'Lifetime civic value' as a media impact metric

Assume you run a nonprofit newsroom. You don't / can't monetize directly, but you must demonstrate impact to funders who back your venture. Because of the changes in the information ecosystem, you can no longer measure reach and engagement in the same way you did in previous years.

I propose focusing on audience members' relationships with you and their propensity to engage in civic activities that benefit the public good. Let's try to calculate the surplus value of civic engagement that your work has generated.

The commercial models around customer lifetime value have matured greatly and been used in manifold ways to capture that relationship.

Here's how it works for commercial media:

1. Calculate the average revenue per account (ARPA): Determine the total revenue for a given period and divide it by the number of users in that period.
2. Determine the user lifespan: Calculate the average time a user continues to use your service. Typically, one would estimate this by dividing 1 by the churn rate.
3. Calculate the lifetime value (LTV): Multiply the ARPA by the average user lifespan. This will give you the LTV.

This becomes difficult for non-profit media when there is no user revenue in step one. Here are two creative methods of applying the same logic to build a relationship that leads to users taking action:

In monetary scenarios, The Guardian's model of voluntary subscriptions could be used with a (tracked) call to action to donate to select external community services, as a reverse form of affiliate marketing that tracks the effectiveness of driving people to support causes that improve the common good, or as calls-to-action that then measure the effective donations.

In non-monetary scenarios, the same could be accomplished by tracking the number of times readers/viewers, or listeners were prompted to take a specific action that benefits the public, such as encouraging others to subscribe, contributing to a crowdsourced project, or expressing their opinions.

Civic engagement is so broad that it's hard to define. In such a case, it could be defined for individual purposes and then benchmarked as the propensity to take a certain action:

1. Calculate the average number of civic actions per account (ACAPA): Determine the total number of specified actions taken for a given period and divide it by the number of users in that period.
2. Determine the user lifespan: calculate the average time a user continues to use your service.
3. Calculate the lifetime (civic) value: Multiply the ACAPA by the average user lifespan. This will give you the LCV.

The result is a non-monetary derivative metric that could be tracked and benchmarked against. They would get a much clearer sense of the relevance and trustworthiness of the media organizations they support because resonance is derived from audience engagement, not algorithmic distribution optimization. Funders can still measure impact along the funnel and use additional individual data points for validation and storytelling.

The end result is a derivative metric that can be tracked and benchmarked against. Because audience engagement rather than algorithmic distribution optimization determines resonance, funders can evaluate the relevance and reliability of the media organizations they support.

What I love about lifetime civic value is that it would commit a media organization to operate in an audience-centric way and to adopt a theory of change of civic progress and social solidarity in its calls to action, further eroding the silly View from Nowhere pedestal. Reading recommendation: The View from Somewhere. Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity, by Lewis Raven Wallace.

This is more advantageous for smaller publishers because they see a bigger relative increase in customer value with each new subscription or action, compared to larger publishers, who may not see as much of an increase at higher levels.

It could also work for hybrid operations that are able to partially monetize.

P.S.: I’m excited to have found a publisher to experiment with LCV. We created this dummy spreadsheet to experiment. Interested? Get in touch.