Fumaça

About: Fumaça is an investigative journalism podcast focused on injustices and inequalities. They mainly create serialized audio-documentaries after sometimes years-long investigations. Fumaça’s goal is to become the first audience-funded newsroom in Portugal, while keeping their journalism nonprofit, ad-free, and without paywalls, investors or corporate-sponsored content. Around 1,300 members voluntarily support Fumaças mission financially.

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Fred Rocha, Tech Lead at Fumaça, recalls a pivotal moment in February 2023 during the team’s retreat in Alentejo: “The team brought concerns that we were missing tools to properly manage our community, reduce churn while getting back people whose credit card was expiring, and have a single source of truth for people in the community.” At the time, managing community communications was an “over-complicated” process, as Rocha phrases it. Emails had to be sent manually, requiring lists to be painstakingly compiled, imported, validated, and distributed.

To run their membership model, Fumaça had built their own payment solution using Stripe. The inefficiencies were stark. “Every time we wanted to contact the community about anything,” Rocha recalls, “we had to assemble a list by hand, export it from Stripe and import it to Mailchimp. It consumed a significant amount of time and energy from the community team.” Another big problem was emails that could easily be automated, such as those notifying members of expiring credit cards. 

beabee was the missing piece of the puzzle

It was that moment on the team retreat in February 2023, when the Fumaça team decided that a different solution was needed to organise their growing community. Fumaça had been in contact with CORRECTIV for some time through networks such as the Reference Circle. beabee sparked Fumaça’s interest because it was developed by journalists for journalists. “Other tools we considered were all too much about selling products, rather than nurturing deep relationships with a community,” Fred Rocha says. “beabee focuses on the latter. That is what stood out for us.”

By choosing beabee, Fumaça was able to fill the gap between the payment provider and the organisation of the community, including communication.

beabee makes it possible to maintain close relationships with the community. It is now easier for Fumaça to communicate with the community and activate its members. This involves very mundane tasks: inviting members to events, asking them for feedback on podcasts, writing to them when their credit card has expired, and asking them to remain part of the community when they have cancelled their membership. Fumaça can now automate some of these tasks, saving the team a lot of time that can be spent on journalism and genuine collaboration with the community. Fumaça can now also segment the community for the first time to build sub-communities. For example, based on members interests or expertise. Or based on their level of engagement, for example, how often they attend Fumaça’s events.

Another advantage is that Fumaça finally has a single source of truth, a place where all information about the community comes together. “We always wanted to have that,” Rocha says. In beabee, Fumaça’s community team can see at a glance, for example, what membership status people have, when they last made their payment or if they cancelled their membership, whether their credit card has expired, or which email communications they have subscribed to. This information no longer being scattered across different platforms makes day-to-day work much faster. “It really saves you a lot of hopping around different services”, Rocha says.

In the first months using beabee, Fumaça already saw an increase of monthly community revenue, according to Rocha, which he attributes to the option of being able to more easily handle failed payments.  “beabee makes our lives easier and that has a direct impact on our community revenue.”

The need of a trust-building solution

Another important factor for choosing beabee was the fact that it allows newsrooms to truly own the platform. Fumaça has built their own community join form on their website, guiding people through the join process exactly as they want to, controlling every step of the process. “Building trusting relationships is very important for our membership strategy,” Fred Rocha says. “We want to keep people in our own environment as long as we can and don’t send them to a third party service.” 

So, instead of using beabee’s out-of-the-box join form, Fumaça decided to build its own integration, connecting beabee to the custom join form on their website. This now seamlessly integrates with beabee. “The ability to make these custom adjustments was a major factor in our decision to use beabee,” Rocha says. “We gain a lot of flexibility, we can edit or add code at our end, play around and experiment.” In the future, Fumaça might also add new custom features to the beabee code, or adjust existing features to their needs.