Working in partnership with FT Strategies, The National went from zero to 100,000 registered users in less than five months. In doing so, it set a strong foundation for growth, impact and a financially sustainable future. Here’s how they did it.

 

Situation 

The National is the leading quality English-language news platform in the Middle East. Based in Abu Dhabi with bureaus in Beirut, Cairo, London and Washington, its mission is to explain the Middle East to its broad audience of UAE residents and influential international decision-makers.

“The National’s success rests on strong, original journalism, catering to our readers’ and viewers’ interests - and making sure our journalism reaches the right audience.”

 

Mina Al-Oraibi
Editor-in-Chief 

When the publisher came to us at the start of 2024, The National wanted to launch a registration strategy to support three of its strategic goals:

  • Better understand, engage and grow its core audience 
  • Define a more targeted content proposition for readers, viewers and listeners
  • Create a robust foundation for growth, revenue and influence in the region

Our goal was to create a more targeted and engaged core audience and achieve the internal target milestone for registrations set at the start of the year. We used the North Star framework popularised by the Financial Times to create four supporting outcomes to drive towards the goal.

 

Our work together

The project consisted of three workstreams: 

  1. Design a registration strategy and proposition that spoke to The National’s strengths and designed experiments to validate existing assumptions 
  2. Equip editorial, product and technology teams to drive registrations via knowledge-sharing and training
  3. Support The National’s team with go-live plan and post-launch 

Across all three workstreams, we worked with the team to answer the following questions:

  • Audience - Who is the target audience and what needs and behaviours do they exhibit?
  • Content - What content do these audiences value and why and how does it compare to other value drivers?
  • People - How can internal working methods change to drive audience engagement and registrations?
  • Technology - What tools, technologies and systems help optimise the user experience and fulfil the registration goal?

Our methodology 

Deciding the registration value proposition was a key part of the project. We used an adapted version of the value proposition canvas to align The National’s leadership and project team around the user benefits of registration. Using audience research and inputs from a staff survey, editorial content was decided as the key driver of registration value.

To ensure the right content was locked, we conducted a content analysis to identify three opportunity scenarios. These options were based on production (how many articles does the newsroom produce of this kind?), engagement (what is the audience interest in these stories?) and brand differentiation (how different are these stories from other publishers?). This allowed us to estimate the impact and upside of their locking and to implement rules in Piano, the customer data platform tool that The National had selected.

From there, we set up a transformation office to implement the value proposition ahead of the registration launch date. This involved regular virtual check-ins and weekly calls to make key decisions.

 

Results

The National launched its registration offering in late August 2024 following several weeks of testing. It achieved 25% of its target within four weeks and by the end of November, it surpassed its end-of-year target.

By early January — less than five months after going live — this number had surpassed 100,000 and has continued to grow steadily since. 

The team also experimented with live webinars for registered users, including one around the Israeli strikes on Lebanon. These were designed to both drive registrations and engage readers who have already provided their email addresses.

FT Strategies director Lisa MacLeod and The National’s Head of Digital Strategy, Alex Gubbay, shared a stage at the Global Media Congress in Abu Dhabi in November 2024 to talk about the benefits of first-party data and the experience of growing a registered user base. 

“FT Strategies has been such a reassuring presence and support for us on each considerable step of the journey so far. No way do we get to this point, in this shape, without you, nor indeed with such a helpful steer for what should come next...”

Alex Gubbay
Head of Digital Strategy