News organizations have long used surveys to gather useful feedback from readers and guide decision-making. At BlueLena, a core offering for our publishers is a standard 11-question reader survey deployed to help newsrooms understand information needs, alongside likelihood to support news and the values they hold that guide that decision.
The final question asks readers whether they would recommend the publication to a friend or colleague, a frequently used question that serves to calculate a net promoter score, or NPS. Readers answer this question on a scale of 1 to 10, with the answers used to generate a publication’s score, ranging from -100 to +100.
Publications that collect net promoter scores regularly are able to measure reader satisfaction over time, and there could be opportunities to see how the scores change based on where a reader is in the audience funnel. For a publication’s supporters, an NPS survey can identify brand advocates and readers in danger of churning, and automations can be used to continue communication with either group.
How net promoter scores originated
Net promoter scores are used across industries to measure customer loyalty and predict business growth. The concept of asking “would you recommend this to a friend?” to evaluate how people feel about products, businesses or services was first publicized in a Harvard Business Review article, “The One Number You Need to Grow” in 2003, and was based on two years of research aimed at linking customer behavior to company growth. According to the article, the research found that “the percentage of customers enthusiastic enough about a company to refer it to a friend or colleague directly correlated with growth rates among competitors.”
Respondents who answer a net promoter score question with a 9 or 10 are labeled the “promoters,” those who answer 7 or 8 are considered the “passively satisfied” and those who answer 0 to 6 are the “detractors.” To calculate a net promoter score, the percentage of respondents who are detractors is subtracted from the percentage who are promoters. The resulting score will be somewhere between -100 and +100.
Setting a benchmark for Net Promoter Score in independent media
There are no known published benchmarks for net promoter scores across a broad swath of news media organizations, so BlueLena has analyzed scores across more than 40 publications in our coalition to set such a benchmark. We believe benchmarking this (and updating it regularly) will help individual publishers better understand readers’ perception of their product, and create opportunities to grow.
In BlueLena’s standard audience survey, which has been used by more than 40 publishers between 2021 and 2023, the average NPS is +25, meaning that, on average, newsrooms working with BlueLena have a high enough percentage of promoters to outweigh detractors.
This NPS score is based on an average of newsroom scores from across the United States, including from nonprofits, digital-only outlets, alternative weeklies and daily newspapers. Across these organizations, scores ranged from -43 to +69, with the top 20% of newsrooms earning an NPS of 50 or higher.
According to global benchmarks from SurveyMonkey, the average NPS among organizations from any industry is +32.
How to use a net promoter score
Net promoter scores were designed as a benchmark metric that companies could use to measure customer loyalty and predict growth over time. As such, the scores should be collected and evaluated regularly to see how customer satisfaction might be changing.
For publishers using NPS as part of ongoing surveying, such as in part of a welcome series, results can be filtered by date range to see how a net promoter score may have changed historically. For surveys that have multiple questions including the NPS question, try segmenting the results of only the promoters or only the detractors to look for insights based on how these respondents answer other questions.
With the original research that led to NPS surveys in mind, publishers could dive deeper to see how scores change based on where readers are in their journey down the audience funnel. For example, if a score is collected during the welcome series for new contacts, scores could also be collected six months down the road for engaged newsletter subscribers, or at a certain point in time after a reader becomes a donor or subscriber.
Each of these NPS surveys could be sent through an automation, collecting info from readers as they hit certain points in their journey. When paying members are surveyed, promoters could be placed into an email automation that goes on to collect positive testimonials for use in marketing, while interventions could take place with detractors to learn why they’re dissatisfied before they cancel.
About BlueLena
BlueLena creates a sustainable future for independent local media with strategies to build audiences and tools to support journalism funding models for long-term success. Today, over two-hundred brands leverage our audience management platform, strategy consulting and marketing services to accelerate their digital transformation.
BlueLena is founder-funded and backed by investment from Automattic (owner of WordPress), Local Media Association and Old Town Media, a New York-based firm that has supported The Colorado Sun, Block Club Chicago, Chalkbeat and Medium, among other successful media-related projects. Visit us at bluelena.io