The Data-Inspired Editor

The Data-Inspired Editor

A magazine worth making is worth measuring. Kellogg editor LeeAnn Shelton shares how she learned to love data analytics and approach the magazine with a strategist’s eye.

By LeeAnn Shelton

I took a deep breath and clicked “Join Meeting.” It was the spring of 2021, and since we were all still working from our kitchen tables and guest bedrooms, I was thankful the hiring panel on the other side of the Zoom call couldn’t see me nervously fidgeting with my hands.

My laptop was perched on a rickety card table squeezed in next to our bed—my makeshift office during the blur of lockdowns and the new (ab)normal that came after. (This was prime real estate, actually: Lockdown had tested the limits of our two-bedroom apartment, and my  husband  good-naturedly  retreated to work from a card table in our toddler’s nursery.) The red webcam light flickered on. It was go time.

Over the next 30 minutes, I proceeded to lay out why the Kellogg School of Management’s flagship alumni periodical, Kellogg magazine, should return to print and why I was the woman to lead it.

I had been an alumni magazine editor for five years at that point, and everyone on the call in my final-round job interview was keenly aware of the uphill climb ahead for the magazine. Like so many higher-ed periodicals, Kellogg shifted to publishing online when the pandemic threw universities into chaos. But there was a growing sense among many of my fellow editors that digital magazines weren’t drawing in readers nearly as effectively as print editions had.

And yet, the hefty budget line item of an alumni periodical remained a tantalizing peach, ripe for cost-conscious admins to pluck off the tree and redirect toward any number of worthy causes: student scholarships, virtual classroom setups, or PPE perhaps. But here we still were, asking an important question with a complicated answer: Why is it that a storytelling medium our alumni can hold in their hands remains so valuable?

Well, I got the job, and my first charge was to continue exploring this question and make an informed recommendation to our leadership on whether our magazine should return to print or remain digital-only. I knew that I couldn’t just rely on my gut instinct—even though it told me loud and clear that no one wants to cozy up in a blanket on their couch with their beloved alma mater’s magazine, only to swipe and pinch through a PDF on a minuscule smartphone screen.

What I needed was data. This is the story of how I gathered it, how I learned to love analytics in the process, and how that journey has transformed the way I approach my job to this day.

START WITH A TEAM-PLAYER MINDSET

The institutional leaders who approve your magazine’s budget are charged with making decisions based on tangible outcomes, not gut instinct. And as each new fiscal year comes around, they are facing difficult trade-offs and balancing priorities across your entire organization.

Remember that your colleagues in leadership and finance are on your same team—they love your institution as much as you do, and you share the collective goal of using precious resources as effectively as possible. So, make it easy for them to say yes to you. Presenting insightful data showing your magazine’s impact is a great way to do that.

CHOOSE YOUR METRICS BASED ON INSTITUTIONAL PRIORITIES

I have to admit, I used to find quantifying the impact of an alumni magazine on institutional goals to be really difficult. In my mind, an eliminated or scaled-down magazine means alumni aren’t meaningfully engaging with your brand as often, which in turn hampers stewardship efforts five to 10 years down the line for your entire advancement team. But, that’s extremely difficult to value in dollars and cents.

Instead, start by identifying some publication metrics that you can tie to your organization’s strategic business goals. For  example, if your marketing team is focused on understanding and improving audience sentiment, field a readership survey that establishes a baseline Net Promoter Score (NPS), a rough measurement of how likely the respondent is to recommend your institution.

If your institution is struggling with alumni record-keeping, add up how many change-of-address forms your print magazine processed last year, and how many more alumni your school can now reliably reach because of it. If engagement is top-of-mind, try to tally up how many letters to the editor and social media shares or comments your articles generate—bonus points if you can demonstrate that those are from previously disengaged grads. If you’re in the midst of a fundraising campaign, try creating trackable vanity URLs from your print issues to giving webpages and track how many readers use them.

READER SURVEYS ARE CRUCIAL

Simply put, print magazines lack the kind of immediately accessible, always-on data collection systems that our digital communications channels, like websites and blogs, automatically have. By contrast, to understand how your readers are engaging with your printed issues, you have to ask them. That’s why regularly fielding a magazine readership survey is so crucial.

Shortly after arriving at Kellogg, I fielded the CASE Magazine Readership Survey, a tool developed by higher-ed alumni magazine editors that offers preset questions and the ability to benchmark your results against those of other institutions. I had a hunch that our feedback would be pretty positive. After all, Northwestern Wildcats are known for their school spirit and close-knit community.

When I got the results, I suddenly had my proof. It revealed that nearly 70% of our readers read every issue or most issues of the print magazine, and that many of them read most or all of it. I was flat-out astonished when 17% of our readers told us they spend an hour or more with each issue—and that 82% of readers spend at least 10 minutes with their copy.

