Setting and Tracking Goals

How do you define success for yourself and for your news organization? And how will you know when you’ve reached it?

Those are the two questions that setting and tracking goals allows you to answer. But the value of setting goals goes beyond articulating what success looks like. Here are a few other reasons to make time to be thoughtful about the goal setting process:

• It ensures you’re being transparent about your ambitions, and your progress toward meeting those ambitions, with your team and your key stakeholders, including your advisors, funders and readers. And when you publicly share your goal, it helps create a dialogue about your progress, where you’re successful and where you’re experiencing challenges that can engender deeper loyalty and trust.

• It allows you to make smarter business decisions. Setting and tracking goals across different areas of your business — for example, finances, audience and impact — allows you to understand the relationship between these and your bigger picture goals. For example, you may want to grow earned revenue from your audience, so you set a goal. But then you might see that you’re falling short of your audience growth goals, so you understand that an earned revenue strategy won’t be enough for you to meet your broader financial goals. 

• It helps you articulate the value of your news organization. Anyone who has given you money to support your news organization (advertisers, donors, funders, sponsors, readers, etc.) wants to know what you’ve done with those dollars to help make your business sustainable. So when you can readily point to goals you’ve set and progress you’ve made toward those goals, it shows those folks that your business is something worth supporting.

Remember: In the same way that journalists seek to hold power to account, setting and tracking goals enables you to hold yourself accountable to your business.

What metrics should I set and track goals for?

First, a quick reminder of how LION defines sustainability. Sustainability is the intersection of operational resilience, financial health and journalistic impact. Your news organization will be operationally resilient if you build a company culture, compensation plan and workflows and systems that help you retain and professionally fulfill talented employees, including yourself; it will be financially healthy if you develop reliable sources of revenue that exceed your minimum operating expenses; and it will be journalistically impactful if you ensure your journalism fulfills its mission for the communities you aim to serve. 

And while achieving sustainability isn’t a simple, linear path, our hypothesis is that a news organization must first focus on being operationally resilient to be sustainable. This helps it become financially healthy and ultimately allows it to achieve journalistic impact. 

Whether your news organization can generate new revenue is one key indicator of the success of this program for your newsroom; but, we also want to know whether that newly generated revenue has contributed to making your business more sustainable in the long run. That’s why we recommend publishers to set and track goals for eight Key Performance Indicators that primarily focus on operational resilience and financial health metrics. We also encourage you to track any other metrics that feel useful to assess whether you are meeting your definition of success.

Below are definitions of the eight Key Performance Indicators.  You can set goals for these KPIs and track your progress toward meeting them.

Organizational Capacity

Total capacity: The total number of people contributing work to your news organization.

• Why this metric matters: It’s important to understand the capacity you have in your newsroom to do all the things you want to do. 

• How to track it: We suggest you track this metric based on how you’ve built, or plan to build, your team. This will enable you to best understand your capacity and how it could change over time. That means tracking full-time and part-time employees, freelancers, contractors and consultants. Maybe you want to become less dependent on freelancers, so you could set a goal of hiring three full-time reporters in the next two years. Or maybe your revenue strategy includes hiring a full-time person, plus a part-time person who eventually can become full-time soon. We suggest including as much detail as you can since there are many ways to structure and build a team.

• Other things to consider: If you heavily rely on unpaid workers or volunteers, we strongly suggest noting that as well. 

Financials 

Total annual budget: The total amount of money you estimate your news organization will spend over a 12 month period.

Total annual expenses: The total amount of money you’re actually spending to keep your news business afloat.

• Why these metrics matter: You want to be sure your business is living within its means and you don’t want to spend money you don’t have. Also, tracking your annual budget over time allows you to understand how you’re growing your capacity over time. 

• How to track them: While you usually want to set your annual budget just once a year, it’s useful to track your spending against your budget on a monthly and a quarterly basis to understand seasonality and trends. As you get more sophisticated, you’ll be able to recognize those spending trends over time.

