News Content Performance

This year, our Newsroom performance improved significantly. In selecting stories for our Newsroom, we use a scoring system to vet the relevance of the proposed article. The themes we look for are: DEI, LDDW focus, entrepreneurship, Brilliant Future, faculty research, relevance to current news cycle. The more themes the story checks off, the more likely our team is to pursue the lead and produce an article. All our top stories in our newsroom met one or more of these themes. Of course, there will always be stories we feature that have none of these elements, but the goal is to stay as on brand and on message as we can.

Another measure of a good story is: is there a clear beginning, middle and end? For example, did an alum have a story of humble beginnings, learning and growing period at the Merage School, and then achieved success? What role did the Merage School play? These are the questions we want to answer in our newsroom as we tell the central brand story of Why Merage. Our newsroom and social media represents a portion of our owned media. This year we also began tracking our earned media (mentions in the news, internet, etc) through Cision. We had 420 media mentions:

By tracking our earned media, we can learn the kind of stories that we should be pitching and circulating to the media. We also use Cision to track the earned media of our competitors, to learn where they are successful.

KPIs

In FY 20-21, the newsroom received 40,382 pageviews, average time on page is 1:53 minutes. We posted: • 72 stories

• 5 press releases • Average of 6 news stories a month compared to last year's average of 5 • 24 were digitally driven stories, 21 were DEI stories, 28 featured faculty, and 20 covered events at the Merage

School

Our top 5 best-performing stories: 1. Three Times an Anteater (1,448 views) 2. GMAT/GRE Waiver (1,145 views) 3. Dr. Cyrus Shahpar (1,063 views) 4. Espi Elio (746 views) 5. BMA Announcement (684 views) That's a vast improvement over last year's top story with 247 views. Stories can be found in the Newsroom Tracker.

Year-Over-Year Performance

In FY 20-21 the newsroom received a total of 6,898 views (485% increase).

Recommendations for Next Year

Last year we were able to double our newsroom views, this year we improved almost fivefold. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly what caused this year’s success, however, there are some clues. First, it is possible that the year before we set up a cadence that was regular and predictable, priming our audience for this kind of story. Next, the effects of the pandemic and new interest in investing in education cannot be discarded. People had more time to read (as shown by the two-minute average per page) and more interest in possibly investing in their education. This is also shown by the sudden interest in our 2017 story about GMAT/GRE waivers. To some extent this also explains why Vivian’s story resonated with our audiences. Finally, launching the zot version of our newsletter unlocked a new audience for our stories. For next year, I recommend continuing our aggressive 6 articles a month average, especially on stories surrounding student success.