openDemocracy launched its editorial partnership programme in 2011. We have worked with a number of individuals, university departments and other organisations to edit and publish their content on our platform.

We help our editorial partners translate out from their area of expertise to our global audience. Each partnership will have different needs, but we can help partners build new audiences and expanded communities engaging with their work. We can advise partners about how to structure debates and build on themes for longer-term collaborations. And at key points in each project we help partners understand and assess the impact they have made throughout the partnership. 

Articles published within editorial partnerships are introduced into the main openDemocracy publishing stream and RSS, with the chance of being included on our front page, in our daily newsletter and our social media channels and a guaranteed place in our considerable archive. Each editorial partnership also has a specially curated landing page, which can become an active hub on site that our readers revisit.

Each partnership has its own specific needs and requires a tailored approach which begins with a face-to-face meeting with prospective partners to work out the potential and the desired outcome.

We have a limited number of openings to work with new partners in 2014. If you’d like to join our programme, it would be good to hear from you soon and we are eager to give you any further information you need to help you decide.

Why partner with openDemocracy?

We are a global site, receiving around 350,000 visits per month, with a readership that is split between the UK (26 %), the rest of Europe (22%), the Americas (32%) and the rest of the world (20%),
More and more read us: the last 12 months have seen a 22% rise in readership, with double digit growth in 26 countries,
Respected in academia: oD is used as a source in a multitude of academic papers. Our partners have included researchers at the Open University Centre of Citizenship and Governance, the University of Warwick’s Department of Sociology, the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute of Global Affairs amongst others,
We are read by readers who change the world: a third of our readers consider themselves activists, a quarter are occasional journalists and writers, twenty per cent influence policy professionally,
We have an open platform published under a Creative Commons license, helping articles spread beyond our own website, and a thriving social media presence (25,000 on Facebook and 20,000 on Twitter). 

Examples of partnerships

Our partnerships are varied and evolving, but they can be bracketed into two types:

Smaller, event-based partnerships – £5,000 or less.

Shorter-term partnerships will often be anchored by a symposium, conference or event. openDemocracy will provide a platform for introducing the material to a wider audience, generating debate, potentially prolonging the life and impact of the event. Examples include: Political Aesthetics of Power and Protest; Neoliberalism, crisis and the world system; Shock and Awe – 100 years of aerial bombing. 

Strategic, longer-term partnerships  – £5,000 and up

Partnerships that are three months and longer in duration often generate a different set of demands. Here the challenge may be to involve our global audience in a series of debates which build up a new vocabulary for them over time. Through longer-term partnerships we try and evolve a community of readers engaging with a significant set of themes that have entered openDemocracy’s bloodstream. Examples include: openGlobalRights; civilResistance.

These partnerships are not mutually exclusive – a smaller, event-based partnership may evolve into a longer-term debate over time. All pricing is subject to negotiation.

Helping you assess impact

One aspect of editorial partnerships that we are particularly interested in developing is our assessment of your impact.

We provide impact statements to all of our partners at key junctures, customizing these statements to demonstrate the level of success in the key goals of the partnership. Through these statements our partnerships can be cited as successful examples of knowledge transfer – taking a debate beyond the expert discussion in academia to a wider public.

Impact statements put together a narrative about the success of the partnership, citing:

• Information on visits, page views and unique visitors, including geographic breakdown of visitors
• The level of engagement, such as the time readers spend on the page and the number and quality of comments and mentions on social media
• Information on referring sources, including search engines, social media, and the network of sites linking to and reproducing articles
• More qualitative measures such as stand out comments from influential readers about the partnership, thoughtful mentions on social media

For examples of our impact statements, see openGlobalRights and Oecumene: Citizenship after Orientalism (published with permission).

What to do if you are interested?

Get in touch with our Editor, Rosemary Bechler and our Publisher, Andrew Hyde via [email protected]. Think about how you would answer these questions:

-       What is the big idea? What kind of debate are you trying to introduce and what are the main themes?

-       What sort of audience are you looking to cultivate?

-       How can you involve your own community (for example, do you have students who can blog and a social media network you can involve)?

-       What is your schedule? (Should the partnership coincide with specific events, a particular anniversary or time of year, and how long do you anticipate it lasting)

Testimonials 

I thought the Citizenship after Orientalism partnership was excellent - exactly what OD does best, staying close to current news, and at the same time getting behind it to look much deeper.

 Iannis Carras (Historian of the Balkans and Russia)

The Battle of Algiers debate looks great. Already students at Sussex will be using the articles alongside a special screening of the film. This is going to be a great resource. 

Martin Evans (University of Sussex)