Saco Bay News, Black Iowa News, Fort Worth Report and My Ballard created T-Shirts with their communities

If a newsroom is looking to collaborate more with their community and generate revenue, a locally designed T-Shirt or other merch can be the perfect opportunity. We’ve seen it take off for organizations like Block Club Chicago, which leveraged quirky hyperlocal stories like Chance the Snapper and Chicago’s famous lovebirds to create meaningful and community-centered merch. 

For newsrooms just starting out with merch or local partnerships, there can be plenty of unanswered questions about cost, where to find artists and how much to pay them, what platforms to use, the pros and cons of printing locally, and more. So, Innovation in Focus teamed up with a cohort of newsrooms to answer those questions in real time. Each newsroom found a local artist, created a design and launched a merch site. 

• Saco Bay News
• Black Iowa News
• Fort Worth Report (new design launching soon)
• My Ballard (coming soon)

Finding an artist

Almost every newsroom had an artist in mind when we started. For Fort Worth Report and Saco Bay News, it was someone their organization had featured in previous news articles. For My Ballard and Black Iowa News, they found artists within their networks.

If you don’t know an artist off the top of your head you’d want to work with, you can look at the Chamber of Commerce, community groups, local artist collectives, art leagues, or libraries. Dana James, founder of Black Iowa News, said she plans to work more with local high schools or colleges to find artists in the future, maybe even planning an annual design competition.

One tip each of our partner newsrooms agreed upon: Set deadlines early for key tasks such as your first design first draft. This will help keep everyone on track.

The design process

Each of the news orgs wanted a design that spoke to the unique aspects of their community (landmarks, cultural references, inside jokes) rather than their newsroom’s logo or something that would appeal mostly to journalists. 

For Black Iowa News, this meant including the distinctive Des Moines skyline; in Fort Worth, the artist included line drawings of cowboy hats and boots; and the two coastal news organizations included fishing, lobster boats and other distinctive scenery.

My Ballard included iconic “if you’re local, you’d know” type images in the first draft of the design, such as a local house that was rumored to inspire the movie Up and tributes to the area’s origins as a Scandinavian fishing town.

We also learned that it is important to set expectations about how many rounds of edits you plan to go through with the artist. 

Dana James, founder and publisher of Black Iowa News, reached her final design after four revisions. She suggests other newsrooms be as clear as possible when communicating with the artist. For example, Dana even specified the types of hairstyles she wanted for the people featured. At Saco Bay News, founder Liz Gotthelf asked her artist to make the name of her organization more subtle, moving it to the boat rather than a banner across the time.

Pay or profits 

To keep it simple, each newsroom decided to pay their artist a flat fee or stipend rather than a percentage of profits. The stipends ranged from $100 to $350.

Fort Worth Report’s Jamese Branch, marketing and events manager, and Trish Terrel, chief development officer, created a simple scope of work agreement. Here is a templated version of that agreement, which could serve as a good starting point.

If you have a small budget, Springboard for the Arts recommends naming your available stipend and asking artists to propose to you what they can do for that amount of money.

The Innovation in Focus team also talked to artists for advice on what to include in a contract. 

Leah Beach, founder of the Developing Artist Collaboration in Delaware, shared some basic elements:

• Total pay (with dates)
• Intended use
• Length of use
• If the artist receives credit (like on social or on the items themselves)
• The deadlines for deliverables

She also emphasized that you are paying for the artist’s ability, but also their experience. You can expect to pay more for someone with decades of professional design experience, for example, in comparison to an artist fresh out of school.

Print-on-demand

Especially for small and hyperlocal news organizations, using a print-on-demand provider helped relieve any pressure to pack and ship the products themselves.

We researched and compared five different providers: Printify, Bonfire, Spring, Spreadshirt and Zazzle. 

We ultimately scratched Zazzle off our list because it was the only one that used a more complicated royalty system and seemed better suited for designers than a newsroom looking to establish an online merch store. Spring also wasn’t a great fit, because you have to pay extra to change the default URL, which is “my-store” and a jumble of letters and numbers. Other sites allow you to include your news organization’s name in the URL without paying extra.

The other three were all fairly similar in that you could design a shirt or other product, set up a merch store and launch it all for free. You pay for the base cost of the product and set a price for the specific profit margin you want. 

Bonfire stood out because it offers bulk shipping discounts and the option to allow customers to donate an additional amount when checking out. This allows higher profit per order, putting the typical profit around $10+ per a shirt. However, the newsrooms were unsure if it was worth delaying shipment of merch when they weren’t sure how many shirts people would order.

Spreadshirt 

Fort Worth Report expects to make a $6 profit on each shirt after paying a base cost per shirt of $18.99 and selling for $24.99 on Spreadshirt. Saco Bay News also used Spreadshirt, making between $6.50 and $7 on each shirt sold for $26.99.

Initially, Fort Worth Report wanted to partner with a local T-shirt printer to accomplish their goal of establishing more relationships with local businesses. While they tried to negotiate discounted printing by offering cross-promotion opportunities or working out a nonprofit rate, ultimately they felt the price difference between the local printer and the print-on-demand service was too great for the organization to justify it. They decided to use their existing merch site with Spreadshirt.

Another helpful perk of Spreadshirt: They offered a graphics service to help optimize the design for printing for $20. Fort Worth Report used this service, and Jamese said it was helpful, especially since they were printing their design on both sides of the shirt.

Printify

Printify’s pricing depends on the color and size of the shirt, but you can set a profit margin no matter the starting price. For example, a large white T-Shirt sold for $16.25 will earn Black Iowa News a profit of $6.50 with the profit margin set at 40%. 

Printify differs from the rest because you have the option to choose your printer and shipping service, giving the newsroom a wider variety of pricing options. And if you feel stuck, Printify has a guide on how to choose which includes reviews next to each provider from other customers. 

We liked that Printify and Spreadshirt made it easy to order sample T-Shirts, and Spreadshirt let you return the samples within 30 days for a full refund, including postage. This was one of our biggest lessons: Always order a sample before launching, so you know what you’re selling! For example, My Ballard’s Meghan Walker found that her T-Shirt was a thinner material than expected.

Promoting the shirt, design and artist

Both Black Iowa News and Fort Worth Report are looking forward to ordering some shirts to sell at in-person events. For Black Iowa News, Dana often attends festivals in the spring and summer where she’s spending as much as $250 on a booth. If she can sell some merch while she’s there, it will help offset some of those costs. 

Fort Worth Report is hosting a birthday party for the organization in April, where they know they will have an audience of loyal readers and community members who might buy the shirt. They are looking to invite the artist and feature a Q&A with her in their members-only newsletter. 

Saco Bay News also shared a Q&A with the artist, as well as promoted the merch store on their Facebook page. Even the mayor of Saco Bay posted that she ordered a mug! 

The news leaders said they plan to ask the artists to share the designs with their network. Other ideas included sharing the links in newsletters and fundraising campaigns, as well as in-line promotions in stories.

A couple of the members of the cohort said they wished they had established a longer-term marketing or promotion plan before launching, but they’re looking forward to experimenting with ways to keep up the momentum.

Sign up for the Innovation in Focus Newsletter to get our articles, tips, guides and more in your inbox each month!