Today marks the end of CUNY’s Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program for me and my amazing cohort of colleagues. To keep us moving forward, we’ve been asked to publicly share our progress, so here’s where Power the Press stands after 100 days.

🌟 Ideas Festival

Face-to-face engagement is crucial for building trust in communities, making events an essential tool for modern newsrooms. While I’ve heard repeatedly from potential clients a desire to host events like The Texas Tribune Festival, they face common barriers such as a lack of event development know-how, connections to high-profile speakers, effective sponsorship pipelines or production resources. 

My initial idea was to create a national ideas festival that would partner with media organizations interested in co-programming and hosting a large community gathering. These ideas festivals will feature renowned speakers, sponsorship to cover production costs and lower media partner risk, as well as guidance for partners in programming, selling sponsorships, and engaging their communities around ideas and policy discussions. The model allows partners to host impactful large-scale events while minimizing their research and development investment.

🎲 Few to Many

The fatal flaw in this idea is how many events like this can be reasonably produced in a year. Sponsorship of independent news-related events isn’t impossible but it’s not easy either, and many newsrooms wouldn’t be good candidates for partnership if they don’t have some capacity in the areas outlined above. Also, parachuting into a community once, or even annually if we mutually decided to keep doing a joint event, isn’t likely to be sustainable. How can we serve more organizations?

📚The Template Solution

Collaborating with my long-time partners at Panacea Collective surfaced scalability challenges in producing multiple large-scale ideas festivals annually. They already have a robust client base and scaling up for multiple events would be difficult without impacting their current work. I love operations challenges and have worked with the Panacea team long enough to understand the pain points of scale.

I won’t go too far down this rabbit hole but it’s worth mentioning that most event technology focuses on attendee management, from posting event webpages, taking RSVPs or selling tickets, to managing speakers and sponsors and the on-site experience from check-in to digital displays to livestreams. Few reasonably priced tools are available to support the behind-the-scenes work of producers. We’re using project management tools built for software engineering or marketing projects with minimal breadcrumbs in the “event management” templates.

You know after reading my post on templatizing events that having a way to rinse and repeat an event is the surest way to gain efficiency and event efficacy over time. When I finally landed on a tool that we could use as a team to support better event production management, the lightbulb 💡 went off in my head. Anyone who can follow a project management template can follow an event production template if that template has the details and expertise built into it.

Thinking of providing templates got me thinking about outsourced services like Newspack or Indiegraf that prove the case for bundling pre-built tools. With built-in expertise and a team to provide guidance as needed, we could provide actual event templates along with production management tools that make events possible for more organizations.

📰 Newsmaker Event Example

In a previous post, I laid out a simple newsmaker conversation event. Imagine if you went into your project management software today and instead of a generic “Event Management” template, you pulled up a Newsmaker event template. It includes a suggested budget, task list, sample sponsorship deck, and a webpage and RSVP tool with marketing assets that you need only add a few details to to launch.

Even better, what if you don’t know what kind of event would be best to accomplish a specific goal like adding newsletter subscribers or cultivating new members? After filling out a short questionnaire, our tool suggests options that are proven to meet your goals based on data collected over many iterations. You select a template from the narrowed list of options and get started.

I mentioned a sponsorship deck template, and further imagine the conversations your sales team might have. Questions about what audience to expect or ways to activate their brand are easy to answer because they are armed with previous event samples. How much revenue might you be able to earn with a proven event template? This deeply researched suite of offerings will enable small and medium-sized organizations to execute high-quality, effective events efficiently.

⚡What is Power the Press?

My North Star has always been lowering the barriers for organizations to use events as a tool for audience engagement and revenue generation. Currently, you can hire me to produce an event or consult on strategy, sponsorship, budget management, or growth. But I want to “power the press” by offering a range of event solutions, from DIY playbooks pre-built within a project management tool up to and including custom, bespoke productions.

In short, Power the Press will offer a DIY tools that allow teams to quickly get up and running with proven event formats and out-of-the-box technology. We’ll offer a knowledgebase with experience and data to help organizations choose the best event types for their goals, featuring short videos and case study guides. Additionally, we’ll host a community of practice for event producers, providing connection and shared information sources.

⏭️ Next Steps

The journalism industry needs innovative solutions like Power the Press now more than ever. We need new tools and revenue streams so news outlets don’t have to figure everything out on their own. Does this idea intrigue you? Let me know if you’d like to be part of this work.

• Research and product development: Have an event format to contribute that will help fellow media outlets accomplish a specific goal? Reach out to add to the initial template library.
• Partnerships: Interested in being a beta partner to pilot our template solutions? Contact me at agnes [at] powerthepress.com
• Community of practice: Subscribe to this Substack to receive an invitation to our community platform when it launches.

Thank you for reading Power the Press. Share with your event-curious colleagues.

Power the Press aims to democratize event creation for media organizations by providing robust yet accessible template solutions. Combined with our expertise, knowledgebase, and community, we lower the barriers to executing revenue-generating, audience-building events without extensive overhead. Our goal is to equip more organizations with these vital tools to build connections and sustainability.