What we heard at our election listening sessions

Throughout May and June, we hosted five listening sessions dubbed “What’s on your mind, municipally speaking?” to hear from Edmontonians about the issues that matter most to them in the 2025 municipal election. Two of the sessions were online, and three were in person at Edmonton Public Library branches in Castle Downs, The Meadows, and downtown.

In 2021, pandemic restrictions meant every listening session we held happened on Zoom. This year, we could mix virtual and in-person events, and it was incredibly rewarding to meet people where they live.

The listening sessions are a key part of our 2025 municipal election project, which aims to help Edmontonians make informed choices in the upcoming election. The idea was to offer space for people to go a little deeper into the issues that matter most to them.

We are grateful to everyone who took the time to share their thoughts with us. We heard from dozens of people, and we learned a lot.

An excerpt from the flip-chart notes taken at our listening session in Castle Downs on June 7, 2025.

A flavour of what we heard

Hundreds of comments, whiteboard notes, and flip-chart scribbles coalesced into several clear themes, including homelessness, social disorder, governance and accountability, infill, housing affordability, infrastructure and growth, policing and public safety, active transportation, and climate change.

Here are some examples of what we heard:

“How we deal with the homeless population, how we view them, is kind of fundamental to how we view other aspects of our society.” Participants agreed that the housing crisis demands urgency, creativity, and empathy while also acknowledging growing unease about safety on transit and in public spaces.
“The city has done a lot of work around initiatives and reports and plans, and then there’s no accountability to actually deliver on those.” People want competence over theatrics: clearer measures of success, better follow-through on approved plans, and safeguards against party-style politics that could deepen polarization.
“What I am against is in older, mature neighbourhoods, where all of a sudden you’ve got house, house, house, 11-unit building right beside the house. No parking provided.” Support for compact growth collides with worries about lost trees, parking shortages, and oversized projects that feel out of scale. Residents asked how council will preserve neighbourhood character while meeting housing targets.
“We need to build deeply affordable housing, and we’re not doing it right now.” Beyond homelessness, people fear being priced out of the city altogether. They pressed for tools — like inclusionary zoning or city-owned land — to keep a mix of incomes in every ward.
“A lot of the business people … they’re just having to close because they can’t get people to their businesses. And I don’t know that the city is doing much to help them.” From LRT construction headaches to rec-centre shortages, voters questioned whether Edmonton is choosing the right projects, sequencing them well, and mitigating disruption for local businesses.
“I’m not saying defund the police. I’m just saying, can there be a reallocation into different agencies that would be better suited to provide the types of support that we’re looking for?” Many see value in policing but want a bigger share of the safety budget to flow to mental-health teams, outreach workers, and transit peace officers.
“Bike lanes are seen as anti-car, and I’d like to hear the rhetoric change to ‘transportation options.’” Debate over bike lanes remains fiery, yet there is a growing chorus for neighbourhoods where walking, rolling, and transit feel as convenient and as safe as driving.
“The smoke has been … like a hard punch, because it almost always comes.” Wildfire smoke, heat islands, and tree loss turned abstract climate goals into lived reality. Participants talked about tangible resilience measures, from shade infrastructure to tougher tree-retention rules, alongside emissions cuts.

Underlying many of these discussions is a frustration with the limits of municipal power when provincial decisions (or inaction) shape key files such as housing, policing, and social services.

How we analyzed the input

We used large-language-model tools at two key points. First, we fed the transcripts, flip-chart photos, and whiteboard notes into a large-language model and asked it to cluster recurring ideas. Those thematic groupings came straight from the AI; for the purposes of this post, we did not apply any editorial tweaks to that structure. Second, we asked the same model to pull candidate quotations for each theme. From the resulting pool, Taproot chose the excerpts you see here.

Looking ahead to the broader election project, we’ll run several rounds of analysis with multiple large-language models on all the input we collect. The goal is to get a comprehensive, data-driven view of community priorities; our editorial team will then combine those machine-generated insights with additional reporting and judgment to shape the candidate survey and other election tools.

We’re fortunate to have powerful large-language-model tools at our fingertips to handle the heavy lifting of pattern-spotting and quote-gathering, freeing our team to focus on other important work. Because this technology is evolving quickly, we’re committed to learning in public and following emerging best practices, including recommendations from resources like Trusting News, to keep our use of AI transparent, responsible, and firmly anchored in human editorial judgment.

What happens next

Alongside our election question, input gathered at these sessions will help us draft a candidate survey that will be sent to all candidates this summer. The survey will form the backbone of our voter matching engine, which we plan to launch in September.

