Publishing Platform

The publishing platform Banyan has designed for community-level news co-ops is tailored to Banyan’s multifaceted community-institution model. 

The platform’s foundation melds two powerful off-the-shelf software applications, and Banyan amplifies their impact with distinctive digital tools it developed.  The platform’s public face is an open-source WordPress framework now in wide use.   The platform’s back end is NationBuilder, a database integrated with an array of digital tools that’s popular with political, labor and cooperative organizers.  Banyan’s hybrid platform was developed with $35,000 in Knight Foundation funding received when the Institute for Nonprofit News selected Banyan as an Innovation Fund Grant winner.

The platform includes six crucial components, some of which arise from the tools Banyan has developed, some from the WordPress theme, and some from NationBuilder:

• CMS/Publishing: The platform brings together news, features and other information — text, still photography, audio, video and data display — into a seamless news presentation. In Banyan’s model, news co-ops offer readers a variety of ways to read a co-op’s journalism in addition to going directly to its home page, with options from daily emails of headlines to a phone app to text alerts, even podcasts.
• Collaborative Journalism: Easy-to-use collaborative journalism tools are crucial to co-ops’ success. They offer readers an array of possible responses: 1) click a box to say whether the story was helpful; 2) send the editors a direct message with suggestions, corrections or information for further stories, 3) post a comment about the story; 4) engage in a digital engagement forum on the topic that the story advances, to post or perhaps just to read what others are saying; 5) invite other people to engage in the forum; 6) start a forum if none on the issue exists; or 7) submit an article, images, audio or video for publication. These tools, along with analytics, are designed to provide a high volume of reliable and useful feedback to editors. The tools also offer readers a chance to flag stories as offensive to the Banyan value proposition of relevance, respect and trustworthiness.
• Digital Public Square: The engagement forums serve as a welcoming public square for people to come together in community, to learn from each other and other resources, and to use bottom-up digital tools to harness the power of networking to organize in pursuit of constructive community change. The forums may also be used by people offering and seeking help — mutual aid groups, a tool exchange, much more. The digital tools are designed to ensure easy access by less-than-expert web users in the context of a welcoming space. In addition, the platform opens community space for each school and other public community organizations. It also offers space for, or links to sites for, freecycling, resource swaps, time banks, and other activities through which people help each other to enrich their community.
• Viral Tools: Every page offers readers an array of easy ways to invite others to read an article or to invite them to join a forum discussion or otherwise engage. Such “viral” tools are built to engage news co-ops’ audiences in a trustworthy way — many new readers will arrive because someone they know has invited them. And many will become members.
• Membership marketing: The software uses nearly frictionless techniques to help readers understand the value that their news co-op’s community brings to their lives — and to make it a snap for them to act on their understanding by signing on as paying members.  It tracks and analyzes reader behavior to detect signals that the time is ripe to make special membership offers, and automates offer-presentation accordingly.  Further, it helps enrich membership relationships in ways that inspire members to pay annual fees year after year.
• Back office: The platform includes a reader/membership database with a reputation-tracking algorithm that, among other things, alerts the editors to the members who add the most value to the site. It processes online membership payments and renewals and creates reports.