As many in the NPA community know, I’ve been not-so-secretly working with the NPA again for the past year in a soft return from my extended maternity leave. Today, we’re officially announcing my new role: I am the NPA’s Chief Product Officer! 

My responsibilities include overseeing our product strategy and supporting Feli’s fundraising efforts. As the NPA is, first and foremost, a community, my primary focus will be improving how we support community members like you. Today, I’d like to give you a preview of what’s on the horizon for the NPA community and ask for your support.

As Feli described in her blog post earlier this month, our goal at the NPA is to build a diverse talent pipeline of news product professionals who can transform the news industry by rebuilding trust with underserved audiences, delivering quality journalism, and building sustainable media businesses. 

In addition to expanding our work with more training opportunities, like the NPMC, and other product capacity building initiatives, we’ll be rededicating ourselves to strengthening the connections formed in our community.

We started the NPA during the height of the 2020 pandemic after more than 250 news product professionals came together to say “we need a community in which we can learn from each other and support each other because pushing our news organizations to change into more audience-focused, goal-driven and sustainable businesses is hard work.” The NPA is community where we can come together to level up our product management skills, our shared understanding of news product management as a unique discipline, and our emotional support networks so that we see fewer of our most talented product thinkers leave for more profitable or less stressful industries. 

We’ve now grown to more than 3,000 NPA community members! And, as product people ourselves, the NPA recognizes that we must adapt our community strategies in response to this growth. 

But one thing won’t change, the core philosophy at the heart of our community. “Ask & Give”: All community members should feel safe to ask others for help in one way or another, and every member of our community —regardless of experience, career level or background— has essential strengths and knowledge to give to others. We credit our co-founder Emma Carew Grovum, for introducing the Ask & Give philosophy, which has helped us create the safe, accessible culture of the NPA community.

We’re calling on you, our community members, to use the NPA platform to ASK for help, resources, career support, and GIVE to others by sharing your time and knowledge. 

On our part, we will continue to facilitate these exchanges and commit to GIVE you more:

• Improving the NPA Slack experience. From onboarding new members to helping everyone navigate Slack noise to keep up with important posts, we know there are ways we can improve the NPA Slack experience. We also know that many of you want more private or anonymous ways to communicate with each other on difficult topics. We’ll be trying new things; and if you have ideas, tell us!

• More networking opportunities. Those who participate in the #virtual-coffee channel tell us time and again that the connections made in those randomly paired conversations are one of your favorite parts of the NPA. We’ll start offering more networking events to strengthen our relationships with each other.

• Building communities of practice. We’ve heard that you want to have more technical conversations with each other. We believe in an “all boats rise” philosophy that sharing knowledge can help all of us grow and innovate, but we also respect that as an open community, many of our members simply can’t share sensitive information about their work or company publicly. As our community grows, we must carve out smaller spaces for people to connect who are working on similar challenges.

We need your help figuring out the best ways to make these improvements. So, here’s our ASK of you:

Help ensure we create and deliver the services our community needs most by responding to our anonymous community survey. (My DMs are also always open to directly sharing your feedback and ideas). Like many organizations, we are always striving to improve ourselves. Your input is essential. We want to work with our members to develop better services — better ways of facilitating connection, exchanging knowledge, learning new skills. 

We have one more BIG ASK: Become an NPA Sustainer and set up a recurring donation to support our work. 

This is the first time we’re asking NPA members to donate to our organization, and here’s why:

We always prioritize accessibility, as we never want the NPA to be an organization that requires anyone to pay money for access to our community. This is an essential part of our mission to ensure emerging product thinkers and product leaders from historically marginalized backgrounds have support to pursue ideas that foster trust and provide relevant information for underserved audiences. We’ve also held to these ideals when planning paid programs, like our annual Summit, which offers tiered ticket prices and more than 100 scholarships each year or the NPMC, which offers a number of scholarships to increase diversity amongst participants.

We always strive to punch above our weight, but the reality is that NPA is still a non-profit start-up with a small team and small budget. By becoming an NPA Sustainer, you’ll be helping us establish financial stability to consistently deliver the programs and services all of our members need most. Your dollars will directly support our core community activities, like Slack moderation, community events and honorariums for members who publish or teach on NPA platforms.

We’re calling this our Sustainers Program because our community will always be open to members free of charge. Those of you who support our mission and have benefited from our work, help us keep it going if you’re able! Please consider showing us your support by becoming an NPA Sustainer today. 

With all that said, I look forward to working with all of you in the weeks and months ahead to build a stronger, more connected NPA community. THANK YOU.