Overview:
BlueLena’s July Community Roundtable explored how Spotlight Delaware has built integrated systems and cohesive strategies for growing membership, fundraising and earned revenue support.
On this month’s BlueLena Community Roundtable five product, technology and revenue leaders explored how publishers of all maturity stages can pursue earned revenue with the same discipline and operational rigor that many organizations have already established for reader revenue and major gift development.
The session featured Megan Wofford, Director of Product of BlueLena; Avie Silver, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Spotlight Delaware; Kenny Katzgrau, Founder and CEO of Broadstreet; April Hinkle, Revenue Strategy Consultant and founding Chief Revenue Officer of The Texas Tribune; and Austin Williams, Program Operations Manager of BlueLena. The moderated discussion and open Q&A examined how standardized systems, shared workflows and integrated relationship management can help publishers diversify revenue while reducing administrative complexity.
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Building a repeatable foundation for earned revenue
Over the past several years, BlueLena has invested heavily in creating standardized CRM and moves management workflows for reader revenue and fundraising, helping newsrooms manage donor cultivation, membership growth and major gift development through repeatable systems rather than disconnected spreadsheets and manual processes.
As those practices have matured across dozens of publishers, a logical question emerged: could the same operational discipline be applied to earned revenue, such as sponsorship, advertising and events?
The answer is yes. This spring, BlueLena joined with Spotlight Delaware and revenue strategist April Hinkle to operationalize a sales CRM framework designed specifically for publishers. The objective was not simply to build another sales tool, but to establish a replicable operating model that newsrooms of any size could adopt and scale.
The resulting model became the foundation for BlueLena’s new Earned Revenue Development program, which brings advertising, sponsorships and event partnerships into the same CRM that over fifty leading publishers already use to manage their newsletter subscriptions, reader revenue and fundraising programs.
Instead of relying on inboxes and spreadsheets, where opportunities can be easily missed or neglected, publishers using this new methodology gain standardized pipelines, revenue- and opportunity-based reporting, workflow automation, and shared visibility across the entire revenue team.
Spotlight Delaware: An early example of success with revenue diversification
Spotlight Delaware’s participation in the discussion provided a compelling example of how a young nonprofit newsroom can quickly and efficiently build a diversified revenue model from the ground up.
In just 30 months since its founding, Spotlight Delaware has already achieved a newsletter subscriber base of nearly 20,000 readers while cultivating a community of more than 1,200 financial supporters who have contributed over 6,000 individual donations. Nearly 400 of those supporters now give through recurring monthly contributions, providing a strong foundation of predictable reader revenue.
Under the visionary leadership of its founding CEO Allison Levine Taylor, Spotlight Delaware early on recognized that long-term sustainability requires more than philanthropy and reader revenue. Today, Spotlight has developed and staffed six complementary revenue streams, including philanthropy, membership and reader revenue, advertising, branded content, events and sponsorships. Taylor and her team have focused on creating thoughtfully structured systems that provide a complete view of every relationship across the organization.
As Director of Strategic Partnerships Avie Silver explained during the Roundtable, the objective has not been to simply create new sales processes, but to ensure that every interaction with a supporter, sponsor, advertiser or community partner contributes to nurturing a long-term relationship and support strategy.
Spotlight Delaware made for an ideal collaborator in developing BlueLena’s structured earned revenue program.
By bringing fundraising and earned revenue into a unified CRM, she and her team gain better visibility, preserve institutional knowledge and position themselves to build deeper relationships and longer-lasting partnerships that combine to support Spotlight’s reporting and journalism.
Silver described an initial experience that was less about the technology itself and more about adapting and customizing workflows to match a publisher’s real-world sales process.
When she first began using BlueLena, one of the first tasks was to look up an advertiser account and log a sales opportunity. That simple workflow immediately exposed a point of friction. Contacts associated with fundraising records at first were not connected to the advertising account and deal in the way the sales team expected, making it difficult to see the complete relationship in one place. Instead of forcing the team to work around the software, BlueLena worked alongside Spotlight to re-engineer the workflow from the needs and perspective of a salesperson.
Together, they reconfigured the system so it reflected how sales and revenue producers actually work day to day. The CRM now opens directly to the account list, allowing Silver to immediately access advertisers, navigate to associated deals, and link the appropriate contacts across records. The project was an exercise in designing an intuitive, repeatable workflow that anyone on the team could follow.
For Spotlight Delaware, the ideal system could scale beyond a single individual and serve many. By organizing accounts, contacts, deals, and reporting around consistent processes, the CRM became a shared operational resource rather than a personal tracking tool.
One relationship with multiple revenue opportunities
One of the main themes throughout the discussion was that supporters of journalism rarely fit neatly into a single category. A Spotlight donor may also own a business that advertises. An event attendee may later become a Spotlight supporter. A foundation relationship may create sponsorship opportunities while simultaneously supporting editorial initiatives.
Silver described Spotlight Delaware’s revenue strategy as cohesive despite involving multiple revenue streams and operations.
“The goal,” says Silver, “is coordinating outreach across the organization so every relationship is managed thoughtfully and consistently rather than separating fundraising and sponsorship efforts into disconnected and separate systems.“
That perspective shaped one of the critical features behind BlueLena’s earned revenue program: creating a single customer record that provides complete visibility into every interaction Spotlight has with a supporter from newsletter engagement to site visits to event attendance, audience surveys, social follows and form submissions, as well as a record of financial support including one-time and recurring contributions.
