When our team at CORRECTIV, Germany’s leading non-profit investigative newsroom, looked back at a decade of community journalism, one regret stood out: we had not collected direct contact information from day one. Valuable relationships had been built, with readers, sources, collaborators, local experts, but the data that captured those relationships lived inside Facebook, in scattered spreadsheets, across email tools that didn’t talk to each other. Contacts were lost.
That experience is the founding insight of beabee: in community journalism, your contacts are your most valuable asset — and you can’t afford to lose a single one.
And it wasn’t CORRECTIV’s lesson alone. Across a growing network of independent newsrooms, we heard the same frustrations: A newsletter list in one tool. Paying members in another. Survey responses in a spreadsheet. Event attendees nowhere at all. No one place to understand your community and no one place to analyse how people are engaging with you.
And because it’s complicated to figure out how to make tools work together, this problem often stays untouched for years while the problem grows: missed opportunities, slow growth, a constant nagging feeling that things are falling through the cracks.
So, together with other independent media organisations, first of all the Bristol Cable and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, beabee was built to create one place where all of the activity comes together.
At its core, beabee is a community contact database — a single source of truth that pulls together data from newsletters, payments, surveys and events into one unified view. It lets you understand who is in your community not just as an email address, but as a person with a history: what they’ve supported, what they’ve told you, how long they’ve been around. From there, you can segment, reach out, report better, grow revenue, and deepen relationships, all without feeding your data into platforms you don’t control.
beabee recreates the reality of a small community-newsrooms where people work across teams. Not just treating community members as customers, you want to nudge to pay more money but involving them as collaborators you also engage for your reporting, as partners, for strategic decisions, as volunteers and more.
The payment and membership tools are built in because we wanted to make it super easy and quick to launch a donation-based revenue model, even if you are just starting off. The survey and crowd investigation tools are built in because community journalism is based on listening and collaborating with community members. And the entire platform is open source and built with data privacy as a foundation, because that’s the basis of building trusting relationships.
We built beabee because we learned the hard way that building a community without tracking your contacts is like building a house on sand. Start collecting your contacts from day one. Treat every contact as valuable. Build a community that doesn’t depend on any single platform to survive. That’s what beabee is for.