Understanding Our Platform & Partnership
What exactly is Contribly?
Contribly is a newsroom platform born at The Guardian, specifically designed with journalists for journalists. It enables you to easily gather, news-level verify, moderate and instantly publish your communities photos, videos, opinions, experiences, and insights at scale, fostering deeper connections with your audience and creating people-powered stories.
But we're more than just software; we're a dedicated partner in helping your news brand thrive.
What do you mean by "we are more than just software"?
Our commitment goes further than the tool itself. We offer a personal touch, drawing from our extensive experience witnessing how hundreds of news brands have successfully used Contribly.
We provide training, share best practices, and act as a partner to ensure your team has the tools and the strategies to succeed. Our Director of Audience Development Francesca Dumas even hosts the "Redefining Engagement" podcast to share insights from media trailblazers globally. We're invested in your success and our industry's future.
See our Reader Call Out Ideas page if you want inspiration on how to get started interacting better with your audience.
Who is Contribly for?
Contribly is built for newsrooms, media organisations, and journalists who want to:
* Engage their community effectively.
* Gather authentic content directly from their audience.
* Create diverse and compelling stories (we have many examples of how to do this!).
* Understand your community's needs and concerns on a deeper level.
* Move beyond simply broadcasting news to fostering a genuine two-way conversation.
How does Contribly help journalists create "people-powered stories"?
We empower you to put your users at the heart of your journalism. Instead of just reporting about the community, Contribly allows you to report with them. You can directly ask your audience for their photos, videos, opinions, experiences, and insights related to your stories (or even help you create your next story) making your content diverse, resonant, relevant and valuable before you even START to work on an article or specific subject. Work smarter, not harder.
What kind of community-generated content (CGC) can we gather with Contribly?
You can gather a wide range of content, including:
* Photos and videos
* Text-based contributions (comments, eyewitness accounts, opinions)
* Responses to polls and surveys
Essentially, if your community can create it, Contribly can help you collect, manage it at scale and instantly publish it.
How does newsroom level verification work?
We get it. Verification is crucial. Contribly provides newsroom-level verification tools designed to ensure the content you receive from your community is:
* GDPR Compliant: Helping you meet data privacy regulations.
* Copyright Cleared: Ensuring you have the rights to use the content.
* Original: Scanning for duplicates from other sources.
* Accurate: Verifying details like location or date of image (for photo requests of a natural disaster in a specific area/date for example)
* Authentic: Including features to help identify potentially AI-generated content.
This gives your team control and confidence in the content you publish.
If the content you receive might fall within any of the above categories, it is flagged in your Contribly Hub ready to be approved or rejected by your journalist before going live!
How easy is it to publish the content gathered through Contribly?
Very easy! It is instantly publishable onto your websites and apps in various engaging formats, such as interactive maps, embeddable galleries, comment displays, polls, votes and more. We, of course, also cater to the styling to match your website.
Will Contribly add a lot of extra work for our already busy newsroom team?
Not at all. In fact, Contribly is designed to streamline the process of gathering and managing community generated content (CGC). The tool is user friendly and simple to use and we provide training support that helps your team adopt new workflows efficiently.
It's less about adding hours and more about a shift in how your team approaches story generation and audience engagement – a shift that can save time because you are getting the impact you are striving for.
How does Contribly help educate news brands on audience engagement?
We are building the news industry standard for CGC engagement. Our unique position allows us to see what works (and what doesn't) across many different newsrooms worldwide.
We actively gather 100s of these real-life examples, innovative strategies, and practical do's and don'ts. We share this knowledge through our training and resources like our blog articles, case studies and podcast, aiming to help the entire industry learn and move forward together.
How easy is it to get started?
Contribly was built so it can be used out of the box. We cater to non-tech savvy people but also can cater to further if you want to involve your devs. Meaning everyone in the business is happy.
We're interested! How can we learn more or see a demo?
That's great to hear! The best way to understand Contribly's power is to see it in action.