How Børsen Succeeded on a Saturday

On Friday, Aug. 26, Denmark's then Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen called for an election to be held three weeks later, Anders Krab-Johansen, editor-in-chief of business daily Børsen said to a few staff members: "What a shame we don't have a newspaper tomorrow." Like many business dailies, Børsen is published on weekdays only. But it didn't stop Allan Hansen, the commercial director for the paper, from asking "why can't we just make one?"

And that's what the staff at Børsen proceeded to do, putting out 63,000 copies delivered on the Saturday and 7,000 as an insert in the paper the following Monday. And according to research, the special Saturday issue was a real success.

"The whole house worked together to make a special Saturday edition of our newspaper," says Sarah Louise Meinertz, research manager for Børsen. "It was teamwork all the way through, and the house buzzed with action and hyper-engagement! Making this special edition was a classic example of how well Børsen's employees work together and will be spoken of for years to come, I am sure."

Meinertz, however, wasn't involved in the making of the special issue but rather with finding out how effective it was. As research manager, among other things it's her job to gauge the success and effectiveness of the paper in terms of readership and advertising.

"We did a survey of our readers to find out how they welcomed the paper, and matters relating to the paper, for example whether the paper gave our readers a better view of the initial election campaign," says Meinertz. "We also wanted to know about the paper's longevity, how much time the readers spent on the paper, and how much of the paper they actually read. Ads being a big part of the paper's income, we also asked about the ads in the paper, in order to find out what our readers thought about them."

The results showed that readers were very interested in special edition such as the election edition, with 40 percent reading most of the paper and saving it for later use, with the average time spent reading 25 minutes. "This was outstanding considering that the paper was only 24 pages long," says Meinertz.

The paper found that a whopping 82 percent of core readers agree or strongly agree that these kind of special Saturday issues are a good idea. And tThe happy surprise and hoped-for outcome was that 66 percent of the respondents believed the paper to be a useful tool in keeping up with the election campaign, says Meinertz. "If we can provide our readers with tools such as this in the future, it would be immense."

The biggest challenge for Meinertz was that she couldn't use the paper's regular readers' panel since it has been used so often to get reader opinion. "We ended up using a Userneeds' panel and sent out the survey to 85,000 people in Denmark, which gave us 10,280 responses," she says. "Out of these, 502 had read the special election edition on that specific Saturday. That may not seem a lot, but keeping in mind that the edition was issued in 63,000 copies on that specific Saturday, and the panel and the copies were scattered all around Denmark - a country with approximately 5.5 million inhabitants, sending out the survey to anything but our own panel was like finding a needle in a haystack. Which we did!"