CDN Digital (Cebu Daily News) is an online platform based in Cebu, Philippines, dedicated to delivering fresh, relevant, and impactful news that matters to its audience.
The Challenge: learning and leveraging audience insights
For a lean team like ours, knowing our audience is of the utmost importance, especially in the competitive media landscape of the Philippines. Even before joining the programme, we already had the tools to identify our audience, but we needed more insights to truly connect with them and drive meaningful engagement.
IPI’s Local News Accelerator was where we believed we could get some help. The team presented this challenge: We needed to know who our target audience was, so we could address their wants, needs, and interests.
With limited resources, we had to focus on what mattered most.
The Solution: Prioritising and taking it one step at a time
The first step, we learned from the IPI’s Local News Accelerator, was letting people know who we were. Hence, we came up with an ‘About Us’ page on our site, a step in establishing our identity and building trust with the readers we wanted to serve.
Next, we learned ways to connect with our audience, through surveys shared both on our social pages and our site.
Beyond engagement, financial sustainability was also a concern. Since we are a team that is hoping to earn directly from the journalism we are making, we wanted to find new ways of generating revenue.
A newsletter came to mind. CDN Digital is thus making a comeback with its newsletter, where we plan to give our audience curated news items tailored to their interests. This product will also create a direct channel for engagement, giving our readers an avenue to connect with us, and us–an avenue to listen to them. Ultimately, we believe this will help us get more revenue.
What’s CDN’s plan for the future?
Since CDN Digital is committed to bridging local communities and global audiences through credible journalism, engaging stories, and timely updates, we believe these two ideas will help us get the job done. The only thing left to do is deliver. And thanks to this programme, we’re confident we will achieve that.
CDN Digital was one of the participants in IPI’s Local News Accelerator 2024, made possible with support from the Friedrich Naumann Foundation.