• We also suggest tracking monthly expense information so you have a sense of your average monthly expenses, and tracking your expenses by category so you have a rough sense of how much you’re spending on personnel versus tools/technology, etc. Knowing your average monthly expenses and your expenses by category are two very valuable data points to have readily available when buying insurance for your business or speaking with potential funders or donors.

Total annual revenue: The total amount of money you expect your news organization to bring in.

• Why this metric matters: At a very basic level, you should know how your total annual revenue compares to your total annual spending to understand whether you are on track to building a financially healthy and long-term sustainable business. Setting an annual revenue target, even if it ends up being totally off, forces you to be more conscious and proactive about your revenue strategy.

• How to track it: You can simply ask yourself, “how am I performing against my revenue target?” However, another way we’d suggest measuring revenue is breaking it down by three categories: committed, likely, and possible. This will give you a better sense of the pipeline of dollars coming in, and how to prioritize opportunities. Also, it’s applicable to any revenue stream, whether it’s grants, memberships, advertising dollars or major donors. Here’s how to think about what to put in each category:

1. Committed: The money is in the bank or an agreement is signed by the entity giving you money.
2. Likely: There’s an 80 percent likelihood this money will either be in the bank or an agreement will be signed imminently. 
3. Possible: The money is on the horizon or is still a bit “pie in the sky.” These are the  big opportunities you’ll chase after getting your “commitments” and “likelies” through the door.

Total annual revenue dollars by revenue stream: Total amount of money you expect to earn broken down by revenue stream.

Revenue streams as percentage of total revenue: Each revenue stream percentage based on your total revenue.

• Why these metrics matter: The industry generally agrees that revenue diversification, i.e. having more than one revenue stream, is important for the financial health of your news business. We know that, for very small independent news publishers, revenue diversification can be very difficult to achieve because of limited capacity. That being said, we do think it’s important to not be overly dependent on just one revenue stream in case market conditions change and/or one stream collapses entirely. (For example, some news publishers being overly reliant on advertising was a major challenge early in the COVID-19 pandemic). That’s why we encourage you to think about the right “revenue mix” for your business, and set goals about how you can get there. Additionally, tracking revenue diversity can help you decide how to shift your strategy if one revenue stream is more or less successful than you anticipated. It will also help you understand what’s promising, and what to grow if you have shortfalls, so you can get to your total revenue goal.

• How to track them: Vocabulary can vary across the news industries and the industries of the clients you’re serving, so first make sure everyone on your team shares an understanding of what your revenue streams are and how you define each. As long as your team and your hire agree on what you’re “selling,” and your clients understand what they’re “buying,” whatever you call your revenue stream doesn’t matter too much. In our appendix, we’ve provided a list of possible revenue streams by category and you can read more about each in Chapter 5 of our Startups Playbook. Also, you may consider setting goals and tracking the types of revenue within each category. For example, within advertising, you may want to track the percentage that display ads bring in versus content sponsorships.

• Other things to consider: When setting revenue percentage goals, we found in our Project Oasis research that a revenue stream was “significant” if it was at least 20% or more of your total revenue, so we strongly suggest that be your starting target baseline for any existing or new revenue stream you want to grow. 

Months of runway: The total number of months you can operate your business at your current expense level based on the amount of cash you have in the bank. In other words: the amount of time you have before you run out of cash.

• Why this metric matters: What runway gets at is your news business’s liquidity, or, “Do I have enough cash on hand to pay my bills based on the expenses that are coming in?” While there’s no hard and fast rule about how much runway a news organization should have, most experts say three to six months of runway is ideal. For newer news organizations, three months of runway is a decent goal. 

• How to track it: Your total cash on hand, i.e. how much is currently in your bank account(s), divided by your average monthly expense number. 

• Other things to consider: If you’re a nonprofit, you want to pay attention to how much of your cash is truly unrestricted, meaning you can spend it however you’d like to. This is especially important if you are heavily reliant on grant funding, as many donors place restrictions on how dollars can be used. This is a nonprofit’s “operating reserve,” because these dollars can be spent on unforeseen circumstances or emergencies. So we suggest that nonprofits track months of runway based on their total cash on hand, as well as months of runway based on their total unrestricted dollars. 