Here’s what’s next in our election project timeline:

July and August: Formulate the candidate survey;
August and September: Distribute the survey to all declared candidates;
Sept. 22 to Oct. 20: Distribute the matching engine through Taproot’s channels and community partners;
Oct. 20: Election Day.

How you can still help

There’s still time for your input to shape our work! If you haven’t already, please take a moment to answer our election question: What issues do you care about as you consider who to vote for in the 2025 municipal election, and why?

Every response helps us build a better candidate survey and a more useful voter-matching tool, so Edmontonians can make confident, well-informed choices on Oct. 20.

If you’re an organization that wants to help spread the word and ensure your community’s perspective is considered, get in touch to become an election partner. We have 22 partners so far, and we’d love to work with you.

Housing Complex a finalist for Collaboration of the Year

We’re proud to announce that Housing Complex — Taproot’s series on what works, what doesn’t, and what can be improved about Edmonton’s housing system — has been named a finalist in the Collaboration of the Year category at the 2025 LION Publishers Sustainability Awards.

UPDATE: We won the award! Read more about that here.

Housing Complex, which was made possible through a collaboration with the Edmonton Coalition on Housing and Homelessness, is in the running for Collaboration of the Year at the upcoming LION Awards.

This series would not have been possible without the help of the Edmonton Coalition on Housing and Homelessness, nor would this nomination. The Collaboration of the Year award recognizes a local, independent, online news publisher that has “successfully formed a short-term or long-term collaboration with at least one other organization to positively affect their journalistic impact, financial health, and/or operational resilience.”

Partnering with ECOHH allowed Taproot to access funding from the Alberta Real Estate Foundation, making it possible to assign writer Eric Rice and photographer Jordon Hon to capture the stories of 12 people who play various roles in the housing system. Those portraits became the heart of a multi-part series surrounded by explanatory work from Taproot’s editorial team.

We also worked with ECOHH to secure more funds for a well-attended and interactive event to help people further engage with the topic. We are endlessly grateful to ECOHH’s Jim Gurnett for helping us find a way to pursue this project, which would otherwise have been beyond our means. And we are indebted to Eric for not only conducting these interviews with immense empathy and care, but also laying the groundwork to make this collaboration possible.

The awards will be presented on Sept. 3 in St. Louis, MO, during the Independent News Sustainability Summit. Many thanks to LION Publishers for this recognition, and good luck to all of the finalists. Your work is immensely inspiring.

Election brings opportunity for more collaboration

When we embarked on the project that became Housing Complex, we expected housing to be a key election issue, and that assumption has been borne out by the responses so far to our election question: What issues do you care about as you consider who to vote for in the 2025 municipal election, and why?. The answers to this question will inform the survey we’ll be sending to candidates later this summer, and that will form the basis of the voter matching engine that we’ll make available to everyone in the fall. So if you haven’t weighed in yet on the question, please do — the more people we hear from, the better.

We’re happy to have the participation of several election partners to help us increase the breadth and depth of this work. They are using their channels to spread the question, and they’ll continue to engage their communities leading up to the Oct. 20 vote. If you belong to an organization that should be involved, get in touch.

A progress report on Taproot’s election project

Much has happened since last we spoke about our election plan, so here’s an update on what we’ve done so far and what’s to come.

A tiny sample of what we heard at the May 22 listening session to dive deeper into the issues that matter heading into the municipal election. (Debbi Serafinchon)

Hundreds of answers to the election question

This entire project begins with an expression of curiosity: What issues do you care about as you consider who to vote for in the 2025 municipal election, and why?.

So far, we have collected more than 550 answers, which is about double what we gathered in 2021. That’s a tremendous start, but we’d love to gather even more. If you haven’t answered the question yet, please do, and spread it around to your friends and family.

Three listening sessions done, two to go

At a series of events dubbed “What’s on your mind, municipally speaking?”, we’ve had some wonderfully engaging conversations. Many thanks to those who joined us virtually on May 14 and in person on May 22 and June 7 to dive deeper into some of the issues that arose in the early responses to our question.

We have been so impressed by the thoughtful input offered, as well as the participants’ willingness to hear out people who have different points of view. We’ve learned a lot, and attendees seem happy to have spent the time.

You can still sign up for one of the two remaining sessions:

June 11 at 6:30pm online
June 14 at 2pm at The Meadows branch of the Edmonton Public Library

All attendees will receive a little something from our friends at Unbelts. Many thanks to the Edmonton Public Library for hosting our in-person sessions.

