The Irish Times: How Contribly Powered Global Engagement and Content Growth
The Irish Times wanted to become a platform for their audience, and get to know them better than ever before, but where to start?
Their analytics showed that many of their readers come to their sites from all over the world, yet they didn’t know much about their diaspora of people trying to engage with Irish news. This is where The Irish Times’ engagement journey using Contribly’s newsroom software started.
Results:
From a trial call-out to their Irish abroad readers, to a newsroom culture change. Here is how engaging directly with readers using Contribly impacted The Irish Times:
A new engaging offering to sponsors - increased revenue
New high quality, relevant content, sent directly to their team ready for publication
40,000 reader stories, opinions, experiences, videos and photos sent directly to their news teams
Valuable reader insights helping deliver new products ie, new paywalled content, parenting newsletters, Award winning ‘Lives lost’ series
An untapped community or Irish abroad
The Irish Times (IT) describes Ireland as an ‘emigration nation’. Via their ‘Irish Times abroad’ pages, they have found an untapped community of displaced Irish citizens, looking for a platform to represent their changing interests and ready to share their experiences and stories.
The Irish Times’s first focus was supporting the growth and expansion of the community of Irish abroad via their channels. Their aim is to become a platform for the communities they serve which includes news, emigrant stories and discussions for Irish people around the world.
How Contribly addressed the challenge
The Irish Times, Ireland's leading newspaper, knew a vast global community of Irish emigrants existed — While their "Irish Times Abroad" pages were popular, they, like many news brands, faced a hurdle:
Untapped Potential: How could they truly connect with this dispersed audience? And how could they truly understand what was relevant to them?
Missing Voices: How could they give these readers a platform to share their unique experiences and evolving interests?
Limited Insight: Without direct engagement, and valuable first party data, deeper understanding of this audience segment remained elusive.
The challenge? The Irish Times understood that dealing with the amount of audience images, videos, stories and data was too time-consuming and difficult for their journalists without the right technology.
Contribly proved to be the tools needed to complete the job. They enabled The IT to collect, edit, verify and publish their communities stories. In addition to gathering valuable data that would help grow their community and product.
“Contribly enables us to act as a platform for our users to become part of the story. A real game changer!”
Also see Ciara’s article about audiences abroad: Looking for new, loyal audiences? Try overseas…
A first trial call-out and huge learnings
The Irish Times created a first Contribly call-out to all the Irish Abroad. ‘If you are Irish and live abroad, introduce yourself’ They didn’t want to manage this via email, or forms - this would take too much time for the journalists.
People shared their stories of why they moved and their experiences.
Hundreds of stories came in via the easy to use upload widgets, pasted in their articles and apps. Whilst uploading readers also accepted the terms and conditions, granting The Irish Times licence to use all this content.
Those submissions flowed into the Contribly Hub (the newsroom tool dashboard for journalists), all this content (photos and stories) were organised, and ready to be approved for publication.
On their pages, a gallery and map widget displayed all the approved stories. As and when a submission was ticked and marked as approved the content would appear on their sites instantly, creating a live updating article.
In the background, Contribly highlighted contributions that might have issues, helping verify contributions, to speed up the moderation process.
The result of that one call-out? A live article of reader stories, many individual articles from those stories that ‘stood out’, an engaging map with readers photos dotted around the world, loads of 1st part data about their readers saved in a secure easy to use dashboard, and The Irish Times learning loads of new things about their newly active community.
How the Irish Times built on the learnings: One of the learnings was that many those readers that engaged were nurses living abroad. Information that that The Irish Times team did not know. They could now target those readers specifically and dive deeper into their experiences, resulting in this article: Irish nurses around the world: ‘Emigrating was the best decision I ever made’
Then, when nurses started striking, they could once again call on them to share their grievances, and be the news brand to represent and tell their stories.
Why did this work?
People don’t like to be the first to engage. By creating a live article filled with readers content, more are enticed to engage. The quantity of engagement also increases when readers can see they are part of something bigger than just themselves.
Quality increases when people can see the content that has already been shared. No one wants to share something worse than the previous person, therefore quality inherintly increases.
Readers experience an instant value exchange. When we post on social media, we know we are going to get likes, comments, shares - that is what we call the value exchange. When readers share and it is published, this feeling of being seen/heard is essential. If we waste this engagement by doing nothing with the content, your community is very unlikely to engage again in the future. (See this blog post about reader value exchange)
Data collected - they learnt, a considerable amount of these readers were nurses living abroad - and this led to even more content: From: Irish nurses around the world: ‘Emigrating was the best decision I ever made’ to ‘I am a nurse, this is why I am striking’
The progress since that first call-out: Since then, The Irish Times use Contribly daily to call all their readers to engage. From sponsored competitions, parenting questions and advice, children’s art competitions, whistleblowers, experiences from concerts, gardening questions, Experiences from readers seeing protests in America, Irish readers in flood zones in Spain and so much more.
Check out this video from Conor Goodman, who shares how The Irish Times uses Contribly:
For the readers: Amazing live articles they can engage with. You can share on social everyday, but it's not everyday that you are published on The Irish Times.
For the Irish Times: Quality data about their readers. They now know their audience so much better, it’s no longer about individual articles, or campaigns…they can now build long term relationships with these readers like parents abroad, or nurses, or even Irish in America.
The Results
By empowering their audience to share, The Irish Times achieved remarkable results:
Deeper Audience Understanding (Know Your Readers Like Never Before):
Contribly's newsroom software revealed who their emigrant readers are, where they are, what devices they use and what matters to them. This allowed for personalisation.A Surge in High-Quality, Authentic Content:
One “call-out” generated over 180 long-form contributions in just 3 days, directly fueling 6 additional feature articles on their main site. The content was trusted, engaging, and resonated deeply.Massive Time Savings for Journalists (More Relevant Content, Less Grind):
The newsroom software halved the turnaround time for producing focused stories. Journalists were equipped with hundreds of individual narratives, making daily article creation faster and richer.A Loyal, Engaged Community (Readers Feel Seen & Heard):
By providing a platform away from the noise of social media, The Irish Times became a trusted space. Readers knew, when they shared, something would happen - Readers felt represented, fostering strong brand loyalty.A Network of "Community Journalists":
They built a valuable list of engaged readers ready to contribute insights and stories on demand.New Revenue Potential and new products:
Understanding this highly engaged community opened doors for targeted sponsorship opportunities, creating new revenue streams (The abroad section of the Irish times became so relevant they put it behind a paywall. They created engagement in every section of the news, finding where readers engaged most; resulting in a new parenting newsletter for example).
Sponsored competitions, also brought in new revenue, and an even more interesting offering for their advertisers. ie. ‘The Best Place to Live in Ireland’ travel competition, Ireland’s greenest places to live 2025 sponsored by Electric Ireland, Best place to holiday competition in association with Fáilte Ireland.
The Irish Times transformed its approach, turning passive readers into active contributors and reaping significant rewards.
Is your news brand broadcasting to an audience you wish you knew better?