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A Newswire for Your Organization

Nonprofits now have a newswire to call their own

Think you can't afford to get the word out on your nonprofit? Think again. David Irons, co-founder and VP of AScribe, talks to Office.com about AScribe, which transmits nonprofit news for less than you might think.

By Marianne Mancusi for Office.com

Oct. 31, 2000 -

While companies like PR Newswire and Business Wire might have no problem getting the news out, they do it at a price that might be out of many nonprofits' reach. AScribe, a newswire service based in California, distributes news strictly for the nonprofit sector at a lower cost. Office.com talked to David Irons, co-founder and VP of the company, about how the service works.

What is AScribe?

It's a newswire service for the entire independent sector. It's two and a half years old. We started it in California in March 1998, sending news from California universities and nonprofits to California newspapers and new-media organizations. At the end of an eight-month test, we had enough feedback from our customers; they told us they would pay for it, and they all wanted us to roll it out nationally if we could. So for the last year and a half, that's what we've been doing. We're now in 35 states with news from 350-plus organizations.

Why do nonprofits have a problem with some of the more traditional newswire services?

It's a combination of brand and cost. The people who are most interested in nonprofit news don't tend to be on the business desk, which is largely where PR Newswire and Business Wire are read. And also, for the most part, nonprofits can't afford to spend north of $500 for each release that they want to put out nationally. We do a variety of things to keep our costs as low as we can and use technologies that allow us to pass those savings on to our customers.

"We basically make it very easy for organizations to distribute to major papers, daily newsrooms and traditional media."

- David Irons, co-founder and VP AScribe

Can you give us some examples of cost cutting?

Well, we are, at this point, only seven people working in one office in Oakland, Calif., which keeps our overhead down. We don't have the expense that the corporate newswires have of releasing market-moving financial information simultaneously on three continents. At this point, we are only doing information from universities, foundations, environmental organizations and other public policy-related nonprofits that have news they want to get out not only to traditional newsrooms, but also into new-media space.

If a nonprofit wanted to try out your service, how would it go about doing so?

(The nonprofit) would contact us probably via our Web site. It has all the basic information one needs to learn about the service, to see the last seven days of news on the wire and figure out if it's a good fit. You know, most organizations do want to experiment with it (AScribe) because the cost is so low, and the fit really is apparently so close to what they're doing. We love when people want to experiment with it. You can download the membership forms from the Web site and pick a news-release package.

A package?

One way we drive costs down is by not billing for individual releases. People buy a news-release subscription in advance, and when they've used up 80 percent of it, we go back and ask, "Do you want another package?" Fortunately, somewhere north of 95 percent of our clients are renewing.

Once they subscribe, then what?

We basically make it very easy for organizations to distribute to major papers, daily newsrooms and traditional media. We deliver to that market over leased space on the AP Wire, so we're right in the major data stream flowing into the newsroom that is searchable by every reporter and editor in the newsroom covering a certain beat. Our members can reach individuals covering many different beats - often these are people they don't know are interested in their news. They (the reporters) might be new to a beat, they might be covering that beat for a colleague. It's a very useful supplement to one's Rolodex and individual lists that one might maintain.

Then we flow news into Web space through a variety of different channels. Many Web sites, more than 250 of them so far, publish news releases as they were written by the organizations. Some of those sites, like About.com, are very large Web portals that have about 650 different channels of information. Some are very specialized Web sites that appeal to narrower, vertical audiences ranging from those interested in oceanography to psychology and from anthropology to zoology. They're not all academic or scientific in their focus - there's a lot of environmental news, a lot of business economic news, a lot of health-related material that goes out on our wire. It finds its own natural audience with Web sites that are focused on the topic of the release. We also move our members news into digital news services, like AP Alert, and archives such as Dow Jones Interactive, Comtex and, next month, Lexis-Nexis.

How much does it cost?

Annual membership for nonprofits is $125, and a package of 30 news releases costs $900. How does that compare with a company like PR Newswire? I think we're undercutting them by more than 90 percent. But they are still more national than we are. We're a young organization; we're still growing our downstream network, those organizations to which we send. Though we're smaller, we're offering a service that our members find valuable. They tell us we're doing something that's long been needed - creating a newswire service that's focused on the needs of universities and the independent sector, and satisfying the desire of media to receive that news via a digital pipeline.