Industry professionals like to refer to memberships and subscriptions as either interchangeable or mutually exclusive, but perhaps as Chip and Dan Heath discuss in Decisive, thinking OR instead of AND is the beginning of a bad decision.The Texas Tribune, a digitally native nonprofit news site in Austin, proves this point. Publisher and COO Tim Griggs spoke to us exclusively for our Members-Only Case Study about how the site is selling memberships and subscriptions.First the site narrowed its audience from the general voting public to those Texans who were engaged in local and state politics. Using primary voting statistics as a gauge, The Texas Tribune presumes its market is a little more than 2 million of the 19 million adults living in Texas.Griggs explained that The Tribune sees three ways to monetize its audience:

1. Contributors — Audiences members who believe in a cause, but may or may not be regular readers. These readers need to be captured with point in time donations.
2. Members — Readers who want to join us, be part of the family. They are primarily targeted through the tiered membership plans described below.
3. Subscribers — For now, subscriptions are limited to Texas Weekly, but the site has a number of microsites and newsletters that could spin off into healthy subscription products.

One of the most telling features of The Tribune’s business model is that subscriptions are sold entirely separately and not folded into memberships. Also, Griggs advised against tangible products, like tote bags or mugs, which really “don’t move the needle” on memberships. This is an important lesson since we’ve seen other sites with membership models, particularly nonprofits, assume the NPR/PBS tote bag is a critical conversion factor when it usually isn’t at all.For more on The Texas Tribune, including a breakdown of revenue generated by memberships and subscriptions, check out our exclusive Case Study.