Membership Growth Manager

Date Posted	September 23, 2025
Industry	Digital Media
Specialty	Local News
Required Education	Associate's Degree
Telecommute?	Hybrid
Job Status	Full-time
Salary	Negotiable

Description:

Membership Growth Manager

Status: Full-Time
Reports To: Chief of Staff
Location: Santa Cruz, CA; Eugene, OR; or Remote

Position Overview

Lookout Local is building the next generation of local news, with thriving operations in Santa Cruz and a new launch in Eugene-Springfield in 2025. In Santa Cruz, our organization is thriving and growing, in our impact, newsroom size, membership and reading audience. Our models – business, community and journalism – are working, with the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News award certifying our coverage excellence and community-centric mission. In Eugene, we are bringing our proven model of community-centered journalism to restore trusted local news, strengthen civic life, and ensure residents have the coverage they deserve — already making Lookout the second-largest news publication in Oregon.

We are seeking a Membership Growth Manager to lead conversions, renewals, and retention across all of Lookout Local’s publications. This role is responsible for ensuring seamless, efficient, and scalable membership operations across markets, eliminating duplication and standardizing best practices so that Santa Cruz and Eugene benefit from shared systems, strategies, and insights. We have established a good practice and now intend to take it to new success.

This is a hands-on, analytics-driven role for someone who thrives on optimizing prospect and conversion funnels, coordinating campaigns, and ensuring our membership technology stack delivers maximum impact.

Key Responsibilities

Membership Growth & Retention

• Manage membership conversion strategies, including onboarding flows, paywall optimization, checkout, and offer testing.
• Develop and execute campaigns for renewals, upgrades, and churn reduction.
• Own win-back strategies for lapsed members.
• Owns membership growth and retention testing/prioritization and project manages cross-functional sprint planning in pursuit of goals.
• Collaborate with the newsroom and other teams to ensure editorial and promotional efforts support our membership model.

Analytics & Reporting

• Further refine and track membership KPIs (acquisition channels, conversions, renewal rates, churn, lifetime value, ARPU).
• Provide clear, regular reporting to leadership on performance, experiments, and recommendations.
• Use analytics to understand and optimize campaigns, pricing, and user journeys.

Technology & Process Optimization

• Manage and improve membership systems (CRM, ESP, subscription platform, analytics stack).
• Work with vendors, developers, and consultants to configure tools for maximum performance.
• Explore automation and AI solutions to scale retention and conversion efforts.
• Ensure integrations between platforms (payment systems, email, app, etc.) are seamless.

Campaign Execution & Collaboration

• Execute targeted marketing campaigns (email, social, in-app, partnerships) that drive conversions, renewals and winback.
• Partner with the product and tech teams to refine paywalls, checkout, and app/website features tied to membership.
• Collaborate with community-facing initiatives (events, newsletters, classroom programs) to ensure they support conversion and retention goals.

Qualifications

• Proven experience in membership/subscription management, digital marketing, or customer lifecycle management.
• Strong analytical mindset with experience using dashboards, funnel analysis, and A/B testing.
• Comfort working with CRM, ESP, and subscription management systems (experience with Pugpig, Stripe, ActiveCampaign, or similar a plus).
• Hands-on executor who can move seamlessly between strategy and day-to-day implementation.
• Excellent communication skills; able to translate data into actionable insights.
• Self-starter who thrives in a fast-paced, cross-functional, startup-like environment.

Application Process: 

Please send your resume and cover letter to jobs@lookoutlocal.com and put Membership Growth in the subject line.

What We Offer:

• Competitive salary and performance-based incentives.
• Full-time benefits include highly competitive medical, dental, and optical benefits, and 401(k) with matching and stock options in our growing company
• Good PTO allowances 
• An opportunity to make a significant impact on and contribute to the revival of local journalism.
• A collaborative and mission-driven work environment.

Equal Opportunity Employer: Lookout Eugene-Springfield is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status.