Chicago is a city of neighborhoods that recognizes 77 community areas spread across 234 square miles. For many residents, the neighborhood they live in is a central part of their identity; it also shapes their day-to-day lived experience, the issues that matter most to them and the lens through which they view their city.
Block Club Chicago, an independent, nonprofit newsroom founded by natives and longtime Chicago-based journalists, launched with a novel vision — to report city news from a vantage point that recognizes the centrality of neighborhoods to Chicago residents. Our team of 16 reporters don’t cover topical beats: Each is assigned to a small cluster of neighborhoods, and charged with covering the stories that matter most to their community. Many of our reporters live in the neighborhoods they cover.
An ad from Block Club Chicago’s 2024 campaign
Sometimes this strategy produces reporting that looks a lot like a small-town newspaper. We cover minor developments and local school council meetings with the same attention as City Council meetings. We’re notorious for stories with such a concentrated impact they might elicit a laugh from readers who live outside the “beat.” More often, they endear the whole city to the story and the community, like our multi-part series on a rat-shaped impression in a Roscoe Village sidewalk that inspired memes, merchandise, musical tributes and one marriage.
Just as frequently, a small issue we’re alerted to by our readers reveals larger issues grander in scale. When high-risk West Side residents said they were struggling to find the Covid vaccines dispatched to their communities, we looked for answers, and uncovered evidence that hospital executives were offering shots to their friends and associates, including staff at a luxury watch shop and at Trump Tower. That conversation with our neighbors led to a federal investigation and indictments on charges of wire fraud, embezzlement, money laundering and conspiracy to commit bribery.
It was this acute understanding of readers’ affinity for their neighborhoods that inspired our most successful promotional campaign, now an annual tradition that typically drives up to a quarter of our annual subscription revenue.
Campaign design centering audience identity
The initial seed funding for Block Club Chicago’s 2018 launch came directly from our readers via a Kickstarter campaign following the abrupt shutdown of our predecessor, DNAinfo Chicago, by its billionaire owner. To support Kickstarter’s model of offering supporters incentives across a spectrum of contribution tiers, we designed postcards, tote bags and T-shirts to offer as standalone rewards, and as supplemental prizes for gifts that exceeded our annual subscription price. Our readers’ early enthusiasm for apparel and accessories that signaled their support for our journalism inspired us to consistently incorporate merchandise sales into our revenue model (though it represents the smallest piece of the pie, compared to philanthropic funding, advertising revenue, individual donations and subscriptions.)
When we decided we wanted to design a campaign to reach new subscribers four years after our successful Kickstarter, we drew heavily on our learnings from that promotion, and from similar experiments we’d been conducting in our webstore in the intervening 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. The latter category includes merch like our “Gator Watch” line, inspired by an alligator found in the Humboldt Park Lagoon, and “Chicago is For Lovebirds,” artwork featuring a pair of endangered Piping Plovers whose nesting habits in a popular lakefront park are closely monitored by the Park District — and by Block Club.
We knew this approach resonated with our readers and reinforced the most central tenets of our brand, but questioned how we could reconcile it with a subscription campaign designed to cast a wide net, where our aim was to capture and convert previously unreached audiences from every corner of our city. 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 found the perfect partner in Steve Shanabruch, a local artist whose work is inspired by posters from the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project, the New Deal-era program designed to pay artists to create works for the public in their home communities. His inspiration meshed perfectly with our vision of reinforcing that same sense of ingroup identity through artwork, and we 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. We decided that payoff was worth the price of a complicated execution process.
This judgment call was affirmed in 2022, when Lion Publishers named our neighborhood print promotion the Revenue Campaign of the Year, and competition judges shared this feedback about our program: “Block Club Chicago has spent the last several years honing its merchandising strategy into a strong pillar of their revenue approach. This campaign shows what’s possible when an organization marries entrepreneurial business acumen with strongly developed community ties.”
Our neighborhood print campaign in practice
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. For the duration of the campaign, we include a link to a form (we’ve used Google Forms and Jotform in the past) in the automated purchase confirmation email that’s sent by our subscription management tool after checkout. We ask users to select the print they would like and provide a shipping address.
We have adapted the campaign slightly each year based on feedback from our audience, and as our capabilities have expanded with improvements to our tech stack. 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 if we incentivized readers to turn off auto-renew and strategically resubscribe during the campaign. In 2022, we offered current subscribers the option to purchase a gift subscription to qualify for a print, and let them submit a separate mailing address if they wanted to receive the print themselves while sharing the subscription with a separate recipient. Later, in 2023, we added another alternative for existing subscribers, offering prints as a thank you gift for donations in a concurrent fundraising campaign.
Block Club Chicago staff
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.
Lizzie Schiffman Tufano is the Vice President of Revenue at Block Club Chicago. She spent over a decade working in Chicago newsrooms as a reporter, editor and digital strategist before moving into business operations — including five years on the news team at Block Club‘s predecessor, DNAinfo Chicago.
