Then we had some benefits around content that only members can see. You can see the headlines on the site, but you have to be a registered member to read them. One of those is stories from other nonprofit sites around the country that we curate, and the other one is a weekly roundup of things our staff members have been reading and want to recommend to people.

There’s also a monthly giveaway of tickets that are provided by our advertisers and sponsors. We give them on a first-come, first-serve basis. We send an email to our eligible members and they can sign up to get tickets to things.

Then we have another benefit we recently introduced for our larger donors: a chance to vote on which nonprofits should get free advertising on MinnPost.

We’ve invested a lot, and maybe even more than in the benefits, in building out the infrastructure of membership — to build out a much more sophisticated database, so we can automate processes like renewals. What we’ve seen in the last in the last two-plus years is we’ve gotten about 25 to 30 percent growth in the total number of members, but a bigger growth, 65 or more percent, in the number of sustaining members. This is where the targeting efforts have been put: on looking at the people who give every month, on an automated basis.

That’s the story of the membership program. It’s still ongoing, but the infrastructure is now built.

We’re still not heavily reliant on them. We tend to get in the neighborhood of 15 to 20 percent of our funding from foundations, and we have wonderful foundation support, including from several local foundations in the Twin Cities. We’re very appreciative of that, but we continue to build our model not to depend too much on foundations.

In that sense, we’ve achieved our goal of being more reliant on business-related revenue streams, which are mainly memberships and major donors and advertising and sponsorships. Those together account for 80 to 85 percent of our revenue.

The reason I say it’s still a work in progress is my wife Laurie and I cofounded and have run the organization for nine years, and for the first six-and-a-half or so, we were the top management, and we never took any pay. So we were doing a couple of hundred thousand dollars or more of work and not getting paid. So we were running surpluses during that period, but we would’ve been running deficits if we had paid ourselves the way executives are paid.

Starting two and a half years ago, after having adopted a succession plan with our board, we went out and hired new people. We hired Andy Wallmeyer, who’s now CEO, and we hired Andy Putz, who replaced the previous part-time editor. Finally, in January, we hired a new development director, and she does membership and major donors, foundations. Those positions added quite a bit of payroll, and we’re not back to break-even with all these additional positions.

But we’d planned for this. The board approved a three-year plan, and it called for us to lose money in 2016 and 2017. The goal is to get back to break-even in 2018 by generating more revenue. It’s still a work-in-progress for complete sustainability. Our new leaders have to pay their salaries along with the rest of the organization’s.

I’m optimistic we’ll get back to break-even, or a small surplus. We’re working on major donors, and we’re working on corporate sponsorship. Those are areas we see as having significant growth potential.

Online advertising is, as you know, a difficult business, so it doesn’t seem to offer the same growth potential as the other areas.

You get more ability to develop expertise. Relationships are more stable — they last longer. And that has kept increasing over time. Most recently for example, we’ve added a data reporter, and now we’re now on our second one. We’ve added a Somali reporter to our staff who covers immigration issues and the jobs market and how the community is trying to create more good jobs. That’s been a change over the years, to add more staff writers.

In terms of the journalism itself, the style or tone hasn’t changed much since we launched. Our focus has always been primarily on analysis. We don’t do as much investigative work, and we wish we could do more, but it takes a lot of time to do it well, and it takes a lot of resources, and we’re already trying to put out a high quality site every day. That’s part of our business model — we’re not a site that publishes a story every week or two.

In order to sustain that model, which is very important to our readership, we find that our sweet spot is analysis. It adds value beyond the reporting. We’re not focused so much on breaking news as we are on explaining what things mean, what’s going on behind the scenes.

That’s pretty much always been true, but we keep getting better at it, because we’ve moved to a more staff-driven model.

Those three beats all have varying amounts of reader funding. The first two are fully funded by readers. The arts one is partly funded by readers.

We are doing interesting work in that direction with our data reporter. Since they don’t have a beat they cover on a regular basis and their beat is really their skill, they have more of a chance to do investigative work.

The ones doing this well at the local level, that I’m aware of, are the Texas Tribune, the Voice of San Diego. And then there’s us. There may be other purely local sites I don’t know about? Among the local ones, those are the ones I know about, and those are the ones that have developed very diverse sets of revenue streams. I’d like to see more sites like that.

Our audience is people interested in public policy and public information. We’re not really trying to broaden out beyond those characteristics. What we’re interested is, there are huge numbers of people who are college-educated, and there are people out there interested in public policy and public information, who still don’t read us yet. So we want to reach those kinds of people.

We want to reach more into the rapidly growing diverse communities, like immigrant communities. Even in those communities, our audience is going to be those interested in public policy and those who have gone to college.

Beyond that, my interests in the short-term are private interests: I’m hoping to improve my bridge game. I’ve been playing the piano again after having not played since I was 12 years old. I’ve got a lot of books I want to read, particularly history, which I’ve not had much time to read. These are all very personal goals, and they’re all on my agenda, along with continuing to help MinnPost.

I’m very optimistic about the future of MinnPost. We’ve built a strong model. It’s hard to know exactly how many readers we have who we could call regulars, but it’s in the range of 75,000 or so. We get over 1.2 million pageviews a month. We’ve built an audience, and we’ve demonstrated we can get a portion of that audience to be donors every year, and we’ve demonstrated we can get advertising and sponsorship that is based on that audience that we’ve built. The core strengths are there, and now it’s just building on those things.

I’m confident the new generation of leaders will have no problem building that up. In the short term, as I mentioned, they’ll have the problem of building the revenue to cover the added salaries. But I fully expect they’ll be able to do it and for MinnPost to be around for a long time.