A multi-year partnership modernizing The Dispatch's digital presence and unlocking new revenue channels.

About The Dispatch

The Dispatch delivers fact-based reporting on politics, policy, and culture to a growing audience of engaged readers. As their subscriber base expanded, a fragmented vendor ecosystem was creating unnecessary cost and complexity - and their stack couldn’t support the personalization, tiering, and segmentation needed to serve a diverse audience. The disconnect between their editorial quality and their digital presence was becoming a barrier to growth.

The challenge

Multiple disconnected vendors meant every platform was managed separately, driving inefficiency across the organization. The website no longer reflected the caliber of the journalism, and without personalization or tiering there was no way to create premium experiences for the most engaged subscribers.

On top of that, the publishing team needed a custom plugin to avoid wasting hours moving content between the CMS and their email provider - without one, every send would risk manual errors.

Platform redesign & relaunch

Working closely with The Dispatch team, we executed a complete visual overhaul of their digital presence on WordPress VIP - elevating the brand to match the journalism while streamlining the editorial workflow. As part of the transformation, we migrated subscription management from Memberful to Piano, carefully transferring payment tokens and subscriber data so revenue never skipped a beat.

A premium membership experience

We designed and built a multi-tier membership structure that opened new revenue opportunities: a guest-pass system for sharing premium content, audio articles produced with ElevenLabs, personal bookmarking, customizable homepage sections, and paywalled share links that expand reach while protecting premium content. The Dispatch went from one-size-fits-all to a platform that adapts to each reader.

Unified onboarding & first-party data

A streamlined member activation flow now does double duty: welcoming new subscribers and collecting the first-party audience intelligence that lets The Dispatch segment readers and deliver more relevant content to every group. That same data powers personalized digests, with delivery time and content mix optimized for each reader.

ESP migration & lifecycle management

We led the migration from ActiveCampaign to Iterable, giving the email program a foundation for advanced automations, sophisticated targeting, and personalized campaigns. On top of it we built robust lifecycle management: drip onboarding journeys, dunning, engagement-based retention, and winback campaigns that recover lapsed members.

Editorial tools & workflow

A custom newsletter plugin integrates directly with the CMS, so editorial staff publish newsletters as easily as posting articles - with full control over formatting and personalization. A content sectioning system gates access by subscription level, supporting free and premium strategies in one unified workflow.

Bespoke comment solution

Rather than paying for yet another tool, we built a commenting solution that integrates directly with onsite accounts - saving upfront cost and delivering a dramatically better experience for members.

Data pipelines, warehouse & dashboarding

We built the data pipelines that capture and ingest key data across the stack - subscriptions, email engagement, on-site behavior, and advertising. Those datasets are joined and enriched in a central warehouse, and a visualization layer on top distills the insights that drive decisions: LTV, engagement cohorts, and audience segments, defined through the exact lens of the business.

Commercial partnership enablement

Using audience insights from readership data, we supported the exploration of new verticals and commercial partnerships - including systems to manage ad inventory, external campaigns and house promos alike, across every surface and down to reporting. The work extends to AI: bot-traffic analysis, a Tollbit integration, and support for AI licensing deals.