More than a dozen election partners signed

We’ve enlisted the help of several election partners to support our effort to equip voters to make confident, well-informed choices.

These organizations have agreed to spread our question, invite people to listening sessions, encourage candidates to fill out our survey, and circulate our voter matching engine. In return, they get a space on our election site to express what issues are important to them.

As of this writing, we have 13 election partners signed on:

BILD Edmonton Metro
Dear Future YEG
Edmonton Bike Coalition
Edmonton Coalition on Housing & Homelessness
Edmonton Federation of Community Leagues
Edmonton Global
Edmonton Public Library
Edmonton Transit Riders
Green Drinks Edmonton
Paths for People
Protect Our Winters – Edmonton Chapter
REALTORS Association of Edmonton
YEG Muslim Vote

We’re in talks with several others, but there’s room for more. If your organization should be on this list, get in touch.

What’s next

The answers to our election question, the input gathered at the listening sessions, and the issues surfaced by our election partners will inform the questions we ask in our candidate survey.

To help us make sense of this enormous pool of data, we’ll be employing AI (specifically, large-language models such as ChatGPT or Gemini). It is the nature of these tools to reflect the biases inherent in their training data — we’ll work hard to mitigate that as we derive the questions we’ll be putting to the candidates.

The questions will not capture every issue we hear about, nor will they necessarily reflect what we hear about most. Rather, the survey will be geared toward municipal issues on which candidates are likely to have differentiating opinions, expressed in multiple-choice answers. This is what we’ll need to build the voter matching engine, which will let you take the same survey and learn which candidates align with you best.

Declared candidates will receive their surveys starting in mid- to late August. We expect to learn about a few more when nominations close on Sept. 22, and we’ll get those candidates their surveys as soon as possible after that. Candidates’ answers will be displayed along with their other information on our election website, (as we did in 2021).

As soon as we have a critical mass of candidate responses, we’ll make the voter matching engine available to use until polls close on Oct. 20.

What you can do

While we’re in the information-gathering phase between now and early July, these are the things to do or spread the word about:

Answer the election question;
Attend a listening session;
Become an election partner.

Once the candidate survey is ready to go in August, please encourage the candidates in your ward to fill it out. And watch for the voter matching engine in September.

We’re working with a partner to present a forum for mayoral candidates in Edmonton in the fall — we’ll share details as soon as they’re firmed up. If you are aware of any candidate forums or other related events, in Edmonton or the surrounding region, please submit them to the Taproot Edmonton Calendar.

Finally, if you value this work, become a Taproot member. You’ll be helping us inform, connect, and inspire the community.

The Taproot Mini brings a bit of fun to The Pulse

Taproot now has its own crossword puzzle, bringing a daily dose of delight to The Pulse.

As is the case with everything Taproot publishes, the puzzle is locally sourced. We’re excited to be working with Brandon Cathcart, a crossword constructor who also happens to be a reader of Taproot’s weekday newsletter about what’s going on in Edmonton.

Crossword constructor Brandon Cathcart is the mind behind The Taproot Mini.

“One day, I was like, ‘I think this could use a mini crossword,’” Brandon said of The Pulse. “I think I would enjoy taking a little break after my news updates.”

Now, Brandon was perhaps primed to think this way. He caught the bug for doing newspaper crosswords back when free commuter dailies like Metro were a thing, and he started making his own in high school, about 15 years ago.

But it’s not just Brandon who has seen this opportunity. Crosswords were born in newspapers more than a century ago, and the great success of New York Times Games has persuaded many outlets to revive the tradition of offering diversions alongside the news.

This also aligns with Brandon’s larger project. He recently started YEGwords, which sends a weekly email newsletter with an 11×11 crossword (more challenging than The Taproot Mini), along with commentary for the word nerds among us. He also distributes paper copies of YEGwords puzzles in selected coffee shops and bookstores.

“I want to put something fun into the world that people can find and enjoy,” he said.

It’s a worthy mission. And for the next month, Taproot will be one of those places where Brandon sprinkles some fun. Every day in The Pulse, you’ll see a mini-crossword made just for Taproot readers, always with a few Edmonton-themed clues. Based on what I’ve seen so far, I think you’ll enjoy them, regardless of your puzzling prowess.

“One of the things that I really try to do with my crosswords is make them accessible for people who aren’t familiar with crosswords,” he said, “while still making them fun for people who do.”

Give them a try and let us know what you think! If you don’t already get The Pulse, you can sign up here. We’d love your feedback on the Mini at hello@taprootedmonton.ca.

