How The Center Square Scaled 12+ Newsletters and Boosted Opens to 72% With beehiiv

Overview

The Center Square is a nonprofit news organization and national newswire publishing original reporting across state and national markets. Newsletters are central to its distribution strategy, powering repeat readership, partner communications, donor engagement, and revenue.

After migrating its newsletters to beehiiv, The Center Square transformed email from an externally managed operational cost into an owned, scalable, and revenue-generating growth channel managed entirely in-house.

Background

Newsletters have long been a core pillar of The Center Square’s audience strategy. They consistently rank among the organization’s top acquisition channels for website traffic, and newsletter subscribers return more frequently and spend more time engaging with reporting than non-subscribers.

In addition to consumer-facing newsletters, The Center Square also sends daily planner emails to publishers nationwide as part of its newswire service. As a nonprofit organization, newsletters also play a critical role in donor communications, impact updates, and long-term supporter relationships.

Despite their importance, newsletters were not operating at full potential.

Problem

Before switching to beehiiv, The Center Square’s newsletter setup created growing limitations as the organization scaled:

• Limited access to subscriber lists and first-party data
• Inconsistent and incomplete performance reporting
• Poor visibility into subscriber acquisition sources
• Increasing deliverability issues
• Slow turnaround for edits and new launches
• No built-in or scalable newsletter monetization

As a result, The Center Square did not fully own its audience or its data, and newsletters were underutilized as a revenue channel.

As Kate Guenther, Director of Design and Visual Marketing at The Center Square explained,“At the end of the day, we didn’t truly own our audience or our data.”

Challenge

The Center Square needed to bring newsletters fully in-house while supporting a complex, multi-market operation.

The platform needed to:

• Support 12+ state and national newsletters
• Be manageable by a small internal team
• Improve deliverability and engagement
• Enable consistent newsletter monetization without a sales-heavy workflow
• Provide clear analytics on subscribers, content performance, and revenue
• Reduce editorial and operational overhead rather than increase it

All while remaining cost-effective for a nonprofit media organization.

Solution

The Center Square migrated its entire newsletter operation to beehiiv, consolidating publishing, analytics, growth, and monetization into a single platform.

Operational Automation

beehiiv significantly reduced manual work through automation:

• Recurring sends replaced fully manual scheduling, saving approximately 4 hours per week
• RSS-powered newsletters automate content selection and formatting, saving 15 or more hours per week based on publishing volume
• Reusable templates made it easy to maintain consistent branding across state and national newsletters

Several newsletters now run as largely set-it-and-forget-it workflows, reducing production stress and minimizing errors.

Guenther put it simply, “Once a send is set up, it largely runs on its own.”

Audience Ownership and Analytics

With beehiiv, The Center Square gained full access to first-party subscriber data, including:

• Subscriber location and newsletter preferences
• Open and verified click behavior
• Performance differences across state and national newsletters
• Visibility into acquisition sources and paid campaign performance

This data now directly informs editorial decisions, engagement strategy, and monetization planning.

Built-In Monetization

beehiiv’s Ad Network introduced a new newsletter revenue stream that did not exist previously.

• Ads are easy to enable and manage
• No dedicated ad sales or ad operations team is required
• High send volume and frequency mean inventory is almost always available
• Revenue is more consistent and predictable across newsletters

“Because we don’t have a large team dedicated to selling or managing advertisers, this setup has been especially helpful. It allows us to generate steady, almost passive revenue from newsletters.”

Results

After migrating to beehiiv, The Center Square saw measurable improvements across engagement, revenue, and operational efficiency.

Engagement and Audience Quality

Rather than prioritizing list size, the team focused on list health and deliverability.

• Average open rates increased from 52% in March 2025 to 72% in December 2025
• Verified click-through rates increased by 42.4%
• A smaller but significantly more engaged audience improved inbox placement and consistency

“We ended up with a smaller but much more engaged audience.”

Revenue Impact

• The beehiiv Ad Network created a new, ongoing newsletter revenue stream
• Revenue per subscriber increased without aggressive list growth
• Newsletter revenue became more predictable and easier to manage
• Ad performance tracking revealed which newsletters drive the strongest monetization

“Revenue is more predictable, and revenue per subscriber has increased as we’ve been able to consistently monetize sends without adding operational overhead.”

Editorial and Operational Efficiency

• 4 hours per week saved through recurring sends
• 15+ hours per week saved through RSS-powered newsletters
• A small team now manages more than a dozen state and national newsletters
• All newsletters are managed in-house without outside agency delays

“Publishing at scale is more reliable and less stressful, with fewer opportunities for errors.”

Traffic and Business Impact

• Newsletter subscribers consistently rank among the top four acquisition channels
• Subscribers spend more time on the site than non-subscribers
• Newsletters continue to drive repeat visits and sustained engagement

Start using beehiiv

The Center Square didn’t grow engagement, save time, and unlock consistent newsletter revenue by adding more tools or headcount. They did it by bringing newsletters in-house on a platform built for scale, ownership, and monetization.

If you’re running multiple newsletters, managing a small team, or relying on email as a core distribution and revenue channel, beehiiv gives you the same foundation: automation that saves hours each week, first-party audience ownership, and built-in monetization that works without added complexity.

Start using beehiiv to turn newsletters into an owned, scalable growth engine.