Increase in donations after using our Audience Management system
33%
Member benefits developed in partnership with Newspack
8
The background: Hong Kong Free Press was founded in the wake of the 2014 Umbrella Movement, a 79-day-long pro-democracy civil disobedience campaign. In 2020, HKFP Editor-in-Chief Tom Grundy turned to Newspack to help them publish the news and manage subscriber engagement and donations, so that he could focus his time on managing the ever-changing red lines of the Hong Kong media landscape.
The bottom line: Grundy no longer has to worry about the technology side of the business. Over the years, he’s worked with Newspack to develop eight member benefits and increase donations by 33% using our Audience Management system. He also relies on our infrastructure to keep his site secure despite ongoing threats to press freedom.
The big picture
“We don’t face the same kind of physical risks maybe that others do in Asia, but it (Hong Kong) is certainly one of the most complicated press freedom situations in the world, especially after the 2020 security law where we have seen newsrooms raided, a thousand journalists out of work, and journalists jailed,” explained Grundy.
The last thing he has time to worry about is the technology side of running the publication. HKFP is a nimble team of seven journalists who are on the ground, getting the news out. They’re not website developers.
He learned early on that building a bespoke content management system was more trouble than it was worth.
“If you build something from scratch, something bespoke, you are then having to maintain that for an indefinite period into the future.”
In addition to the ongoing maintenance, he realized he lacked the vocabulary to communicate what he was trying to achieve when it came to partnering with developers. “I would get sucked in for hours, days, months-long sort of technical tasks, which I’m very underprepared and unqualified for. Whereas, I needed to speak to tech people who were also aware and understanding of journalistic terminology and where we come from there.”
That’s where Newspack came in.
Working together to find solutions
In 2020, Grundy began working with us to migrate multiple donation management tools and a content management system into a single platform.
“We were scattered across multiple platforms and way too many payment platforms. Newspack very patiently worked with me over a year to get it right and to get everyone on board in terms of our donors, who have also been patient. We’ve come out the other side able to offer eight benefits to members,” he said.
Since using our Audience Management system, HKFP has increased donations by 33%.
Grundy is also thrilled not to have to worry about the security of the site. “Particularly with our security situation, Newspack has been very understanding and sympathetic to build in certain mechanisms to keep the website safe if the worst happens in Hong Kong. We have had no downtime.”
He finds it reassuring that Newspack is part of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. Because Newspack is built on WordPress and hosted on WP Cloud, Grundy can focus on journalism knowing the site is secure.
The HKFP team works closely with our support team to fix any issues that may arise, but also to feed any ideas for new functionality that might benefit other publications using our platform.
“To give you an example of how responsive the Newspack team are, we faced tax inspections last year, and we wanted to do a fundraiser to tackle some of the penalties we were facing after the whole sector was facing these random tax inspections. We wanted to do a targeted funding campaign like traditional crowdfunding, a one-off where we would raise money for a specific thing to a specific target, and I put it out there on the Slack channel with Newspack, and within a month they’d rolled it out to everybody.”
He continued, “Wherever you are in the world, there are plenty of threats to the media industry, to journalism, whether it’s AI, the financial situation, politicians, and political trouble. The last thing I have the capacity for and am able to worry about, particularly in recent years, is the technology side, the uptime, and I’m just grateful that can be handled efficiently and is often just happening in the background.”
“If I need to dive in, I can speak to someone directly who speaks my language in terms of journalism and get things sorted. I have been able to backburner this huge bandwidth suck that we had in the days before Newspack and just dip in and out when it’s needed if we need something new. If we need something fixed, that has liberated me and our news outlet to really focus on navigating the red lines, getting the news out. When you’re a team of just seven journalists, we’ve never had a tech person, developer, or engineer on board; it’s absolutely a blessing.”
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