That’s data I could take right to my CMO, to show the incredible amount of time and attention we were “buying” with a modest average cost per copy. I encourage you to field a readership survey yourself. You may be surprised at how favorably your “sticky” print magazine’s metrics line up against digital metrics of cost-per-click and time-on-page for reaching this same audience online.

WHEN IN DOUBT, ASK YOUR AUDIENCE

The same survey provided critical insights into our biggest question: Should we return to print? The results were unequivocal. About 80% of our readers preferred to read us in print, or in print and online both. Only 20% preferred to read online only. This was a key piece of data that helped me make the case for reviving the print edition, while keeping our website for those who preferred digital.

A well-constructed survey will also ask your readers what they most want to see in your pages. We’re redesigning our magazine later this summer, and these insights from our readers will steer our new editorial framework.

A good survey will also attempt to quantify how your magazine has increased your readers’ connection with your school and the actions they’ve taken as a result of reading. I was pleased to see just how many alumni said they attended an event, recommended Kellogg to a friend or relative, or made a donation because of our magazine. Now that’s evidence I can take to my colleagues.

METRICS DON’T HAVE TO BE SCARY

I’m a writer and editor by background, so you might be surprised to learn that the reference book “Web Analytics 2.0” by author Avinash Kaushik is front and center on my bookshelf, right next to my dictionaries and stylebooks. It wasn’t always this way. It was a mindset I gradually adopted after I took a marketing analytics course at a previous job. (Use those higher-ed perks and get back in the classroom!)

Of course, I was intimidated at first. I had no idea what a pivot table was, much less how to make one. Excel was a program I had to learn in high school and then rarely opened again. I didn’t know a pageview from a user from a session. But through persistence and curiosity, I figured this stuff out—and you can, too.

If you’re hazy on analytics, start with a beginner-friendly text like Kaushik’s that defines key terms and what different metrics mean. Try Google Analytics’ free self-paced courses to learn how to set up your own dashboards. Take a finance colleague out for coffee to ask what financial metrics they care about. You might even find free professional development resources or access to open online courses (MOOCs) through your institution’s library or human resources department.

My persistence eventually paid off: I grew more fluent with these tools over time, and it was actually a piece of Google Analytics data that sealed the deal on bringing our print magazine back. Through exploring our web traffic, I discovered our most recent online-only issue only had 5,000 unique users, aka individual people. This meant we were reaching less than 10% of our previous alumni print circulation of roughly 55,000. I remain grateful to our leadership team who, when faced with that data point as well as the other research I presented, understood the long-term ramifications and greenlit our revived print edition.

Once you’re familiar with the basics of analytics, use your new knowledge to figure out how your content typically performs. I lead our brand’s content hub as well as the magazine, and we established our internal benchmarks by using data from Google Analytics.

First, I pulled down a spreadsheet file of our pageviews by article for the past six months. Then I cleaned up the data a bit, eliminating any funky-looking URLs and outliers that would skew the data. Using the remaining entries, I calculated the pageviews per article for the 50th percentile (about 500 in our early days) and 90th percentile (1,000+). This gave us a reliable benchmark to understand what overperforms, what underperforms, and what knocks it out of the park. When our marketing colleagues ask, “How did that blog campaign go?” we have a well-informed answer, which they love. We plan to recalibrate these benchmarks periodically, expecting them to change as we grow.

CONVERSATIONS ARE DATA, TOO

Not all data has to be numbers. Qualitative data is just as important. When I was researching whether to bring our magazine back to print, I attended the CASE Editor’s Forum to chat up colleagues. I also asked my regular peer group of b-school editors for their opinions.

And I gained important insights from Lane Press, which was not our vendor at the time. (They now print Kellogg magazine.) I met their team through the conference, and a representative was kind enough to let me interview her about the current state of the industry. She noted that several of their alumni magazine clients were coming back to print even though it was difficult and costly to get paper at that time, post COVID—another important data point that I passed on to my leadership.

TURN TO YOUR PEERS

Insights can come from anywhere. Hit up your friends in advancement and alumni relations for any surveys they’ve done recently. Your marketing and communications team might have brand health studies or audience segmentation research to share.

If you’re a smaller shop without those kinds of resources, don’t despair. Check with your college or university library to see if you have an institutional subscription to market research databases or reports (check usage rights and permissions first). Or, sign up for industry newsletters. Erin Peterson, the talented writer and editor behind Capstone Communications, has a fantastic one focused on alumni magazines in particular. She often shares news and research from across the magazine industry.

At the risk of paraphrasing my favorite holiday movie, stop to think for a minute, and you’ll realize that data is, actually, all around. I hope my experiences and the lessons I’ve learned encourage you to go forth and use it to do great things for your publications and institutions.

LeeAnn Shelton is director of enterprise communications at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and editor of Kellogg magazine. You can often find her biking around Chicago’s North Shore with her husband and two young kids or hitting the books as she studies for her master’s in integrated marketing communications at Northwestern Medill. Connect via shelton@pagesthemagazine.com.