NPQ Business Plan Summary

NPQ’s Three-Year Business Plan Is Based on Four Principles

• Attract a wider market of civically engaged actors with content that is useful and relevant to the evolving environment and their evolving practice within it, and is both credible and cutting-edge;
• Create a model in which most of the income is derived from those who make use of and contribute to the content, making the publication a creature of its market’s needs;
• Build revenue streams that are renewable and pooled from many sources but derived from just one primary and one secondary transaction type, keeping the core business infrastructure small; and
• Base the collaborative publishing model on a small editorial staff that is responsible for recruiting, guiding, and editing multiple editorial partners, from lay journalists to media and investigative partners, keeping the editorial masthead relatively small.

This model will create a business entity with a relatively stable low-cost denominator on which can be built a more expansive system. We would predict that the only positions that would need to grow in direct proportion to amount of content, at least in the near future, would be the editorial support positions. The positions that would need to grow in relationship to revenue would be clerical/administrative positions, and this growth would occur much more slowly.