Dear readers — Calum here. The day has come! We’re officially launching our first ever Bell membership campaign: a major push to bring quality local journalism to a huge new audience across Glasgow. The team, including Bell mascot, Dumpling the Chow Chow, is absolutely buzzing. Here’s our brilliant campaign site where you can see exactly what we’re trying to do, why and how close we are to our goal.
That goal is to add 1,000 new paying members by 15 November, which would take us to a total of 3,000 full subscribers. To do some number crunching: we’ve already got nearly 28,000 readers on our free list. If just 3% of them sign up, we’ll reach the target right away.
This campaign is about what we can do for Glasgow, to make it a better city to live and work in. To that end, Bell readers have helped us come up with five amazing pledges that we’ll make good on if we hit 1,000 new paying members by our deadline. Here they are:
We believe these will make a big difference here: training up talented young journalists, creating a space for much more thoughtful city-wide conversations, going properly deep on some of the biggest issues we’re facing, and more. In the coming weeks we’ll be telling you more about each pledge and why we think it would make such a difference.
We know that 1,000 is a massive (insane?) target, so to get us there we’re allowing you to choose your price for a limited amount of time. You can now lock in a year’s subscription for only £65 — that’s just over a fiver a month, and more than £40 cheaper than paying monthly.
Or, if you’re really not sure, you can try us out at just £2.99 a month for a couple of months. Every signup counts towards the big target. We've set up a campaign tracker on our website so you can follow our progress to the second (and we’ll be trying not to bite our nails raw while watching it).
As a free Bell subscriber, you’re already halfway to being part of our mission to make Glasgow better. Go the whole way by being one of the first 100 people to join up during our campaign, for a price of your choosing, and help us unlock those big pledges.
We’re incredibly excited about what the next few weeks will bring. So let’s get to it and spread the word!
