Company Overview
High Country News (HCN) is a nonprofit news organization covering the American West, publishing both print and digital editions for a subscriber base built on donations, memberships, and subscriptions. With growth increasingly coming from digital acquisition, HCN needed a renewal strategy that worked for both its long-tenured print base and its newer, fast-growing digital audience.
The Challenge
HCN's legacy renewal process relied on manual, mail-based follow-up when a subscription lapsed: a workflow built around print subscriber habits that didn't translate well to digital subscribers. HCN had already phased out underperforming legacy acquisition campaigns after finding they produced weak renewal rates, but the core renewal mechanism itself remained manual and inconsistent across subscriber types.
At the same time, HCN's team wasn't sure whether digital subscribers were fundamentally a different kind of customer than print subscribers, or whether the two groups simply needed to be met differently in how (and when) they were asked to renew.
The Solution
Working with Pelcro, HCN moved its subscriber base onto automated renewals, removing the dependency on manual, mail-based outreach. HCN paired this shift with its own activity- and engagement-based segmentation work, using signals like newsletter engagement and subscriber tenure to better time and target retention messaging, giving each subscriber the right message at the right point in their journey instead of a single blanket renewal push.
Key elements of the approach:
- Automated renewal via Pelcro, replacing manual mail-based renewal follow-up
- Engagement-based segmentation (newsletter opens/clicks, site activity, tenure) to identify which subscribers were ready for a direct renewal ask versus needing more nurturing
- Using activity data to continuously refine what a great subscriber experience looks like at each stage, rather than treating all subscribers the same
HCN's research also found that print and digital subscribers engage with content in largely the same way: the top-performing stories perform similarly across both groups. This lets HCN keep a single, unified editorial strategy rather than building separate content tracks. The real differentiator between the two subscriber bases wasn't content preference, it was tenure. That reframed retention as a tenure-building challenge for digital subscribers rather than a content or pricing problem, directly motivating the renewal and engagement work above.
The Results
Since moving to auto-renewal, HCN has seen renewal and retention performance grow substantially: a 26% growth in renewal rate (from 55.73% in 2023 to 70.39% in 2025, up 14.66 points) and a 12% growth in retention rate (up 8.19 points) over the same two years.
Subscribers who engage with HCN's newsletter renew at meaningfully higher rates than those who don't: reinforcing that ongoing engagement, not just subscription format, is what drives retention. HCN continues to use this kind of activity data to shape a better subscriber experience: recognizing when someone is ready for a renewal ask, versus when they need more time and value before being asked to convert.
“Moving to auto-renew has been central to our updated subscriber experience. Our old renewal process was built around termed subscriptions, which meant loyal subscribers could stop receiving the magazine because of a missed renewal notice or mail issue. Now we’re getting High Country News into our audience’s hands more reliably while simplifying the process for subscribers and our team.”
Looking Ahead
HCN continues to refine its segmentation model, incorporating tenure and activity data into subscriber scoring to better predict which subscribers are ready to convert versus which need more nurturing. HCN is also exploring Pelcro's newer activity-tracking and AI-driven analytics tools to move from manual segmentation toward more predictive, automated retention workflows.