Building a sponsored content program with intentionality and trust
Erica Schopmeyer, director of operations at Outlier Media, recently wrapped up a fellowship with Poynter’s Media Transformation Challenge where she focused on growing Outlier’s sponsored content program. Outlier had a couple sponsored content agreements when Schopmeyer joined, but she wanted to help grow this revenue stream to offset the organization’s reliance on grants and improve the organization’s sustainability. She set out to develop an ethics policy and vision for the program, including setting a goal of raising $70,000 by the end of the year. She ultimately built a program that earned Outlier about $200,000.
Schopmeyer spoke with Innovation in Focus Editor Emily Lytle to share a few practical tips and best practices for other newsrooms.
Lytle: What did Outlier consider when building an ethics policy around your sponsored content and advertising?
Schopmeyer: I started with saying, “Let’s make sure that editorial understands that this is business content.” That means that the editorial team will not touch it. They will not have any hands on it because we understand that these are two very separate pieces of our business. Taking into account the fact that we’re a 16-person staff and this is going in our newsletters, which is in front of the audience that editorial is cultivating, I think it’s a bit of a delicate dance. But essentially, I collaborated with our managing editor and our editor in chief, and I created a policy that basically says: This is content that lives on the business side of Outlier. There is no editorial control over it. Our partners are mission aligned. Our partners may be able to review the work, but they have no influence over any of the editorial part of our business.
Then to actually execute the work, we hired a freelance copy editor and a freelance writer so that we’re not relying on our editorial staff at all to do this. And the freelance editor and writer are people within our network, which is the beauty of this. They’re people that we know and trust, and we know that they’re gonna make sound decisions.
Lytle: How do you make sure that your partners are aligning with your mission and values as an organization?
Schopmeyer: Some of that is personal relationships. For example, the first program with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation was focused around training writers of color in Detroit to write stories, and all the stories were focused on the Kellogg Foundation’s grantees’ work. They ended up being really excellent pieces of writing and they could have their name on an article. We paid them to do it, and they were brought into Outlier a little bit for that time. Again, very much separation between Church and State in terms of the editorial side of things. But it was a really great way to feel like what we were doing was mission aligned.
Part of it is just identifying who makes sense for us to work with and then cultivating that relationship just like any funder and really learning about each other. And I understand what our audience’s priorities are, because I live in the newsroom, too, so I understand what could be useful for Detroiters.
Lytle: Can you give an example of what one of these sponsored content relationships look like?
Schopmeyer: I have a writer, Randiah [Camille Green], who I asked if she would be interested in taking on a year-long sponsored project with us. She creates one story every month, and the issue area is around early childhood. W.K. Kellogg Foundation had an interest in demystifying one of these initiatives that they’re a part of and so, having a journalist who understands how to ask questions and see a bigger picture but also see how it applies to individuals – all of those are great skills for deep diving into something like this initiative. She writes a story every month, and it gets published on our site. And it’s really useful content.
Our next guide is going to be a guide for pregnant mothers. This is not like a perfume ad, right? These are intentional stories that in some ways we might be telling anyway.
Lytle: How do you communicate this to readers in a transparent way?
Schopmeyer: We have a very clear physical delineation. We have a little tag on all the sponsored stories that’s blue and says, “sponsored.” We have essentially two sentences agreed upon by both parties, like an explainer that lives on each story that says, “this story was created in partnership with X foundation.” And if we put it in a newsletter, it lives in a special box that says what it is.
Lytle: Are there any tools or technology that has helped in organizing or managing these projects?
Schopmeyer: I am a big fan of [Google] Sheets. I always create a project management document once we start working with a partner, and I outline the dates that need to be adhered to. I have another tool that I really like to use around prospecting. This would be before engaging a partner. I have a pipeline now, but before that, I had created a list of organizations that I would like to work with, that makes sense for us to work with. And they’re just larger buckets like: “housing,” and then who falls into the housing category? Environmental work: Who falls into the environmental [bucket]? Parks, waterfront development. These types of organizations that make sense. I have created a tool for myself so that if I’m feeling like, “Okay, who am I gonna approach next about this?” Then, I can go back to that and say, “Oh, you know, I haven’t actually worked with X, Y or Z.”
Lytle: What are some of your best practices for someone who is looking to start or grow a sponsored content program?
Schopmeyer: Start off by really making sure that editorial feels comfortable with what you’re doing, and have them poke holes in your policy. Have your editors say, I don’t feel comfortable with that. I don’t like that, or that’s great with me, or I have no problem with that. Ask them to be your partner in creating this, so that down the road, when inevitably something comes up that feels sticky or challenging, you can come back to that conversation that you very clearly laid out and say, “Okay, well, what did we originally decide that this was gonna look like?”
I do think reliance on your position in your community and your network are also important. I’ve had a lot of really incredible, candid, insightful conversations with people at these organizations that we’ve ended up working with. And I think that there’s a lot to learn from them, and there’s a lot that they can learn from us. I think that doing the pre-work of understanding who are good fits, then really courting those relationships and doing the work to learn about them will only serve you down the road.
When I started out doing this, I did not want to create plug and play sponsored stories that just appeared on our website that nobody cared about reading. I wanted to create stories that were good. I wanted to create stories that were engaging to our audience. I want that to be on the forefront of what this work is, and I think so far we’ve proven that there is a way to do that.
Something that was a real full circle moment for me: Last year, we received a donation on a story that was done through a partnership, but the person reading it enjoyed reading the story so much and enjoyed that we had profiled this afterschool program that was meaningful to her. To me, that suggests that this work is something that our audience wants to read, too, and that’s important to me.
If you are looking to workshop a sponsored content program, Erica Schopmeyer offered to share her experience and can be reached at erica@outliermedia.org.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
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Cite this article
Lytle, Emily (2025, Jan. 27). RJI’s Potter Ambassadors bring benefits of leading-edge education to Missouri news organizations. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/building-a-sponsored-content-program-with-intentionality-and-trust/
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