted enhancements and tests in just a few weeks. That continued through their party planning in January, which Bethany credits with driving their results.

With tools like Newspack’s Audience Management and Data Dashboard giving them more information, the team also learned to use metrics like Customer Lifetime Value to get a clearer view of their paid supporters’ long-term potential.

Going forward, the team will use other dates and time-limited opportunities to build fundraising campaigns. They are also planning how to email more persistently, leveraging the large influx of new one-time donors to encourage them to become recurring donors.

For now, though, they’re still celebrating these impressive results—and hopefully getting a little sleep.

Congratulations to Glenn, Bethany, and the growing QCity team, who demonstrated that any publisher can achieve significant gains with the right mix of methodical testing, quick adaptation, and creativity. And a huge thank you to Apryl Pilolli from The Knight x LMA BloomLab and Local Media Association.