Taproot Edmonton’s social media posts are now automated

Social media can be a valuable tool, but we’ve realized it’s not essential to our mission to help you understand what’s happening in Edmonton and the surrounding region. After reviewing our data and reflecting on the value we provide, we’ve made an important change to how we use social media: Our posts are now automated.

Taproot is now automatically posting stories and newsletters to five social media platforms, including LinkedIn.

Until the end of 2024, we handcrafted each post for our social media channels. But when we examined the results, it became clear that social media wasn’t driving significant traffic to our website or increasing sign-ups. Investing more time to boost engagement would have taken us away from what we do best — delivering reliable, focused intelligence about our community.

In fact, many of you rely on our work precisely because it allows you to avoid spending excessive time on social media. Our weekday newsletter, The Pulse, and our weekly roundups provide everything you need to stay informed and connected, without endless scrolling.

As Taproot Edmonton member Julie B. says: “I love knowing what’s going on in my city and what’s the latest news. Where else can one get all this info in a timely manner complete with links for more in-depth information when you want it? I’m very grateful for this publication!”

In addition, as a Canadian news publication, we currently face restrictions on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. And with many organizations shifting their primary social presence to platforms where we’re restricted or not active, manually posting became even less aligned with our goals.

To keep informing those who use social media as an alert system, we’ve automated posts to announce new content across several platforms, including LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon. While our posts will still provide helpful alerts, we won’t be actively monitoring these channels for responses. From time to time, we may still manually post important updates or special content, but this won’t be the norm.

However, many members of the Taproot Edmonton team are active on social media and happy to engage. If you’d like to connect or reach out, you can find our team on LinkedIn.

Thank you for following along and supporting Taproot. We’re committed to keeping you informed, connected, and inspired while saving you time.

It’s time to share what’s on your election agenda

Curiosity is at the heart of everything Taproot does, and covering a municipal election is no different. Our approach is not to tell you what we think, nor is it to concentrate on what the candidates promise. We begin by asking what you care about and building our work around that in the months leading up to voting day on Oct. 20.

We started gathering input during our housing event in November 2024 — now we’re widening the aperture with a bigger question about what’s on your mind heading into the 2025 municipal election. (Flickr/Mack Male)

If you were reading Taproot in 2021, you may remember this approach as the People’s Agenda. We called it that because we drew inspiration from Jay Rosen’s concept of the Citizens Agenda. This method gives journalists a way to ground their work in the issues voters care about, rather than engaging in the “horse race” coverage that is more interested in who’s leading in the polls and other tendencies that reduce politics to a kind of sport.

When we embarked on that project during the last election campaign, we weren’t sure what we would end up with. We just knew we wanted to listen to the people and equip them to make informed decisions. In the end, we figured out a way to be useful to thousands of voters, and we’re ready to do it again, in a bigger and better way, employing the lessons of 2021.

What do we want to know?

Here’s this election’s kickoff question: What issues do you care about as you consider who to vote for in the 2025 municipal election, and why?. It’s an open-ended question meant to capture not only what’s on your mind but also what you want to hear about from the candidates for mayor and council as they compete for your vote. You might want to keep in mind the kinds of issues that are under municipal jurisdiction as opposed to provincial or federal — the City of Spruce Grove has a handy guide — but don’t get too tangled up in that. Speak from your heart.

This year, we are also inviting (but not requiring) you to share the first three characters in your postal code. That’s so we can see if there are any discernible patterns in what matters to people in particular wards in Edmonton or specific municipalities in the metro region.

What will we do with the answers?

The responses will be one of the most important inputs for the Taproot Survey, which we will distribute to candidates so they can indicate where they stand on the issues that are important to you. In 2021, we asked 30 multiple-choice questions reflecting the topics raised in our information-gathering. Some were very specific, such as “Do you think city council should have approved the Epcor’s E.L. Smith Solar Farm?” Others were more general, such as “How much should the city spend to help local business recover from the pandemic?”

Some candidates did not like the multiple-choice format, and to be sure, political questions tend to have nuances that are difficult to capture in four or five standardized responses. But this format makes it possible to let voters take the same survey and find out which candidates they align with. This matching engine turned out to be a powerful way to equip voters with actionable information. It was also a great (and free) way for candidates to make their positions known and find their voters, in a way that can’t be touched by how much money they have raised. We intend to make the matching engine available again.

