How BlueLena helps independent news publishers build the systems behind sustainable audience and revenue growth

BlueLena is a Reception Sponsor of the 2026 Independent News Sustainability Summit. LION is featuring some Summit sponsors in Q&As to help members learn more about their work. Find out how to become a Summit sponsor.

Hayley Milloy, LION Publishers: We’ve had the privilege of interviewing a member of your team each year for the past two years (2024/2025) to discuss how BlueLena uses technology and expert consulting to help news organizations move toward sustainability. What are some of the major challenges your customers bring to you? Where do you see small, independent news publishers get stuck most often?

Daniel Williams, BlueLena: The biggest challenge isn’t usually a lack of commitment or good ideas. It’s that most publishers are trying to grow audience and revenue while operating with limited capacity, fragmented data, and competing priorities.

We often see organizations that have invested in newsletters, subscriptions, memberships, or fundraising, but those efforts exist as separate initiatives rather than parts of a cohesive, well-coordinated growth strategy. Their audience data may live across several different platforms, reporting requires spreadsheets and manual work, and teams spend so much time executing that they have little opportunity to step back and think strategically.

Another common challenge is that publishers tend to focus heavily on new reader or donor acquisition while underinvesting in building long-term relationships that drive sustainability. Whether someone becomes a subscriber, donor, or member, the real opportunity comes from understanding who they are, how they’re engaging, and what the next meaningful interaction should be. That’s where many organizations get stuck, and where we help.

Hayley: How does BlueLena’s support help them get unstuck?

Daniel: Our role is to combine strategy, execution, and technology into a single operating model.

Rather than simply providing software or consulting recommendations, we work alongside publishers to help them build repeatable systems for audience and revenue growth. That includes everything from lifecycle marketing and campaign strategy to CRM implementation, donor stewardship, audience segmentation, and performance analysis.

One area we’ve emphasized over the past year is helping publishers become more proactive and data-informed. Instead of reacting to immediate needs, we’re helping organizations prioritize the opportunities that will have the greatest long-term impact. That means using engagement data, audience behavior, and donor propensity to make smarter decisions about where to invest their limited time and resources.

Ultimately, our goal isn’t simply to help publishers raise more money this quarter or at year-end. It’s to help them build the internal capability and infrastructure to become stronger and more sustainable year after year.

Hayley: Last year, we chatted with Mariangela Salmeron, who discussed the ongoing rollout of your purpose-built CRM for newsrooms. Could you share a success story from one of your newsrooms that demonstrates how your CRM led to greater audience engagement and revenue?

Daniel: Publishers were coming to us with challenges about operationalizing Salesforce or other off-the-shelf CRM systems that are perfectly good, but are not necessarily designed for news organizations or they require a significant investment in development resources. 

Because so many of our publishers are engaged in fundraising from individuals all the way up to institutional giving, we made a strategic decision in late 2023 to invest in building our own CRM and moves management system specifically for journalism organizations. 

Our first market and best example is LION member Montana Free Press, which adopted BlueLena’s CRM and moves management system to build a more intentional major donor program. 

Like many nonprofit newsrooms, they had strong supporter relationships but lacked a centralized way to identify high-potential donors, track cultivation efforts, and coordinate stewardship across their team. By combining our journalism-specific CRM with BlueDepth, our donor intelligence model, they were able to prioritize outreach based on both engagement and giving capacity rather than relying solely on institutional knowledge.

The result has been a more structured major gift program, stronger coordination among staff, and a clearer pipeline for cultivating long-term donor relationships. Over the past two years, they’ve increased midlevel giving (defined as gifts between $1,000-5,000) by 44%, and it’s almost entirely attributed to their ability to identify those who have the capacity and willingness to contribute at a higher level.

More importantly, the CRM has become part of their daily fundraising operations rather than simply a database. That’s really the transformation we’re aiming for across the organizations we support.

The model we developed for Montana Free Press has now been successfully deployed across 50 newsrooms, including 20 members of LION.

Hayley: What’s one piece of advice you’d give a publisher who’s just beginning to think about building a robust, long-term audience and revenue growth strategy?

Daniel: Start by investing in establishing and cultivating direct relationships with your audience.

Algorithms, search traffic, and social platforms will continue to evolve, but your email subscribers, members, donors, and subscribers are relationships that you own. This has been written about extensively, but it really is table stakes. Every sustainable revenue model ultimately depends on understanding your individual readers, communicating with them consistently, and earning their trust over time.

I’d also encourage publishers to think beyond individual campaigns. Sustainable growth comes from building effective systems. The organizations that consistently grow aren’t reinventing themselves every few months. They’ve built repeatable processes for welcoming new readers, nurturing engagement, converting supporters, and retaining them for years.

Technology certainly helps, but strategy, consistency, and discipline matter even more.

Hayley: Is there anything new on the horizon you’d like to preview for us?

Daniel: We’re excited about three areas.

First, we’ve continued expanding our CRM and moves management system, which is now supporting dozens of independent newsrooms across the country. We’ve recently introduced BlueDepth, our proprietary donor intelligence model, which helps publishers identify supporters who are most likely to deepen their financial commitment based on engagement, giving history, and other predictive signals. And we’re waiving the costs to append up to 5,000 contacts for publishers who join BlueLena through the end of the year.

We’re also building a new analytics and reporting platform that brings together audience, fundraising, CRM, and campaign data into a single environment. One of the biggest frustrations we hear from publishers is that valuable information exists across multiple systems but is difficult to connect in a meaningful way. Our goal is to make reporting less about exporting spreadsheets and more about giving publishers actionable insights that improve decision-making, forecasting, and long-term planning.

Finally, we’re really coalescing around the idea of BlueLena as the total audience and revenue development consultancy, enabled by the best-in-class technology that we’ve standardized on and license to publishers. This includes reader revenue development all the way up to major gifts development, but now extends to managing advertiser and sponsorship relationships as well. By consolidating all reader and business relationships into one unified environment, we have a much more holistic view of those who support journalism financially, and this leads to strategic insights, identifies new and emerging opportunities, and supports all manner of operational efficiencies.

All three of these reflect the same philosophy that has guided BlueLena from the beginning: giving independent news organizations access to sophisticated tools and expertise that would otherwise be out of reach for most individual publishers.

Hayley: How can publishers get in touch with you to learn more?

Daniel: The easiest place to start is bluelena.io, where publishers can learn more about our services, explore case studies, and schedule a conversation with our team.

We’re always happy to speak with organizations regardless of where they are in their audience or revenue journey. Whether a newsroom is just beginning to build a membership program or looking to strengthen an established donor operation, we believe every conversation starts with understanding the publisher’s goals, challenges, and community before recommending a solution.