Within the CRM, Spotlight’s team can view donation history alongside sponsorship activity, advertising relationships, active opportunities and contract history. Membership, development and earned revenue teams gain a shared understanding of each relationship, helping them coordinate outreach, avoid duplication and better understand the long-term value of every supporter.
Why operational discipline matters
Throughout the conversation, the panelists emphasized that earned revenue succeeds when it is managed as a well-structured system rather than a collection of individual sales activities.
Advertising and sponsorship teams often manage hundreds of contacts, multiple campaigns and numerous proposals simultaneously. When those activities live inside individual inboxes or spreadsheets, teams lose visibility, overlook renewal opportunities and potentially leave revenue on the table.
Megan Wofford, Director of Products and Austin Williams, Program Operations Manager at BlueLena walked through a system design that introduces structured opportunity stages, standardized reporting, automated reminders and consistent workflows that make revenue operations easier to manage and easier to scale.
As April Hinkle noted during the discussion, technology should not replace relationship building. Instead, it should remove administrative friction so revenue professionals can spend more time developing meaningful partnerships and less time managing manual processes.
“Publishers already possess valuable relationship data through newsletters, events, donations and audience engagement. Bringing those signals together creates a far more complete understanding of every supporter while opening new opportunities for collaboration across fundraising, sponsorship and audience development efforts,” shared Hinkle, who is one of the most accomplished and well-respected revenue leaders in the journalism field.
Broadstreet and BlueLena partner to bring advertiser leads directly into the CRM
The second half of the discussion explored BlueLena’s newly announced integration with Broadstreet and how two leading journalism solution providers partnered to build an integration to help common publishing clients.
Broadstreet’s free Daybreak lead generation solution enables publishers to invite local businesses to express interest in advertising or sponsorship opportunities directly from their websites.
Instead of routing those inquiries into an email inbox, every submission automatically creates an organization account, contact record and sales opportunity inside BlueLena CRM, placing each lead into a structured earned revenue pipeline where follow-up tasks and staff notifications begin immediately.
The integration addresses a common challenge for many independent publishers: Businesses often initiate advertising conversations because they already know and value the newsroom, yet those inquiries often get buried inside busy inboxes while small teams balance multiple, competing priorities.
By automatically creating accounts, contacts and opportunities within the BlueLena CRM, publishers gain a complete top-of-funnel workflow that captures every inquiry, assigns clear next steps to the right team member and ensures opportunities remain visible throughout the sales process. The result is a more consistent approach to business development that reduces manual work while improving responsiveness and accountability.
Financial sustainability is achievable through revenue diversification
For many news organizations, reader revenue and philanthropy have become more sophisticated over the past decade through investments in CRM technologies, donor management, audience engagement and year round fundraising. Now many publishers are recognizing that long-term sustainability also depends on building similarly disciplined systems for advertising, sponsorships, events and other forms of earned revenue.
BlueLena’s Earned Revenue Development program was created to support that transformation by giving publishers a standardized, ready-to-deploy system for managing advertising, sponsorship and event partnerships alongside fundraising within a single CRM.
The goal is not simply to introduce another technology platform, but to help publishers build repeatable systems that preserve institutional knowledge, improve collaboration and create greater visibility across every stage of the revenue lifecycle.
Using integrations like Broadstreet’s Daybreak solution, and bringing fundraising, advertising, sponsorships, events and audience relationships together into one system, publishers gain a more complete understanding of the people and organizations that support their journalism while creating stronger foundations and the conditions for long-term sustainability.
For more information on this solution, contact us at solutions@bluelena.io
About Spotlight Delaware
Spotlight Delaware is a nonprofit, community-powered, collaborative newsroom that covers the impact of public policy on Delawareans, increasing access to information and civic engagement in historically underserved communities, and strengthening existing newsrooms throughout the state. It was launched in January 2024 and under the leadership of its founder and CEO, Spotlight Delaware has grown to include a team of journalists and nonprofit leaders with decades of combined experience in the First State.
Visit spotlightdelaware.org
About Broadstreet
Broadstreet is a leading advertising management platform built specifically for local news organizations, magazines, and other publishers that rely on direct advertising sales.
Founded in 2012 by media and technology professionals, Broadstreet helps publishers simplify ad operations, create high-performing advertising experiences, automate reporting, and strengthen long-term relationships with local advertisers.
Today, hundreds of publishers use Broadstreet to power their digital advertising businesses, enabling them to win more local advertising revenue while providing exceptional service to their clients. Guided by a mission to help independent publishers reclaim marketing dollars that might otherwise flow to large technology platforms, Broadstreet is committed to strengthening sustainable local journalism through purpose-built advertising technology and industry expertise.
Learn more at www.broadstreetads.com
About BlueLena
BlueLena is the journalism industry’s leading strategy consulting, audience and revenue development solution provider, helping more than 300 independent news organizations across North America build sustainable business models.
Founded in 2020 by publishers, journalists, and media technology professionals, BlueLena combines purpose-built technology with embedded strategic consulting and execution support to help publishers grow audiences, strengthen reader relationships, and diversify revenue through subscriptions, memberships, donations, advertising, sponsorships, and major gifts.
Its integrated platform includes audience engagement tools, CRM and moves management, donor intelligence, marketing automation, and analytics, enabling news organizations of all sizes to operate with the capabilities of a much larger organization while remaining focused on serving their communities.
Learn more at www.bluelena.io