In 2021, we also synthesized the responses to the initial question into eight sub-questions, such as “Will our taxes be well-spent?” or “Will we act on climate change?” Each of these was the inspiration for an online listening session that yielded Taproot stories and more information to inform the questions in our candidate survey. We have something similar in mind for this campaign as well.

Making sense of all of the information we gathered in 2021 was a challenge given the tools at our disposal. Taproot’s reach has grown significantly since then, and we expect the number of answers we gather will be an order of magnitude greater than what we managed last time. Luckily, we can now harness the power of generative AI to sift through the pile of data and help us understand what’s on people’s minds. No identifying information will be used for this analysis, and humans will oversee every step. But we’re excited to see how quickly we’ll be able to gain understanding with this help. We may also use AI to help us craft the wording of the multiple-choice questions to ensure the answers provide as much clarity on a candidate’s stance as possible.

How are we involving community partners?

This work derives some of its authority from the depth and breadth of the information we gather. We want to hear not only from Taproot’s community but also from those who are outside our orbit, to ensure a large, diverse pool of knowledge. We’ll be working with community partners to get our initial question out to their communities. We’ll also be asking them to encourage candidates to answer the survey and to distribute our matching engine when it’s ready for voters to use.

To help fund the significant amount of work that this entire election project will entail, we will be offering partners the opportunity to pay for access to some of the data we gather. This data will be anonymized and in line with our privacy policy. These paying partners will not have any say over the questions we ask or the way we cover the election; they will simply have access to deeper information than that which we will display to the public. These partners will be listed on Taproot’s election site.

What happens next?

Here’s the timeline we have in mind:

March to May: Gather answers to the election question through Taproot’s channels and with the help of community partners;
May and June: Hold listening sessions to dive deeper into some of the issues surfaced;
July and August: Formulate the candidate survey;
August and September: Distribute the survey to all declared candidates;
Sept. 22 to Oct. 20: Distribute the matching engine through Taproot’s channels and community partners;
Oct. 20: Election Day

Throughout this period, Taproot’s editorial team will continue to publish election-related stories, leaning towards the kind of explanatory work they did as part of the Housing Complex project. Story ideas and pitches can be sent to hello@taprootedmonton.ca. We’d also like to list election forums and related events in the Taproot Edmonton Calendar. Here’s the submission page.

Our election site will have a full listing of every candidate for mayor, councillor, public school trustee, or Catholic school trustee in Edmonton, with links to their websites. We may do the same for candidates in some of the municipalities in the metro region — we’re looking into how much more complexity that may introduce, and will be guided in part by the amount of participation we see from voters in the region.

Given the province’s decision to ban automated vote tabulators, we expect we won’t be able to provide the same kind of real-time results dashboard we’ve made available in previous elections. But we will display the results and the stances of the winning candidates once we know them.

How can you help?

The first thing to do is to answer the question. Once again, here it is: What issues do you care about as you consider who to vote for in the 2025 municipal election, and why?.

Please spread that link to friends, family, and colleagues. The more people we hear from, the better. If you are part of an organization that would like to help us distribute the question, please get in touch with Mack at mack@taprootpublishing.ca.

You’ll notice the question page invites you to opt in to receive email from us, as a subscriber to Taproot in general and/or to receive alerts about the readiness of the matching engine and other election tools. This is optional, and your email address will not be correlated in any way with your answers. We do hope you’ll consider signing up if you’re not already on Taproot’s mailing list.

Finally, as you can well imagine, it’s expensive to do this kind of work. Becoming a paying member of Taproot, either as an individual or as an organization, provides us with vital resources to pay the people who pay attention to the Edmonton region, not only at election time but year-round.

How Taproot Edmonton made an impact in 2024

Did you know Taproot Edmonton sent 1.3 million emails in 2024? That’s a lot of informing, connecting, and inspiring people with reliable intelligence about the Edmonton region. Here’s more on what our team has been able to accomplish this year with the support of readers, members, sponsors, advertisers, and other partners.

Informing with reliable intelligence

Every day, our team delivers useful, timely information that keeps you informed and engaged. From in-depth coverage of local news to bite-sized updates in The Pulse, readers rely on us for an accurate snapshot of what’s happening in Edmonton. “I start every morning reading The Pulse,” shares reader Jodi M. “I am always delighted by the news that it contains. By reading it, I feel better informed and more a part of the Edmonton community.”

Our emails saw an impressive 56.4% open rate and 8.3% click rate, showing that readers value the information we provide. We also saw a 7.3% jump in email subscribers and a 28.5% increase in paying members.

