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Marketing and Audience Engagement
Photo by Tejasvi Ramanathan
Selling ads always pushes me outside of my comfort zone. But, because our newspaper is fully self-funded, this is really important for us. Whenever I need to call a business to ask for money, I force myself to just hit the green button and start talking because I don’t want to overthink it. I let myself be uncomfortable because I know that it benefits the team. I also work on prioritizing other initiatives to raise money and allow us to keep producing our work.
Marketing/Fundraising
Ad Sales
Our newspaper is fully self-funded, meaning that we need to raise money in order to print the paper and continue paying for memberships, website fees and so on. Although we do sometimes do fundraising in other ways including having staff reach out to family and friends, a very large chunk of our funding has historically come from ad sales.
We always have a spreadsheet with a list of local businesses and their contacts, as well as information on who is reaching out. This ensures that we don't call people multiple times at once.
This is the spreadsheet that I made this year for us to track which businesses have been reached out to.
I also updated our email script this year to feel more personal, as often, I've found that our staff will just copy and paste directly without adding any personal flair, which doesn't encourage businesses to purchase a space. I of course couldn't add any individual specificity that I try to add in my own emails, but I did make it feel more genuine.
The updated email script I wrote.
This year, in December, we had an ad-selling day after school as we found it was hard to prioritize during the school days alone.
I also make sure that we are reaching out to say thank you to people who buy ads from us, as a lot of times, the people who buy an ad from us once are the people we keep reaching out to every year. This is a thank you note I wrote to Comet Coffee who bought an ad for our third issue this year.
Business Manager
We have found that it is getting increasingly difficult to sell ads to fund our newspaper. This summer, after talking at various camps to other student journalists from around the country, I heard that many of them had a business manager, and I thought it would be a great idea to have a student who solely focuses on that for us. I reached out to the Business Professionals of America at our school to see if any of them would be interested, but nobody was able to commit fully, and I let it slide for a bit.
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In the winter, though, before our third issue, I decided to ask around again, and I got a senior to join as a business manager. Now, she comes into the newsroom for an hour a few times a month and calls as many businesses as she can, which is really helpful. At the end of the day, the selling ads ultimately just takes a lot of time, and having someone dedicated to working on that lets me focus on other endeavors.
Christmas Tree Decorating
Every December since my sophomore year, Tyner Furniture in Ann Arbor has hosted a Christmas Tree Decorating fundraiser with various schools in the area. They provide us with $200 for any decorations we want, and we set a tree up in their store. Voting is open for about a month, and winning schools receive cash prizes. Sophomore year, I coordinated our involvement in the event and we won first place, receiving $750 for the newspaper. Last year, we participated as well, and we received a $200 honorable mention. This year, the event was much earlier, and I was in Nashville for the NHSJC convention, so I mentored some of our editors who were staying at home to get it set.
A story a Web EIC wrote my sophomore year about the fundraiser.
A group working on decorations my sophomore year.
The decorating group posing with the tree my junior year.
Ishaan Kamat and me working on decorations. This was a Polaroid picture that we put on the tree as well.
An email I sent to start planning what to put on the tree junior year.
A few messages I sent this year to get things set up for the tree decorating.
This year's tree!
Fundraiser collab with The Communicator
Normally, in addition to having staff members call for ads, every once in a while, we will sometimes also have them reach out to family and friends to support The Emery, which does often help us with a little boost, but isn't really one formal fundraiser. I wanted to change that this year.
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In 2024, when University of Michigan won the National Championships, I became more into college football and everything that came with it – including coverage from The Michigan Daily, the school's student-run newspaper. That was when I discovered "The Rivalry Edition" that they do in collaboration with Ohio State's newspaper, The Lantern every year leading up to "The Game" between the two universities.
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​Since then, the idea to make my own version with another local high school newspaper has been a goal. This year, I reached out to them about it, we met a few times to make a plan, and we were able to execute it​
Between the two publications, we published six stories over three weeks, all around the central idea of Press Freedom.
The website can be found here.
After talking with our own editorial board, I sent this email to the editorial board of The Communicator.
Click on the image to view our website coverage. I based the website off of the themes of both of our own news websites. The social media EICs created the logo that we used.
I also created a banner for the top of each of our own publications' websites that was hyperlinked to the fundraiser website to get the most foot traffic.
I designed each banner to match the themes of our websites. We kept these up for the duration of December, when the fundraiser was running.
I wrote a script for our own staff members to send out to their family members and friends to also help promote this. This was an assignment that we did in class.
Finally, the social media EICs also coordinated posts to promote this. In total, we raised $1300 for The Emery alone.
Recruitment
Our schools is very big on club recruitment through club fairs, middle school transition day and curriculum nights. This means we have lots of opportunities to set up booths to inform people that they have the option to take the newspaper class. I always make sure we have a table at these events.
This is one example of when I signed us up to promote newspaper and yearbook for the incoming freshman class.
One of my favorite parts is always getting creative with the trifold boards. Pictured on the right are trifolds I helped make for both newspaper and yearbook. We'd been using the same trifolds for a few years, so last year, I decided to revamp them with newer pictures and updated information.
Merch!
We try to sell merch within our publication yearly that we use as another form of fundraising. I've designed this with my co-EIC Ella Yip twice now.
This was the combined publications t-shirt that Ella and I made this year.
This was last year's form. We had both hoodies and t-shirts with the same design.
I also organize a spreadsheet each year where we keep track of orders, money and pick-ups of merch.
This is a portion of one of the spreadsheets.
Audience Engagement
Takeovers
A tradition The Emery started on Instagram before I joined was to do "takeovers" on Instagram stories during trips and conventions. I joined in as well, and since my sophomore year, I've taken over three times. I make sure to make them interactive, as well, including doing polls and question boxes in order to up our engagement. It's a fun way for us to document our trip and show people what we are doing at The Emery, and it helps to boost our social media as well.
These are a few examples of stories I posted for takeovers in Boston, New York (twice!) and Nashville. We typically do takeovers in a vlog-style throughout the day where we'll post updates every hour or so.
Instagram Reels
Something our Social Media EICs are trying to do more with Instagram Reels is to give people a behind the scenes look into how The Emery operates. I've helped out with and created a couple of these.
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I'll admit, these took me a little bit to get on board – I am definitely someone who appreciates using social media as a reporting tool. However, I definitely do see the benefits of following the trends and giving the audience view into The Emery – it makes the experience of consuming our other content more personal.
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Click on the images to watch the Reels.
Advertising the Issue
As a print editor-in-chief, one of my main goals is constantly to find ways to get more people to read our newspaper. Our print paper is available for free to the whole school, and even though we try to distribute out to the whole population, it is inevitable that we miss some people. Most of our advertising for people to come pick up a copy of the paper in our newsstands is done through social media, specifically Instagram stories and reels.
I started making a series of stories that I posted on our Instagram the day we distributed with highlights of the issue. Tap on the image to see the whole set that I posted for issue 1.
This was a fun trend I filmed with web EIC Ishaan Kamat and social media EIC Salem Dinh to promote our first issue.
We also do unboxing videos sometimes to get people excited to see the print editions.
Distributing
One of the best ways to increase our readership is by being thorough with distribution. I personally make it my mission to hand a copy of our paper to as many people as possible. ​
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During my lunch, I will go down to the cafeteria and go from table to table, making sure I offer each student a copy of the newspaper. I probably go up and down the stairs to pick more papers up at least four or five times each distribution day.
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I find offering every person a copy of the newspaper is really important to me. There are always people who accept newspapers in the places you'd not suspect – and I don't want anyone to feel like they don't have the ability to get a copy.