The team at Scoop are no strangers to perfecting the PledgeMe pitch. In the last year alone they’ve run three successful campaigns with us – and now they’re back at it again.
Over the past 18 months since they first crowdfunded to launch their platform, Scoop has stood against the tide of clickbait journalism by offering quality news to kiwis which is not reliant on advertising for funding. They see this as the “future of news” – and now they want to offer more New Zealanders the chance to get on board.
With their 2016 membership drive, Scoop is seeking 1000 new members, and looking to use the money pledged for all-important tech upgrades and public interest grants. They’re already nearly halfway to their target, but we wanted to hear more about how they’re planning to get there – so we had a chat to Alastair Thompson, one of Scoop’s founders.
How are you finding the campaign so far?
his Membership campaign started significantly faster than our previous campaigns and the team working on it have been really enjoying it. There is something very special about engaging a crowd via the PledgeMe platform, an atmosphere of generosity and kindness which feels very genuine and real, and which is shown most clearly in the lovely comments of support which many pledgers put with their pledges.
What do you have planned for the rest of your campaign – anything for us to look forward to?
It is time for us to make another big push out to our crowd and we will be stepping up the activity for remainder of the campaign. In the coming week we have two several significant pieces of content to release which we hope will provide added substance and background to our pitch including an impact statement, which talks about the why of the Scoop Foundation, as well as a public version of our internal vision statement, a kind of roadmap for where we hope to take things over the next few years.
We have a few other plans up our sleeve to bring life to the campaign too, including a celebration of Scoop.co.nz‘s 17th Birthday on June 8th.
Anything you want to shout out to your crowd?
Of course and thank you for the opportunity! We’d like to thank our crowd for their ongoing support and encouragement. We particularly appreciate the thoughtful comments that many have made when they pledge, and which we have been turning into acknowledgement @ScoopTrust tweets and Facebook posts. It is a difficult time for everybody in the news media and it is very nice to have people say in their own words why the appreciate what we are doing. Warms the cockles of our hearts.