Saving you time

Since our inception, our approach has been to pay close attention to what’s happening so you don’t have to. In 2024, we curated more than 2,800 headlines in The Pulse alone, offering concise summaries and easy access to the full stories.

“I love the brief summaries with lots of links, enabling me to get the big picture and dive deeper when I want to,” says member Natalia K.

Connecting the community

We’re proud to connect Edmontonians to the many things happening in the community. In 2024, our team added more than 9,200 events to the Taproot Edmonton Calendar, making it a vital resource for those looking for things to do. “It’s easy to start my day reading an item or two from The Pulse or roundups and feel more connected to what’s going on and to the city itself,” says Thiago V., who recently moved to Edmonton. “The Calendar has been the cherry on top for me, as it always excites me when I find something cool happening in the city that I can go check out over the weekend.”

We continued to track Edmonton’s ever-changing landscape through our weekly roundups, which provide essential updates across a variety of sectors. Whether it’s the latest in local food, tech, arts, or business, the roundups deliver fresh, relevant information to help you stay connected. This year, for example, our Food Roundup highlighted nearly 600 restaurant openings.

Our podcast, Speaking Municipally, also continues to connect listeners to the conversations shaping the city. In 2024, we had nearly 50,000 downloads, with listeners tuning in to important discussions about housing, public transit, zoning, and more. We’re grateful to the dozen-plus guests who joined us this year, contributing valuable insights. “I listen to Speaking Municipally diligently and it has been an important part of my weekly routine in staying up to date about matters related to the city,” says listener and member Giselle G.

Inspiring through stories

The diversity of topics that resonated most with readers this year is particularly striking. Here are the top five most-read stories of 2024 on our website:

These stories don’t just inform — they spark curiosity and invite further exploration. And that’s just the tops of the waves. In 2024, we wrote about 4,000 unique entities, showcasing the depth and variety of Edmonton’s people, businesses, and initiatives.

Helping you take action

At Taproot Edmonton, we’re committed to providing actionable intelligence that helps you make informed decisions. In 2024, we summarized and linked to 493 different city council reports. We also highlighted 175 unique public engagement opportunities, giving readers the chance to contribute their voices to key issues. “Taproot has the pulse on current events and community engagement with promoting active citizenship in the forefront,” says reader Renée C. “Bringing awareness to the greater community amidst the noise is difficult, and Taproot is a credible and reliable source.”

We also continued to provide unique insights with our history pieces, publishing 47 “moment in history” articles that not only inform but also bring a bit of delight. Whether revisiting local milestones or uncovering lesser-known aspects of Edmonton’s past, these pieces have become a beloved part of The Pulse. “I love starting my day with The Pulse,” member Erin J. shares. “It’s a great way to feel connected to what’s happening across the city. It regularly contains a few things I already know and care about and a few things that are new to me and I become inspired to learn more.”

Join us in building an informed community

We are grateful for the support of everyone who has helped make this work possible. If you’d like to help us continue to inform, connect, and inspire people in the Edmonton region, please consider becoming a member.

Here’s to another year of growth and impact in 2025!

Readers offer guidance on how to grow membership

“Don’t ask, don’t get.” We often cite those four words from Amanda Wagner, delivered during an accelerator that Taproot co-founder Mack Male and I attended in 2019. This month, that mantra led us to ask for information from the people who read Taproot but are not paying members. Their answers were revealing.

Why did we ask?

Taproot’s journalism has always been freely accessible. We believe a paywall would stand in the way of our mission to inform and connect the Edmonton region. But we have also always made it possible to buy memberships for $10 per month or $100 per year. This was our first revenue stream, and it remains an important source of funding to pay the people who carry out our mission.

About 6% of the people on our current mailing list pay for Taproot memberships. We wanted to better understand what has stopped the 94% from becoming paying members.

What did we ask?

On Sept. 4, we sent them a survey asking them to indicate what has stopped them from becoming paying members of Taproot. We gave them the opportunity to choose up to three responses from a list of reasons:

I didn’t know paid membership was an option
I don’t know how to become a paying member
I don’t get enough value from what Taproot publishes to pay for it
Taproot doesn’t offer enough extra benefits to members
I can’t afford the current price
I reserve my media budget for news outlets with paywalls
I am already a paying member under a different email address
Someone else in my household is already a paying members
I want to know what Taproot publishes but I don’t want to support it
Other

We also invited them to tell us more about their answer.

What have we learned so far?

The email containing the survey was opened by about half of the recipients, and of those, about 8% answered it. So this is based on a small sample of our total readership. Still, the responses offered some useful guidance.

