Morning Brew

Business Challenge

When Mike Nallan, Director of Insights & Analytics, joined Morning Brew, he was excited by the high level of customer access and engagement but saw the company needed a better way to harness it. “There was opportunity in the chaos,” he says. “We were doing all these surveys, but it was sporadic. The editorial team would want to know something super specific, so they throw out a typeform. The revenue team would send another. There wasn't a rhyme or reason.” The organization—particularly advertising sales reps—didn’t have confidence in the data.

While Morning Brew had behavioral data to measure engagement and declarative data about readers’ jobs and roles, Mike felt the ‘why’ was missing. “We wanted to humanize things, which is core to the Morning Brew brand, and important to show to partners,” he shares. “We didn't really have a translator to understand the data and get a much deeper understanding of who our community of readers is, and then communicate that understanding.”

Solution

Morning Brew decided to centralize research operations and normalize profiling to create a more scalable program. Partnering with Alida, they launched the “Breakroom” community in March 2022. Today, they use surveys and quick polls to gather insights from the community. Their member hub provides a branded experience for Breakroom members to engage with content, interact with other readers in forum-style conversations, and engage directly with Morning Brew.

Instead of reinventing the wheel with each survey, Morning Brew is building a central knowledge base they can rely on to answer questions. “You can slice and dice the data if it's a different stakeholder asking a different question, which I think is the coolest part of Alida,” explains Lisa Goldsman, Senior Associate of Insights & Analytics.

Editorial content

Readers help Morning Brew scope future projects, such as the launch of new newsletters on emerging topics. The community weighs in to validate ideas, as the team documents their experiences and builds with their preferences in mind. 

Pre-sale research

The community has become a vital resource for the advertising sales team to share with partners as part of the pre-sales process. For example, Morning Brew surveyed tech decision-makers in the community on their pain points, which helped build out insights for their creative studio to build content around, and confidence in the alignment with their brand partner.

Results

Over 15,000 members joined the Breakroom in the first seven months, exceeding the recruitment milestone Morning Brew set at launch. Surveys achieve an industry-leading 30%+ response rate, which Mike attributes to their light, fun approach, consistent with the Morning Brew brand voice.

The established community allows Morning Brew to act quickly. As Mike explains, “we can put together a questionnaire, send that out on Thursday, get answers by Friday, and report back by Monday. We can do that because we have access, we know our sample sizes straight away in certain areas of interest, and we can go tackle it.”

Thanks to the agile, time-saving process, Mike and Lisa have time to focus on analysis, communicating results, and providing stakeholders the resources they need to make decisions. “One of the things that we take pride in is we'll join client calls. We show up in new and interesting ways, teaching our partners something they didn’t know prior. The sales team is now able to go out with confidence and say, ‘we have a research team and we know this for sure," says Mike. With an established practice in place, the team’s role is growing and becoming more central to Morning Brew’s business.

The team is excited about the potential to provide more opportunities to encourage the highly engaged community to share best practices with each other. “With all the things we know about this community, we can see that this is actually a really special space.”