A fresh approach to understanding and engaging arts and culture audience boosts subscription

"Have fun with it, and keep an eye on the numbers."

We were immediately drawn to this case, as it shows that deploying a creative and iterative approach can generate results in what might be perceived as unlikely places. At Hamburger Abendblatt, last year's project at the culture desk was about reaching more significant art audiences and turning already interested art readers into subscribers. "It also helped overcome newsroom prejudices around art content", said the Head of the Editorial Culture Team, Maike Schiller, during the webinar. "It worked because everyone had a lot of fun doing it, and we inspired change in the wider newsroom, which has been very motivating for our team."

This case is about how local journalism can benefit from a dedicated approach to user needs.

Background and context of the job to be done.

Hamburger Abendblatt is the largest newspaper in the north of Germany and the second largest in the country. It's the main title in its region, which goes up to the Baltic and North Seas. Hamburger Abendblatt set up a website in 1996 and launched Germany's first online newspaper paywall in 2009. Today, most articles are for subscribers only. The site has just short of 2.5 million unique visitors a month (more numbers in the slide deck).

Hamburg is Germany's second-largest city and a great cultural centre, with 40 museums, 60 theatres, and over 100 clubs. The city is also home to the Reeperbahn Festival (some 700 events at 80 locations). Hamburger Abendblatt's first podcast, Elphidelity, was produced by the culture desk to coincide with the opening of the great new concert hall on the river, Elbphilharmonie, in 2017. The paper now publishes 30-40 podcasts.

In 2023, the newspaper completed a major reorganisation and changed to an online-first structure, with a central super desk with one digital and one print editor. A number of district-based local teams are also working to increase digital market penetration. In addition, four teams are focused on specific audiences: sports, business, politics, and culture.

What the culture team did

The culture team at Hamburger Abendblatt was a part of the 2023 cohort of the WAN-IFRA Table Stakes program, which is focused on audience development (links below for more info). Maike Schiller's team was set to work on identifying audiences beyond the traditional culture readers, audiences they didn't reach. Some were younger, and some were linked to specific events. "For each audience, it's about making their lives easier, covering all parts of the experience, making it last longer and so on.

Where we used to write a post-concert review, we now do lots of articles ahead of time, including around practical questions like transport. For exhibitions, we might write different articles aimed at different reader groups. We may, for example, do one article about whether an exhibition is fun for children, even though it might not be for them, in addition to our standard article.

Other aspects of the audience-centric approach:

• The culture desk was turned into a mini publishing team that also includes key people from marketing, tech and data
• A workflow was set up that guarantees that essential music and theatre reviews are always given priority and published online as soon as possible.
• They change their approach to stories/sections that are not yet successful. (Success equals driving some subscriptions or finding at least 1000 readers.)
• The team tries to do more follow-ups on stories that are a success.
• A dashboard accessible to everyone in the team means it's easy to track success.

The culture desk has also developed its weekly newsletter, Zugabe (Encore), which now has 5000 subscribers and a 30% open rate. The newsletter has become a good source of advertising revenue, and the culture team plans to launch a special discounted subscription offer to subscribers.

Examples of content - and the results

When Bruce Springsteen came to town, the team created lots of "what you need to know" content, had a fan writing about their experience, and published a quick review before midnight when people were still on the train back from the concert. Hamburg's Senator of Cultural Affairs, who is a Springsteen fan, also wrote review. All in all the content around Springsteen generated a reach of 116,000 people and 60 subscription sales.

The team produced the traditional article for the popular Caspar David Friedrich exhibition at the Kunsthalle. Still, it then went to the Kunsthalle every day to write about different aspects, including how crowded it was, what you could buy in the museum shop etc. "With the dashboard, we could quickly see what worked and what was less successful with this pop-up art audience," said Maike.

The new approach to audience development produced some fantastic results both in terms of subscription sales and reach:

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