We need to improve our communications about membership

The answer with the most responses was “I didn’t know paid membership was an option.” Coupled with a few more responses indicating people knew membership was possible but didn’t know how to buy it, it’s clear that we need to make that option clearer and the path more obvious.

It didn’t take much of a nudge for some of the survey recipients to take the next step and start paying — at least a dozen upgraded to paid memberships shortly after the email went out. We asked and we got!

The Tyee has a message from the publisher at the bottom of every article encouraging readers to become paying members and explaining how they are contributing to free access for all. CKUA makes a similar pitch — you don’t have to pay to enjoy it, but if you do, you contribute to the station’s sustainability. We’ll be taking inspiration from these and other sources as we make our pitch more explicit on the Taproot Edmonton website.

We’ll also update our signup page and integrate information about our new Business Membership, which allows companies to sign up all of their staff, ensuring a well-informed workforce while supporting our efforts to continue to provide that information.

Some might pay if membership cost less

We heard from some people that $100 a year or $10 a month is a heavy lift, especially with so many other subscriptions pulling on the pocketbook.

Membership prices have stayed the same since we launched the first version of Taproot in 2016, aside from an increase when we got big enough to have to charge GST. There wasn’t a lot of science behind the price points we chose. We needed to see if people believed in the idea enough to join; $100 a year or $10 a month was memorable and made for easy math.

Perhaps different membership tiers would make it possible for more people to support us monetarily. A one-time donation option may appeal to some. Or maybe we should take a page from some of our friends in the arts community and institute a pay-what-you-can system. We’ll take it all under advisement.

Also, we know there’s interest in being able to claim the digital news subscription tax credit. Taproot hasn’t been eligible in the past, but we’re getting closer to qualifying, and we hope to have some good news to share before the end of the year.

Some might pay if benefits were beefed up

We don’t do tote bags at Taproot (at least not yet). So what do you get if you’re a member?

Initially, paid members had exclusive access to our “story garden,” a place to plant seeds of curiosity, some of which would grow into full-fledged stories that we would pay freelancers to write. It was an innovative concept, but it was hard to respond to all of the ideas in a timely way, even with a small minority of our members engaging. As our business model and editorial practices evolved, we closed the story garden.

For a while, free readers were limited to two weekly roundups, while paying members had access to as many as they wanted. In 2023, we lifted that restriction (but didn’t ballyhoo the change — if you’re a free reader, go ahead and update your preferences to get as many newsletters as you want, including the new Events Roundup).

Right now, the main benefit of paying for Taproot is the warm feeling you get from knowing you are supporting independent local journalism and making it possible for everyone to consume it. That is valuable, as the Membership Puzzle found in a study of news sites around the world. “(Many) supporters of open access news sites say they’re aware that they’re paying for the site’s work as a voluntary act that subsidizes journalism for others,” it noted. “But this is a point of pride, not frustration, for most of them.”

And yet, it’s understandable to expect membership to have its privileges.

Our managing editor, Tim Querengesser, is experimenting with members-only listening sessions as a way to tap into the curiosity of our biggest supporters. In the inaugural session held online on Sept. 13, participants said they wanted not only to interact with Taproot staff but also with each other, preferably in person. (We’ll share more about what we learned in the coming days.) Based on previous experiences with the recent Speaking Municipally live show and other collaborations with Let’s Find Out, we know the power of real-life interaction with our community. One of our survey respondents went further, suggesting that members-only networking events could be particularly enticing if they provided “an inside track to meet the movers and shakers in Edmonton that you’re writing about.” There’s definitely something to explore there.

In the absence of defined benefits, it’s hard for readers to imagine what else we could do that might persuade them to become paying members. Our plan is to follow up this survey with another one that asks about various potential perks to see what would be the most enticing.

Some might pay if we published more of our own journalism

Taproot publishes at least one original story based on our own reporting every weekday, and Speaking Municipally rounds out the week with original commentary on what went on at city hall. Much of the rest of our output is curated from other sources, whether it be the Headlines that summarize recent news in The Pulse, or the items collected in our weekly roundups on Tech, Food, Health, the Region, Arts, and Business. The Taproot Edmonton Calendar, which feeds the “Happenings” files in our newsletters, is also a product of curation.

