ACP Business Pacemaker Application AUGUST 17, 2020 SECTION 1: FIVE FACTORS FOR SUCCESS STRATEGIC FOCUS Leadership, management planning and innovation Describe in detail how your organization followed its mission statement in developing your strategic plans for the year. Our mission is to train students fully and deeply on all aspects of running a news organization and to serve the UNC community with news and information that they need. To achieve this mission, we as an organization have established four overarching goals that serve as the basis of DTH Media Co.’s strategic plans for the year, which include: becoming an indispensable, trusted guide to UNC and life for students; growing consumer and institutional revenue, diversifying and strengthening our business-to-business revenue; and shifting to audience-centric practices across the organization. Our strategic plans for the year fell under the overall progression toward these goals, and in turn, our mission. Some of those strategic plans included: increasing return visits and pages per visit by the 18 to 24 year-old demographic; increasing overall fundraising revenue, applying for grants and hiring a fundraising and donor engagement specialist to assist with these efforts; moving into a consultative selling model within our 1893 Brand Studio and advertising departments; and developing diverse news products beyond solely print news. These plans were created to ensure the progression of a sustainable news organization that can both serve the UNC community and teach students how to produce news in ways that remain both relevant and helpful to the consumer. SECTION 1 Describe in detail how your organization users leadership training to prepare top student leaders for their positions and department management. DTH Media Co. uses a common hands-on training model for all of its student leaders. Many of our student leaders have little leadership experience, so we give them the opportunity to grow by doing in their new roles. Leadership training involves an initial shadowing period each Spring semester, during which upcoming leaders for the next academic year work alongside students currently holding leadership roles. This starting point allows upcoming leaders to get a sense of what their responsibilities will look like and help them learn tasks specific to the role. Summer is the main training period, as we use this period for student leaders to make a slow shift into their roles and slowly settle into their new responsibilities. Over the summer, leaders in training have weekly check-in meetings during the summer with either our general manager or director of sales and strategy to ensure they are comfortable in their new roles. Beginning in the summer, our managing director, advertising director and editor-in-chief meet weekly with the general manager and director of sales and strategy as well to discuss plans for the different departments, weekly updates, team building and leadership development discussions. Additionally, weekly leadership meetings take place in each department to discuss current projects, issues, plans and other leadership development topics. SECTION 1 Our training also includes retreats and workshops. At the start of each academic year, our 1893 Brand Studio and Advertising Department student leaders meet with their teams in an interactive retreat, in which they discuss student leadership roles within the teams as well as expectations, reminders and ideas for the upcoming year. This is also an opportunity for the teams to brainstorm collectively on how they can improve work for current clients and for the DTH Creative sector of DTH Media Co. The newsroom also has an annual editors retreat at the start of the academic year, in which they go over specific skills and topics as well as brainstorm new story ideas for The Daily Tar Heel newspaper. Aside from retreats, our organization also offers workshops throughout the year. These workshops are available to all of our staff, and highly encouraged for student leaders. They typically cover more specific industry topics and are led by guest speakers and professionals in the field. This is a way we offer our students more specialized training in a variety of areas. With our hands-on approach, we give students the freedom to experiment in their roles and craft their responsibilities or goals to fit their own ambitions, and encourage them to do so. Our student leaders differ from one year to the next, and in these differences comes innovation, experimentation and growth throughout all of our departments. SECTION 1 List your group’s goals/objectives for the year and how you pursued them. After partaking in the UNC Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative, an accelerator program for newsroom transformation and sustainability, we developed four strategies to achieve our vision for the future. Become an Indispensable, trusted guide to UNC and life for students We identified the importance of relevant news content spread through popular platforms, diversifying our reach. To better address the needs of our readers, we partnered with the Solutions Journalism Network. Our journalists sharpened their skills on informing the audience of solutions to problems, rather than just the problem itself. Our coverage focused on important topics of the time such as Silent Sam, a controversial confederate statue at UNC, as well as Black Lives Matter and COVID-19. For the primary elections, our newsroom created Tar Heels Vote, election coverage with a student and audience centered focus, to ensure our content was beneficial to the community. We created Heel Talk, a weekly podcast, to increase our audience base and relay content across a variety of platforms. Grow consumer and institutional revenue Consumer revenue relied on small donations from readers who highly enjoyed our content. Our exclusive content on important topics was essential in growing this revenue, as shown by an SECTION 1 influx of donations due to our Silent Sam coverage. Furthermore, our structured email approach for specific demographics emphasized our exclusive content and created a pipeline for new revenue. This includes The OC Report, for local residents of Chapel Hill, and Raising Heels, for the parents of students. These demographics are highly invested in local news and have a higher purchasing power than students. We also partnered with the Duke Chronicle for the Rivalry Challenge, a donation competition prior to the first UNC and Duke basketball game. Institutional revenue focused on cumulating funds from foundations and grants. We increased employee capacity and hired a part-time Fundraising and Donor Engagement Specialist in order to succeed. This specialist was tasked with identifying foundations with similar values to our own and highlighting our strengths. Diversify and strengthen our business-to-business revenue We recognized that, in order to become a sustainable news organization, diversification of revenue was essential. We could no longer rely on one source of business-to-business revenue, whether based on distribution platform or subject vertical. Sustainability balanced the needs of the reader with the objectives of our clients. Our structured channels outside of print helped inform specific groups of readers while simultaneously creating a niche demographic for advertising clients. Our advertising team mastered consultative selling to address our clients’ needs and provide the best possible solution. This created quality, trustworthy relationships and strengthened our value proposition for clients. Our Brand Studio enhanced clients’ marketing and outreach programs to allow for a revenue stream non-reliant on the news or our platforms. SECTION 1 Shift to audience-centric practices across the organization The newsroom honed in on audience centric practices by establishing and writing for niche demographics. To assess the needs of the audience, journalists were consistently reaching out to the community for support and guidance on topics. This was best shown by the feedback and questions from Tar Heels Vote and various social media outreach initiatives. The advertising staff took a new approach to sales and focused on consultative selling. The first meeting with a client highlighted the client’s needs rather than the various products we provide. The following meetings then highlighted the products we believed were most beneficial, not necessarily the most expensive. In an effort to aid our clients and establish trust, general advice in marketing and advertising was another pillar in this form of selling. The Brand Studio partnered with their clients to consistently hear feedback throughout the entirety of their marketing schedule. The partnership ensured that the clients’ objectives were clear and satisfied, utilizing data to measure their results. These four objectives were met through institutional adjustments and fundamental initiatives. We focused on holistic solutions to problems and addressed multiple objectives in the most efficient form possible. SECTION 1 Describe specific growth and innovation strategies your organization adopted for the year and explain the steps taken to measure growth and strategy success. To accurately measure our growth, we focused on institutional adjustments that showed quantifiable results. In the newsroom, the institutional adjustments for growth included the OC Report, Raising Heels, and Tar Heels Vote. We measured success primarily by subscriber rate and open rate. The OC Report has 2.7k subscribers and an average