Bristol24/7 launches campaign to reach 1,000 supporter members

We have set ourselves an ambitious, and highly necessary new target for our supporter membership scheme. We want to have the backing of 1,000 members by March 14. With 750 wonderful individuals already supporting us, that means that during this month-long campaign we need to grow our community by eight members every day.

Become a member by visiting our join page.

We are known for our extensive, informative and interesting coverage of Bristol’s news, culture, food, sport and more. With over 250,000 visitors to our website each month we provide an honest voice for Bristol with stories that often get picked up by other media outlets. We have ambitions to further diversify their team and our coverage, but we urgently need support to continue.

Bristol24/7 supporter membership is £5 a month or £45 a year, and is the best way that individuals can support their local independent journalism. To say thank you for their support, we offer our members deals, discounts, freebies and competitions with local businesses in Bristol. For us this is a win-win situation, it gives us a chance to platform amazing local businesses and provides an extra incentive for people to support us and our work.

Bristol24/7 is completely independent. The funding for Bristol24/7 has historically mostly come from advertising revenue, but we took a significant hit in 2020 when this dropped off entirely, and we have yet to build back a sustainable level of income. This year, we are facing a significant funding shortfall. Our aim is to balance income from advertising with the support from members, as this will make our business more sustainable and resilient and provide a stable platform from which to launch more extensive, investigative coverage of Bristol.

Bristol24/7 is a small team of just ten full-time staff members. We work with some extremely talented freelancers on a part-time basis, and we’d like to grow our team so that we can report on a broader range of topics and provide more opportunities to those around us.

We’re a community interest company, so any profits we do make are re-invested into Bristol. These take many forms, but just some are listed below:

Our extensive work experience programme, which sees at least two young people through our doors almost every week of the year who have the chance to experience real journalism and be mentored by our editorial team.

Our partnership with the Square Food Foundation through which we support the How To Be A Chef programme to train young people who are not otherwise employed to become food professionals.

Our partnership with local charities to whom we offer free marketing and networking opportunities. Last year we supported Caring in Bristol and the Forest of Avon trust.

Our Community Reporters scheme, through which we hire and train aspiring journalists to report on their local area or community and give a voice to marginalised groups.

We’ve got some big ambitions for 2022. We want to increase our climate coverage; we think that the best role we can play to combat the climate collapse is to hold our local government to account, connect people and businesses with solutions and inform our community. We’re also recognising the incredibly adverse effect that Covid-19 has had on young people around Bristol and we don’t think enough is being done to rectify this. We can only play a small part, but this year we’d like to hire a youth editor to give the young people of Bristol an opportunity to have their voices, experiences and opinions heard. We will continue to work with charities and community groups across Bristol, and we are currently in the process of hiring new community reporters.

If you live in Bristol, there is a good chance that some or all of this will resonate with you. We can’t do it without your support and that of our community of members.

Become a member by visiting our join page.

We’re getting the word out about our membership on every platform – via our newsletters, website, social media and our weekly podcast. Please help us spread the word by sharing this article with people you know.

Our campaign runs from 14th February to 14th March, but members can join at any time and we need support all year round if we are to achieve our goals and continue to provide Bristol with quality, local journalism.