Diving into local history can be a great way to reach new audiences and cultivate a sense of place, but some communities already have a strong identity that can be tapped into as well. That’s exactly what Block Club Chicago has built its merchandising strategy around since its launch seven years ago — an approach so successful it’s been named Lion Publisher’s Revenue Campaign of the Year and today drives up to a quarter of the organization’s annual subscription revenue.

Lizzie Schiffman Tufano, vice president of revenue at Block Club Chicago, wrote for API about appealing to distinct neighborhood pride and how that could be incorporated into reaching new subscribers. Read a portion of her essay on how a hyperlocal approach to merch reflects the news organization’s understanding of Chicago’s culture and strengthens community identity.

Campaign design centering audience identity

When we decided we wanted to design a campaign to reach new subscribers, we drew heavily on our learnings from similar experiments we’d been conducting in our webstore over the years.

One of the hallmarks of our most successful merchandise was the extremely narrow specificity of our subject matter. If you peruse the current offerings in our web store, you’ll see very few products that center our name or logo; instead, you’ll see custom imagery from local artists depicting beloved institutions; inside jokes that resonate with longtime Chicagoans and designs that directly reference popular stories we’ve covered.

When our central value proposition is our understanding of Chicago’s distinct landscape of neighborhoods, we knew our audience outreach strategy needed to reflect that.

We partnered with a local artist and realized that there wasn’t a single, perfect design that would resonate with our whole audience — we needed to lean into the distinct iconography of each neighborhood.  The execution of this campaign involves a complicated web of logistics that we have streamlined slightly over the years, but it remains a heavy lift; in our case, the benefits unequivocally outweigh the cost of time and effort.

Each year, from early November through early January, we offer new subscribers a choice from nearly 70 variations of 16-by-20 inch print designs.

The first two years of our campaign, we only offered the print promotion to new subscribers. As the prints became more popular, we heard from longtime subscribers that they felt left out, and we worried about churn. In 2022, we offered current subscribers the option to purchase a gift subscription to qualify for a print. Later, we added another alternative, offering prints as a thank you gift for donations in a concurrent fundraising campaign.

Fulfillment logistics

  • We handle order fulfillment entirely in-house. (For the first three years, our “fulfillment operation” was headquartered in our publisher’s living room.)
  • Responses to our print selection survey are compiled in a Google spreadsheet, and we typically ship out orders in batches 1-3 times per week, depending on volume, as orders come in.
  • Using poster tubes, print-at-home postage tools and existing staff for labor, our distribution cost per print is around $5.90, with occasional outliers for purchases from other states (and, rarely, international orders).
  • Running this campaign annually has helped us defray some hard costs; if we overestimate the demand for a specific print, we can bank the surplus for subsequent years.

To keep the campaign fresh and appeal to repeat customers, we’ve begun adding one new, limited-edition poster to each year’s lineup. Our 2024 design celebrated nine beloved neighborhood dive bars; well aware that the list wasn’t comprehensive, we promised Vol. 2 would drop in 2025. Knowing that Chicagoans’ loyalty to their local watering holes can be as intense as their neighborhood pride, we look forward to updating this series for many years to come — which is very on brand for us.

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Leverage history to shape identity

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