Develop your influencer strategy

In 2022, when I was the senior editor for community engagement at LAist, we conducted a citywide survey to find out what Angelenos were most focused on as Mayor Karen Bass took office.

We knew that if we distributed the survey only on our owned platforms, we wouldn’t reach as diverse an audience as we wanted. If we were going to use the survey to help make decisions about how to focus our reporting on the new administration, we needed to cast a wider net.

We had 100 days and a budget from a grant, which meant we could try several distribution methods. We decided that collaboration with influencers would be one of them (other methods included postcards, bus signs, and flyers at events). We selected five influencers from an extensive list developed by the marketing department and paid each of them a flat rate to post at least one video promoting the survey.

We were astonished at the results. By the time we closed the survey, almost 30% of responses had come from those influencer collaborations, and those respondents were younger and more diverse than those that came from some of our most traditional distribution methods.

Since then, I’ve been bullish on the opportunity influencers offer, but I know it can feel like a big risk to hand your newsroom’s story over to someone else.

Our hope is that this guide can demystify and derisk influencer collaborations for newsrooms and get more of you on a path to responsible experimentation. We can’t guarantee specific results because this opportunity is still too new. But influencers and creators aren’t a fad that newsrooms can just wait out.

As Adriana Lacy wrote in her guide to mapping an influencer landscape:

Local influencers are crucial in today’s media landscape, especially as newsrooms look to engage audiences beyond traditional methods. These influencers play a key role in bridging the gap between journalism and local communities, offering newsrooms the chance to connect with relevant audiences in ways that traditional — or transactional — engagement can’t.

Partnering with an influencer can send a message that you’re listening and meeting audiences where they are. These partnerships may prove critical for news organizations seeking to rebuild relationships among young audiences whose “trust in institutional journalism has bottomed out,” says Liz Kelly Nelson, founder of Project C.

Technical.ly founder Chris Wink thinks we need to trust influencers more than we do. “More than people realize, creators want to be putting [quality] information into the general common,” he said. Newsrooms can help them do that.

What do we mean when we talk about influencers, anyway?

They typically fall into one of four categories, according to Lacy:

• Niche content creators: These influencers focus on specific topics such as local food, community events, or other hyper-local interests. They often attract followers who share those same passions and interests.
• Community leaders: While they might not have a large social media following, these local figures include activists, nonprofit leaders, or small business owners and are influential within their communities and can help disseminate important news with credibility.
• Micro-influencers: These influencers typically have smaller followings (usually 1,000 to 100,000), but their highly engaged audiences often translate to better content interaction and community trust.
• Macro-influencers: Larger influencers with a broader reach, typically over 100,000 followers, who can amplify your message quickly across larger areas or groups.

And beyond these definitions, we’re learning through API’s experimentation with these partnerships that these identifying terms do matter. We embrace the “trusted messenger” language as it points toward an engaged community that has likely been built, cultivated and sustained over time. For local news organizations, a trusted messenger may have a large or small following, but what is more critical is that their following is within reach and with need for your journalism — that is, a trusted messenger’s fans are also local to your market area.

For ease in this in-depth article on developing an influencer strategy, however, we’ll use influencer throughout.

How we researched this guide

We interviewed four audience development experts who have developed influencer strategies for their newsrooms and/or for client newsrooms: Adriana Lacy, founder of Adriana Lacy Consulting; Ryan Kellett, most recently a VP at Axios where he led creator journalism; Liz Kelly Nelson, founder of Project C; and Elaine Ramirez, an audience development consultant who previously led CoinDesk’s audience strategy.

We also interviewed the following newsrooms:

• Charlottesville Tomorrow, who partners with members of the Charlottesville Inclusive Media network to bring their journalism into different communities
• Kansas City Defender, who partnered with local food influencers to bring attention to Black Feast Week
• Technical.ly, who has engaged with influencers in several ways, including hiring a comedian to produce weekly videos and working with influencer Pop Pop Johnson to make technical terms more accessible
• Verite News, who has engaged two local influencers in an ongoing paid collaboration to produce Porch Poppin’

Finally, we reviewed the learning memos from API’s Election and Influencer Learning Cohort.

Priming your newsroom for this work

Many newsrooms approach the idea of influencers in a defensive crouch. What can you do to assuage staff concerns enough that there is also space to get excited about the opportunities?

This can be one of the most challenging and time-consuming parts of this work, but you can’t bypass it. Avoidance often results in these concerns bubbling up and derailing the collaboration further down the line. Trying to sneak by detractors and launch a collaboration surreptitiously is even worse. We put influencer collaborations firmly in the “No Surprises” territory.