Much of this is by design. We subscribe to Jeff Jarvis’s credo: “Cover what you do best. Link to the rest.” We happily point to the work of “the competition,” which is a service to our readers, while reserving our resources for stories that no one else is doing. Curation also allows us to bring our readers much more information than a small newsroom could otherwise provide. In a given week, Taproot publishes about 20,000 finely crafted words — that’s a lot for this many people, and it’s only possible because of a methodology we’ve honed over many years, assisted by technology that Mack has developed from scratch. That “pay-attention engine,” as we’ve sometimes called it, is not flashy, but it provides sustained value, and maybe the lesson here is that we should tell that story more often.

We certainly want to publish more and deeper work. Taproot was born because of the erosion of local journalism that was evident in 2016 and has only worsened since. We are driven to replace what has been lost with something better. So it’s good to know that some would pay if we did more of what we already aspire to do.

Some won’t pay, no matter what

We did hear some variations on the idea that information wants to be free. In a way, we agree. That’s why we don’t have a paywall. We refuse to contribute to a situation where only those who have the means can access reliable information, especially about the place where they live.

However, that which is free to read is not free to make. Someone has to pay.

One of the strengths of our company is its diverse revenue streams. We sell advertising and sponsorship, as well as a business-to-business information service called Spotlight, and we manage to get a few grants and subsidies here and there. Those sources and our small but mighty base of paying members combine to make everything we do possible. It wouldn’t be prudent to rely on just one of those streams and, to be frank, it hasn’t been prudent to neglect growing our membership revenue. We’re grateful for the feedback to guide us toward rectifying that.

Taproot launches an Events Roundup

If you’re looking for something to do, for business or for fun, you’ll find thousands of events to choose from in the Taproot Edmonton Calendar. You can filter that gigantic list by category or other parameters, but we’ll be the first to admit that it’s a lot. Plus, you have to go to the Calendar to see what’s there — what if a curated list of suggestions came to you instead?

A screenshot from the Aug. 22 edition of Taproot’s new Events Roundup.

That’s the idea behind the new Events Roundup, which you can now sign up to receive every Thursday afternoon. It’s somewhat similar to our other weekly roundups, but the focus is on listings rather than news items. Every edition kicks off with a recommendation, followed by upcoming events on a certain theme, some listings for the week ahead, and a few suggestions that are further ahead in the calendar.

Social media platforms ate up the advertising that used to support listings in the mainstream and alternative media, and they took away a lot of our attention, too. But the algorithms are increasingly unfriendly to both event organizers and event-goers. So let’s bypass all of that with a local, vetted, comprehensive listing that’s free to use and free to peruse. And let’s make it easy for you to know what’s going on with a tight, informative roundup of listings delivered directly to your inbox.

“I would have gone if I had known!” is a common lament. The Events Roundup is one more way to we can help you prevent those blues.

If you’re new to Taproot, subscribe for free today! If you’re already a subscriber, click the “update preferences” link in any email from us to add the Events Roundup to your selections.

It’s time for Taproot’s summer break

As is our custom twice a year, Taproot Edmonton is taking a break from our regular publishing schedule. This is to give our team a chance to catch their breath and make some room for the important but not urgent work that is vital for our long-term sustainability. A regular publishing cadence is a beautiful and necessary thing, but it’s also a hamster wheel, and every now and then, we step off.

Our 2024 summer break will overlap with the August long weekend, which is a little earlier than in previous years. The last edition of The Pulse before the break is on July 26, and it will be back in your inbox on Aug. 12. Our weekly roundups will resume in mid-August as well. Speaking Municipally will return around the time that Edmonton city council gets back to work.

A little girl walking toward a bicycle through water fountains with the Alberta Legislature in the background

While you won’t see any fresh stories on our site during the break, the Taproot Edmonton Calendar will continue to offer a huge variety of event listings throughout the summer and beyond. Our own Debbi Serafinchon has made sure there’s a rich selection of things to do, and she’ll keep adding events as she learns of them. (Feel free to submit yours.)

Pausing our publications has a lot of benefits, but it does cost us some revenue, as we don’t deliver ads in our newsletters or podcasts during that time. We also lose some visibility because we disappear from social media. Here are a few ways you can help us fill that gap:

Become a paying member if you aren’t already one. Taproot is free to read, but it’s not free to make. If you have the means to pay $10 a month or $100 a year, you’ll be helping us inform and connect everyone in the Edmonton area.
Ask your employer to buy a Business Membership. This is a great way to get everyone in your organization on the same page while helping us continue to pay attention to our community.
Refer a friend. At the bottom of every email you receive from Taproot, there’s a unique referral link — share it and you’ll earn points you can redeem for rewards.
Tell us why you love Taproot so we can share your testimonial with others.

Enjoy these midsummer weeks, and we’ll see you again on Aug. 12!