Building a movement for unbreaking news
The Correspondent
Momkai has been working on the launch strategy of The Correspondent for the past two years. In thirty days, 45,888 founding members from more than 130 countries contributed $2.6 million. A new world record for the number of backers in a journalism crowdfunding campaign.
For The Correspondent we will conceptualize and design an online platform to change what news is about, how it’s made, and how it’s funded. But first let us share how we created a campaign for unbreaking news.
Unbreaking news
Instead of describing problems and stopping there, the correspondents on the online platform we design want to look for solutions with the members; as a smarter coverage of structural, long term developments that shape the world around us.
The campaign
As Momkai we worked together with The Correspondent and Blue State Digital in New York to lay out the strategy for this global movement for unbreaking news. We designed and executed a complete campaign in all its outings.
Together with the development team of De Correspondent we have build a custom crowdfunding platform. With Bureau NY we created a series of launch videos in which, amongst others, DeRay Mckesson, Rosanne Cash, and Nate Silver explain our mission.
The goal
With a website that performed with a conversation rate of 15% we reached our goal of $2.5 million exactly 34 hours before the deadline. The median pledge by members from almost 140 countries was $30, truly making The Correspondent a grassroots movement for unbreaking news.
Founding members will get a one-year membership to The Correspondent when the platform launches on September 30, 2019; a news site completely free of ads and sponsored content; and most importantly, featuring stories every day that will help you understand the world around you.
The roots
The roots of this platform lie with the Dutch platform De Correspondent. Launched in Amsterdam in 2013, we set a crowdfunding world record by raising over $1.7 million from 19,000 backers.
Today, this ad-free antidote to breaking news has more than 60,000 members, making it one of the largest and fastest growing member funded journalism platforms in Europe.