Building buy-in starts with creating space where people can share their concerns. Consider listening sessions and/or a survey to collect questions and concerns asynchronously.

You can use this three-step process for designing a mini listening tour.

Want to go deeper on designing a newsroom listening tour? Here’s a worksheet I made for SRCCON in 2023.

Consider how you can provide opportunities for feedback and questions throughout the process, not just at the beginning. PublicSource found that providing small updates throughout their influencer collaboration helped keep people in the newsroom reassured.

Below are the concerns that we heard most often when researching this guide, including in the API Learning Cohort. We’ve coupled them with advice on how to overcome them.

Another thing to remember: While this process is new, once you put all the pieces together there are components of this work that are already familiar.

Working with influencers isn’t all that different from working with a new freelancer who you have to learn to trust. You don’t know everything they’ve posted on social media in the past. They’ll bring their own style to the commissioned piece. If the piece doesn’t meet your standards, you can pay a kill fee.

Negotiating rates and terms isn’t all that different from negotiating with advertisers. The influencer is your client and that means that you can set your terms (within reason).

The pre-requisite: Map your influencer landscape

When we talk about mapping your influencer landscape, we’re talking about researching who the influencers are in your ecosystem and evaluating them for audience alignment, content style and engagement.

Sounds daunting, but Adriana Lacy put together a guide to building your own influencer map.

This can happen later in the process if it has to, but doing this proactively will help your organization understand the opportunity that collaborating with influencers offers and allow you to move quickly when the time is right.

Plus, it takes time to develop these relationships — especially if you’re hoping for a barter arrangement instead of a paid one.

Step 1: Decide whether this is the right opportunity for an influencer collaboration.

Some topics carry more reputational risks than others.

• Is it a fraught political topic?
• Is it highly sensitive?
• Is it an investigation or other type of story that needs to be conveyed in a very specific, detailed way?

If you answered “yes” to one or more of the questions above, maybe this isn’t where your organization starts collaborating with influencers.

If you answered “no,” ask yourself these questions instead:

• Are you venturing into a topic or community where you don’t have much reach? This was the case for Kansas City Defender when they launched Kansas City Black Feast Week in 2024. They didn’t typically do food coverage, so they knew no one came to them for that. They collaborated with food influencers people did go to for food coverage to promote the event.
• Can you zero in on a niche or topical area? If so, it will be easier to find the right match and drive results. Verite News contracted a local history influencer to help promote its “Back in the Day” coverage in New Orleans through “Porch Poppin’,” which also includes newsier videos produced by a different influencer.

If you feel strongly that an influencer collaboration is where you should start, despite the sensitivity of the topic, consider safeguards such as writing or reviewing the script and allowing editorial leadership to review the content and offer feedback before it gets posted. Those things can be captured in your contract or MOU, which we go into detail about in another section of this guide.

Another question to ask at this stage: Is our desired outcome a realistic one for an influencer collaboration? Newsrooms typically undertake collaborations with influencers when they want to reach an audience or community they can’t reach through their owned platforms. Expecting the people you reach to immediately trust you and your journalism and then become paying members after encountering your newsroom’s work on social media for the first time is unrealistic.

In general, getting people to leave the social media platform to do something, such as sign up for a newsletter, is not impossible, but it’s also not easy. Remember, “there’s friction built in on purpose,” Lacy noted.

Step 2: Establish the goal of the collaboration

The next step is to get clear about your goals. If you don’t, you’ll find it hard to pick the right influencer, identify the right metrics, nail down the details of the collaboration, or evaluate success at the end.

If you’re struggling with this step, try the mad lib template that API developed for the Election and Influencer Learning Cohort.

If I were using this to set goals for LAist’s collaboration with influencers in 2023, it might look something like this:

“I want to influence Angelenos outside our audience to take our survey on what the mayor should prioritize because we want a more representative sample of respondents and to grow our email database. I’ll know I’m successful when I get survey responses from influencers’ promotion of the survey and compare them to the rest of our survey responses.”

If I were trying to grow my newsroom social media account’s reach, it might look something like this:

“I want to influence locals to follow our new food Instagram account because we want to reach 3,000 followers by next month. I’ll know I’m successful when I see a higher-than-normal number of new followers from videos we produce with the influencer.

There is no consensus yet on when it’s best to work with influencers or how to best measure the impact of that work.

