Built for speed, verified for trust - reader content your newsroom can instantly publish.
The UGC tech platform
built by Journalists for Journalists
Empowering your community to engage with your newsroom.
Watch the video to see how our newsroom software works.
Reader Submissions Made Easy.
Stop Scrambling for UGC CGC.
Organise, Curate, and Create, All in One Place.
Contribly ensures every piece of CGC is instantly publishable and up to editorial standards.
Build your community as a result.
Contribly Features
The Best Tools to Future-proof Your Newsroom, Invite Your Community In.
Reader Participation
Two-way engagement, built into your workflow
No more broadcasting at our audience. Let’s invite them in! Create powerful reader call-outs — no technical setup, no complexity.
Create a call-out in under 3 minutes — from debates, reader surveys and polls to photo submissions, video responses, and competitions.
Every format is designed to lower the barrier to entry while increasing meaningful participation — so your audience doesn’t just read the story, they become part of it.
AI-powered moderation and verification
Newsroom-level verification at scale
Review, verify, and publish with confidence. AIR (AI Moderation Recommendations) streamlines your workflow by screening content as it’s uploaded to meet your Editorial guidelines.
Flagging copyright risks, inappropriate content, and inconsistencies automatically, AIR ensures nothing slips through the cracks.
Moderate at speed with a simple traffic light system🚦and bulk actions.
Community data dashboard
Close the engagement loop
Powerful community data dashboard that turns participation into editorial intelligence
For the time-stretched journalist:
Contribly’s AI Editor Analysis surfaces your best contributions, key themes, and strongest voices in seconds — so you know exactly what to publish next.
Don’t just collect responses… understand what your readers are really saying.
Because participation isn’t the only goal. It’s the start of the next story.
For the Journalist:
From hundreds of responses → to your next story in seconds
How will the new budget affect you?
- 9.6 Parent → childcare costs
- 9.2 Business → tax impact
- 8.8 Nurse → income drop
- Cost of living
- Tax increases
- Public services
Focus on real-life cost impact stories.
For the audience team:
Meet growth targets by understanding how your audience engages, what they care about, and why they come back.
Track contributor behaviour, returning participants, content performance, and topic trends over time.
Identify what drives participation — from low-barrier polls to high-value contributions — and refine your strategy accordingly.
Contribly doesn’t just help you collect content. It helps you build ongoing relationships — turning one-off contributors into repeat participants, and participation into long-term loyalty.
For the audience team:
From first party data → to engagement with a purpose
Keeping your newsroom safe and efficient
Use out-of-the-box, build on top of it or integrate it
Copy & Paste widgets
Instant Engagement Everywhere
With Contribly’s Copy & Paste upload and publishing widgets, all your engagement needs are instantly available on your pages and apps. Copy and paste in a poll, a survey or even a gallery that shows readers stories as they come in.
Flexible integrations and API’s
Easy integration into all your workflows
Connect your SSO to boost registration rates and turn your unknown visitors into known ones. Feed your marketing tools (CRM, CDP, DMP) with all the data collected for better qualification and personalisation.
GDPR and Rights usage
All your content organised for speed
Ready to publish with all rights cleared. Content comes straight into your dashboard, organised by call-out. No more downloading excel sheets filled with responses or copying individual emails, it’s all there ready for you to action.
“At first the newsroom thought: oh God, another tool. But when they saw how easy it was and how well it worked, adoption came quickly.”
Melle Drenthe
Data Lead & Innovation Manager - Regional Newspapers Mediahuis Nederland
Case studies to inspire you:
Free Download:
The Ultimate Engagement Starter Guide
Struggling to engage readers at scale, stay relevant, or build trust in your brand?
This guide will help you outline the steps you can take in order to efficiently increase CGC Engagement, signed-in users and subscriptions.
✺ Frequently asked questions ✺
-
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.
-
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. -
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. -
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.
-
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, support, case studies, and resources like our podcast, aiming to help the entire industry learn and move forward.
-
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.
-
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. -
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!
-
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.
-
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.
-
That's great to hear! The best way to understand Contribly's power is to see it in action.
To learn more or book a demo you can contact us by clicking here.