Audience

Total audience size: The total size of your audience as it’s most relevant to how your business makes money

• Why this metric matters: Any potential client, whether they’re a donor, member or advertiser, is going to want to know the impact of their dollar. This could mean the number of people they’re helping get good information by supporting this publication, or how many people will learn about their product or service by reading this publication. 

• How to track it: There are many ways to track audience size, but as long as you keep the above in mind, you can come up with whatever metrics are most useful for you and your clients. 

• Other things to consider: Sometimes the number that is most meaningful for your purposes won’t be the industry standard. For example, is it most useful to track audience size by providing a total email newsletter list number and providing an average open rate percentage, or could you count the “total opens” of each newsletter and average that number? 

What are some best practices for setting and tracking my goals?

Goal setting and tracking will be a useful exercise for your organization if… 

You treat them as a North Star, and not as a set of shackles.

Goals should always be used in service to the news organization, and not as a rigid tool. They’re meant to provide directional guidance, and if they end up being completely off, it’s good to take time to understand why. Also, you can choose to revisit and reset goals if you’ve surpassed them or if you aren’t even close to meeting them.

If you’ve never set goals before, or haven’t set a goal for a particular metric for which you don’t have a lot of historical data, it can feel like you’re just taking a shot in the dark. That’s okay! Just make sure you are also documenting two key things: your assumptions (i.e. what made you think this goal felt right) and your sources (how you’re pulling the data to measure this goal). 

What starts as a guesstimate will become more informed over time so long as you consistently revisit your assumptions and update them as you learn more about what you’re measuring.

You create a collaborative process for other people on your team to help set them.

The news organization leadership should help shape and inform the North Star of the news organization, and should be able to articulate ‘here’s where we want to get with revenue, impact, growth of the organization, etc.’ But good leadership is collaborative, and team members who are responsible for executing on goals should have a say in setting them. The advantage of collaborative goal setting is that you’ll get a more realistic sense of what’s possible by having those who are responsible for the execution involved in the process. It’s also more likely to help empower your team to take ownership of the goals and to increase their engagement with the work. 

You take the time upfront to create an easy-to-use system that everyone on your team understands and can contribute to. 

There is much value in having your core metrics all tracked in one place and easy to grab at any given moment. Think through the best way to track these metrics for your team. It could be as simple as an Excel sheet or Airtable base, or maybe you’ll want to invest in goal tracking tools/software. Whatever you decide to do, make sure it’s simple and straightforward enough for everyone on your team to contribute to and interact with . Otherwise it will just be one or a handful of people engaging with the data.

You use the data you’re collecting to notice trends and start conversations with your team.

Don’t just set goals and then wait a year to check and see how you did. Decide on existing touchpoints with your team to talk about progress toward goals — a regular All Team meeting, weekly one-on-one check-ins or maybe a quarterly goal-planning discussion. Make time to have these step-back conversations so your team knows that the goals do matter and the whole team is being held accountable for their progress. 

When you do look at the data, you won’t always have a definitive answer for why you’re underperforming or over performing on a goal. At the end of the day, data can be subjective. So instead of obsessing over the numbers, use the data as a jumping off point for more informed conversations about how these are going, what changes you might want to make and what hypotheses you might test in the future.

And depending on how comfortable you feel being transparent about your work as you’re gaining insights in real time, you might consider sharing those insights with funders and donors, who love to know what you’re learning. 

Your last goal setting process informs the next.

As your news operation gets more sophisticated, you can expect to get more and better data. In the same way you’ll take the time to reflect on how to set better individual goals, make sure you take time to reflect on the goal setting process itself. Was the process useful? Are you tracking the right things? Are you coming together regularly or too regularly to discuss progress? Is there an opportunity to share more insights with external stakeholders? Helping you understand what you’re doing as a newsroom — and why — is another benefit of these goal setting and tracking conversations.