In this pre-benchmarks phase it’s even more important to be clear about your goals and to understand what data may help you know whether you achieved them. That’s why, instead of telling you to focus on one specific metric, we offer the table below, a collection of the metrics used by the people we interviewed and why that metric matters to them. Treat it as a menu from which you can select the metrics that best align with your goal – or start by tracking all of these and, after the collaboration, evaluate which one points to the most significant impact for your organization.

Of course, not everything can be measured with these traditional social media metrics. And other engagement tools within each platform could point toward your goals — even if these tools need to be tracked by hand.

How might you use the comment-poll tool in Instagram, for example? Or the auto-reply for a resource function? How might these tools point toward deeper interest and show stronger engagement with your trusted messenger’s community?

Consider a newsroom collaborating with an influencer to share voting information so people feel more confident about their choices on the ballot. How can you know if you increased voters’ confidence? Maybe you start with an Instagram poll following an explainer video.

Remember that unstructured data like this can still tell a story. Using it alongside the structured data the platform or your other tracking tools gives can show you a fuller picture of impact or success.

If you’re hoping to carry your journalism into a news desert in your community, are there ways for you to get a read on whether there’s been an uptick in your audience from that community? Could you share a link with a specific UTM code to track where that link ends up circulating?

Nelson notes that some of the biggest benefits of collaborating with influencers are increased brand awareness and trust in communities you can’t easily reach on your own. To assess that, you’d likely need to survey those communities before and after the collaboration.

“For me, we’re looking for influencers who can bring impact to communities,” said Angilee Shah, the CEO and editor-in-chief of Charlottesville Tomorrow, which frequently collaborates with community leaders. “It’s important that the right person, a trusted person in a community, shares good quality information. And that’s not going to show up in our Google Analytics.”

Remember, this is an emerging space. We’re not at the stage yet of, “Do X and Y will follow.” As Kellett noted to us in an interview, “What is traditional is what is measurable.”

Collaborating with influencers is untraditional and there are benefits, such as brand lift and resonance with communities, that you can’t measure with any of the metrics you’ll find in a social platform’s insights tab.

Kellett encourages newsrooms to run a couple of experiments simultaneously — that way they’ll know if something is successful, it’s not an anomaly. When they launched the social hosts project at Axios, they did five cities at once.

When we worked with influencers at LAist, we chose five different influencers to work with. Some were more successful at driving survey responses than others. We were able to compare the influencers’ approaches and their results, which gave us valuable insights for future collaborations.

Step 3: Find the right match and make the ask

Our Learning Cohort wished they’d spent more time on this step. Finding the right match was a top non-negotiable for their future influencer collaborations.

Lacy encourages newsrooms to consider three qualities when evaluating an influencer during the mapping stage:

Lacy goes into much more detail on each of these in her article.

Evaluations give you your wish list of influencers to work with. When it’s time to pick one or more of them for a particular collaboration, consider the following:

• Who are you trying to reach? When Kansas City Defender was choosing influencers for Black Feast Week promotion, they debated whether to work with non-Black influencers as well. They ultimately decided to do so because the project’s goal was to bring as much attention to Black-owned restaurants as possible and working only with Black food influencers in the area might undermine that.
• What message do you want your choice to send? When CoinDesk collaborated with influencers to grow its new TikTok account, they prioritized geographic, gender and racial diversity. “We wanted to set ourselves apart from the white male-dominated crypto space,” Ramirez says.

Take some time to consider the size of an influencer’s following, as well. Holzenthal from Deep South Today notes that bigger followings aren’t always better. You may find greater benefit from collaborating with three influencers with smaller followings who can each approach the topic from a different angle and bring it to a different community.

Once you’ve identified who you want to work with, consider what type of agreement makes the most sense. It’s important to tailor the agreement to their unique strengths and contributions. They might have something else in mind, but it helps to go in with some ideas.

For a digital influencer or creator, you might opt for a straightforward payment or in-kind arrangement. On the other hand, engaging with a community leader, whether online or offline, can lead to opportunities for in-kind payments or trade/bartering; think along the lines of a promotional swap where both parties benefit by reaching each other’s audiences.

Collaborating with a solo journalist or “news influencer” can also involve trade or barter. They might be yearning for some of the resources and reach a larger newsroom provides or for the opportunity to collaborate with particular reporters, for example. It’s valuable to have an open conversation about what support they would find most beneficial. You might consider offering access to newsroom assets, such as photos or stories they can republish, or even exploring potential reporting partnerships. By aligning your needs with their value, you set the stage for productive and mutually beneficial collaborations.

When it’s time to reach out, Project C’s Nelson stresses being considerate and staying aware that your interaction might not stay private. “Influencers won’t be afraid to put you on blast if they feel disrespected,” she warns.

