In many countries, elections tend to be well produced, extensively covered media events, with audiences tuning in for real-time updates and sophisticated visualisations that show the latest results and estimates.
“In Nigeria, this is not the case,” says Yvette Dimiri, Head of Subscriptions Growth at Stears Business.
“When it’s election night in Nigeria, you’re typically gathered around the screen, watching election officials enter data into an Excel sheet. It’s a very painful event.”
As a new publisher, Stears wanted to seize this opportunity to create a more innovative approach. But it also knew that many older media organisations invest a lot of resources in their election coverage in terms of boots on the ground and experienced political analysts. “We couldn’t really compete with that, so we had to get a bit creative,” she said, during WAN-IFRA’s Digital Media Africa 2022 conference.
Stears is a Nigerian company with a mission is “to become the world’s most trusted source of African data, insight and data collection tools for businesses, financial and policy professionals.” It first started publishing in 2017 with a small network of people, and as the 2019 general elections approached in Nigeria, they set out to use their data expertise to stand out from the other players in the space.
The result was the Stears Election Centre. “The goal there was to allow anyone in the world to easily access quantitative results and data about Nigeria’s elections,“ both for the current (2019) and preceding (2015) elections, Dimiri says.
For the company, the aim was to “showcase our data expertise to international clients and investors,” as Stears was trying to fundraise at the time. Dimiri also says that building the Election Centre seemed like a “big, hairy, audacious goal,” which would rally the whole team in order to build best practices.
Fast growth boosted by collaborations
Once the Election Centre website was up and running, there were some pivotal moments that helped spur the project forward. First was an enquiry that arrived from CNN: the news channel wanted to feature the Election Centre in their TV show. “That was huge,” says Dimiri.
This was followed by another opportunity, as the web browser Opera wanted to list Stears on their front page as one of the sources for election data. (Opera is the second most used web browser in Nigeria, according to Statcounter.)
Boosted by these collaborations, the site had 2 million visitors on election day. “For us that was astronomical. We were doing maybe max 10,000 visitors a day, so this was a high leverage event,” Dimiri says.
In addition to its public-facing content, Stears also developed an enterprise product to further highlight their data expertise. Specifically, they built a predictive model for a client that wanted to find out the election results faster. “In Nigeria, collating the data from elections can take three to five days. So this client wanted to know right away.”
Successfully delivering on all these fronts allowed the company to showcase their data expertise, Dimiri says, and as a result Stears was able to raise a seed funding of $600,000.
Relaunching the product with new features
These days, Stears is a very different company from the tiny start-up of a few years ago. The organisation has a staff of about 35 people, 18 of whom belong to the Intelligence team (newsroom, consultants, data). Nine people are part of the Product & Engineering team, while five people work on Growth & Marketing.
“So it looks very different now, and we just have more that we can put behind what we decide to do for 2023 elections.”
The 2023 elections will be an important opportunity to build on the previous success. In addition to delivering on the growth trajectory that was promised to investors, Stears aims to grow out of its niche publisher status and become a household name.
An important part of this is the upcoming relaunch of the Election Centre as Stears Elections. “The product carrying the brand name is really important.”
The new product will refine the features that were included in the previous version and improve user experience through user testing. The team also wants to add another layer of data by including more detailed election results on a local government level.
In addition, Stears Elections will include more editorial coverage that helps add context to the results, as well as providing information about candidates. Finally, the company will focus on polling in 2023, with an aim to create an online panel whose results will be shared publicly.
“We really see ourselves as democratising polling data, using our expertise, giving our peers, other media, opportunities to use our poling data, and just talk about the elections with as much data as possible,” Dimiri says.
Watch the presentation below, starting from 11:20 mark.