Particularly successful influencers might be represented by agencies or at least have assistants. Don’t be surprised if you get directed to them until it’s time to discuss the content. Note, too, that part of the disrespect comes from a transactional request where you, the newsroom, get something from them for free. This is one of the reasons we included an option for a “kill fee” in the contract, so if the work is canceled, your trusted messenger is still paid something.

Step 4: Nail down the details

Compensation

When interviewing newsrooms for this guide, we heard a wide range of compensation arrangements, including:

• Barter arrangements that gave influencers things such as behind-the-scenes access and/or free tickets to events
• Hourly rates with an hourly minimum for each post
• Flat rates ranging from $250/post to $1,000/post
• A year-long, part-time contract (such as Technical.ly’s “Creator in Residence” program)

It’s worth noting that our conversations with local newsrooms mostly focused on niche content creators, community leaders and micro-influencers. For a broader picture of rates, this LinkedIn post with rates broken down by followers and number of posts might help calibrate your payment terms.

In the API Influencer Learning Cohort, rates ranged from $150 to $2,500. The difference points toward those community leaders who donated their time and suggested a small honorarium versus the macro influencers who set a higher rate.

We found a slightly smaller range at Social Currant, a social impact platform that primarily works with mid-sized to macro creators to facilitate collaborations with non-profits. In their 2024 impact report, Revolutionizing Impact Communications through Creators, they noted a compensation range of $800 to $2,500 when content was broken out by niche (comedy, lifestyle, student athlete and fashion/beauty). But the report has more depth and nuance worth spending time with.

People we interviewed also stressed that the influencers they worked with appreciated the opportunity to have consistent work and that some influencers were open to negotiating their rates if they could be guaranteed assignments on a certain frequency.

“When you’re working with influencers, if you find the right people, the project revolves around the mission as opposed to being about me and the rates,” Holzenthal says. “If you find the right person, the salary fits and it doesn’t become banter back and forth. Offer what is appropriate.”

Shah of Charlottesville Tomorrow similarly encourages newsrooms to think about influencers as more than just a distribution method. They’re working alongside journalists to support access to quality information.

“[It’s] not so much ‘How do we get this influencer to do what we want,’ but ‘How do we support them so they can keep being trusted messengers in an ecosystem where the news mechanisms are collapsing?”

Contract

A solid contract or MOU is key, especially if your newsroom worries about reputational risk. Head to our advice on writing a contract — complete with templates you can adapt! — for a list of topics to consider including in your contract.

And as the API Cohort learned, the urgency to which a newsroom takes on an assignment can be very different from the urgency with which an influencer operates. So from project scoping and onboarding to expectations, getting the paperwork signed as early in the process as you can is highly recommended.

Workflow

Nelson warns that many newsrooms don’t spend enough time hashing this part out — and we heard that from newsrooms in API’s learning cohort as well.

Who is doing what? It’s probably pretty obvious who is making the video, but who is responsible for…

• Editing a script?
• Giving feedback on a video?
• Social graphics?
• Captions?
• Hashtags and tags?

And when it comes to getting the content out the door, what are the associated steps? Based on what we heard, this is a pretty common workflow, but your newsroom might find that you don’t need all these review steps or that you do them in a different order:

• Agreement is signed
• Newsroom and influencer meet to settle on goal and message
• Newsroom writes a script
• Influencer reviews the script and makes adjustments
• Newsroom reviews script again
• Influencer records video
• Newsroom reviews video and gives feedback
• If necessary, influencer reshoots video
• Newsroom approves video
• Newsroom and influencer discuss captions, hashtags, etc.
• Content is posted

This is not the only right workflow, but it’s the version we heard most often. Factchequeado, one of the newsrooms in API’s cohort, urges newsrooms to build in extra time. “Structured feedback loops and multiple review stages can help fine-tune the content, ultimately leading to more polished and aligned promotional material,” wrote Olivia Rivarola, Social Media & Product Manager, in the team’s learning memo.

Step 5: Settle on a message

Several newsrooms in API’s cohort said that one of the biggest lessons was approaching the influencer like a partner rather than dictating what to do. The influencers know what will resonate with their audience better than you do. Be clear about your goals and brainstorm the best way to do that with them.

Lacy encourages newsrooms to start broad with a statement like, “We’re both really passionate about climate change.” Then share what you hope to promote in the partnership and invite them to suggest how to approach it, too.

She warns that giving them a script to read often falls flat. “The influencer looks like they’re being held hostage” in those scenarios, she says, and urges newsrooms to let the influencer have a say in the message.

THE CITY, one of the newsroom’s in API’s cohort, originally wanted to do a man-on-the-street video to promote their voter guide. But that wasn’t the style of the influencer they wanted to work with.

“Finding someone who understands the objective of the video and has a good read on the audience we’re all trying to reach, who is comfortable working at the speed of a newsroom, was much more important than ensuring our original concept came to fruition,” said audience engagement producer Diana Riojas.

Rivarola from Factchequado agreed.

“One of the most impactful decisions was allowing [the influencer] creative freedom to tailor the content to her audience,” she said, noting that they avoided “rigid scripting.”

“This approach ensured that her promotional materials felt genuine and aligned with her established style, tone and voice. [Her] ability to frame Electopedia and Electobot as relatable, helpful tools for her community added authenticity, which resonated strongly with her followers,” she added.

But while the video was engaging, the team felt it didn’t quite align with their brand identity and aesthetic, and they will make those expectations more clear up front in the future.

Nelson also advises newsrooms to “chunk up” their stories to make it easier for the influencers to digest them into scripts.

Step 6: Be ready to explain it to your audience

Your first collaboration with influencers might attract some audience attention, especially if missteps occur.

Mollie Muchna’s guide to collaborating ethically with influencers includes a checklist of things you should consider explaining to your audience, as well as sample disclosures that you can adapt.

Step 7: Do it

Before anyone presses publish, double-check that you’re set up to track all the metrics you want to track to evaluate the success of the collaboration. Go back to the goals you identified at the beginning – what data do you need to collect to know if you achieve those goals? Are you set up to collect that data? If you’re trying to monitor conversion, have you set up UTM codes or bit.ly links? Do the influencers have clear instructions on what links to use? Bit.ly put together a guide to tracking influencer results that you may find helpful.

Consider how you’ll keep the rest of the newsroom up-to-date while the collaboration is ongoing — even if it means translating your message based on stakeholder needs and business imperatives. Make sure to share the influencer’s posts when they go live and to share bite-size updates about how followers are responding. Communicating about the work is a big part of building and maintaining newsroom buy-in.

If your data and communications plans are set, you’re ready to launch your first influencer collaboration.

Step 8: Do a robust retro

When the collaboration is wrapped up, take a beat and do a retro.

When I’m doing a retro on a new tactic, I like to break it into two categories:

• The results: This will be focused on your success metrics, such as reach or new followers. You might find that while you underperformed on one metric, you overperformed on another. Capture all of that.
• The process: A lot of work went into making this happen. What worked well? What was rocky? What did you forget to plan for? Was anything a last-minute scramble? Consider inviting the influencer to this part of the retro or collecting their feedback to share with the team. (At LAist, we told the influencers how many survey responses they drove, which helped them feel like a part of the team. One of them shared that they rarely heard back from a client about how well the collaboration performed. Closing the loop is key to turning it into an ongoing relationship.)

Step 9: Present the results and lessons learned to your newsroom

You probably spent a fair amount of time getting your newsroom on board with the idea of working with influencers in the first place. Don’t forget to close the loop by sharing with them what worked, what didn’t and what you learned from the experiment.

This could be as simple as an email memo. You could consider doing a newsroom brown bag that allows them to ask questions and make suggestions for ways to collaborate with influencers in the future.

The API cohort distilled their learnings with the following mad lib, which you could try too:

Here are some of those from the cohort:

When it comes to influencers, if I knew then that I could probably be more creative with how we view alignment with content creators, I’d explore engaging with more people in wild ways that still stay true to our editorial value.

When it comes to influencers, if I knew then that people take so long to complete the proper paperwork…  I’d have set earlier deadlines for said paperwork.

When it comes to influencers, if I knew then that influencer reach is as random and erratic as legacy news org social reach… I’d form this as more of an experiment and diversify both influencer and topic area differently.

When it comes to influencers, if I knew then that my company had mushy guidelines around working with influencers and had many legal questions that remain unanswered…  I’d discuss before agreeing to things differently. ☺️

When it comes to influencers, if I knew then that not every influencer views themselves as an influencer, I’d approach them differently with more structure and different terminology.

What did we miss?

We spoke to some of the earliest adopters of influencer collaborations to write this guide. We know that there’s more to learn as more newsrooms explore this space. If your newsroom has advice not already captured in this guide, we want to hear it! Email Ariel Zirulnick at ariel@arielzirulnick.com and API’s vice president or journalism strategy Sam Ragland at sam@pressinstitute.org.

 

Ariel Zirulnick is an audience and product consultant who helps newsrooms do journalism with and for their communities and build systems and editorial products that make that work sustainable.