Product Notes: Noticias Para Inmigrantes's lean approach to WhatsApp experimentation

Hi! You may be hearing a lot of talk about platform evolution among audiences — it certainly comes up in my work as a product manager with organizations such as 2PuntosPlatform. But we’re learning that what’s even more important than establishing presence on a platform is understanding how to properly use it for your audience, and knowing when to define its limits. 

That’s why I wanted to share a case study about the growth of the WhatsApp channel from Noticias Para Inmigrantes, which the organization launched and expanded last year. NPI knew the app was popular among its immigrant Latino audiences in the U.S., but before launching a broadcast channel, the team conducted research and experimentation to learn how to best use the feature. The result? About a year in, the channel has 38,000 members, engagement rates double what they saw among competitors, and engagement up to 40 percent for some features.

Beyond the metrics, here’s what’s most crucial: The team managed to do this without reliable on-platform analytics, with just half a staff member’s time dedicated to the channel alongside other collaborators. They’re now using it to share useful information during a critical time for their community, but have also set boundaries around where they expect continued growth from the platform.

Here are some key lessons on experimentation from a conversation with Laura Liibbe, previously Director of Product at plus más media (NPI’s parent organization) and an NPMC alum, who now works at the National Domestic Workers Alliance. Laura published a playbook for progressive media and nonprofits, Starting & Scaling a Broadcast Channel: WhatsApp Lessons You Can Apply Anywhere, during her 2025 Media Innovation Fellowship with the Higher Ground Institute.

Lesson 1: Even when there’s a clear opportunity, research it

Before launch, the organization had been eyeing WhatsApp for a while due to its popularity with Latino audiences. NPI wanted to pivot away from using Facebook Messenger due to decreasing engagement and platform ownership concerns (although WhatsApp is also owned by Meta). Other direct-to-consumer experiments with email had failed, and SMS was too costly. When WhatsApp launched the Channels feature for users to join for free in late 2023, it finally provided a window of opportunity. But the team knew they had to learn more about it before acting.

They spent late 2024 doing a landscape analysis to track and compare existing news channels. This involved a lot of manual benchmarking: manually tracking follower counts and reaction rates on other Spanish news channels to establish metrics of success. Through this research, they identified key features other channels were using, such as audio messages, polls, and sharing content with links, which became their testing priorities.

Laura notes that this helped establish realistic comparison points and created shared team knowledge of features, so they could avoid jumping into a new platform they didn’t understand. 

NPI’s WhatsApp channel, with linked content and explanatory voice messages

Lesson 2: Embrace constraints and get scrappy — even with metrics

The prelaunch research informed the early launch strategy and set expectations for how the NPI team would measure success. They set key performance indicators for growth and engagement on the basis of benchmarking and began targeting their unengaged Messenger audience and SMS list for conversions. 

So when it came to measuring success, they were ready for the challenges they encountered. WhatsApp provides extremely limited metrics — only reach, growth, and new followers in the last 30 days. The app offers no data on read rates, click rates, or detailed engagement metrics.

“All of that had to be manually evaluated,” Laura says. To pivot, they designed 30-day testing cycles to experiment with the features they’d identified. Their team manually calculated read rate by comparing 30-day reach to total followers.

The result? What they learned drove a more measured investment in the platform, instead of trying to get the organization’s entire audience to adopt it. The team surfaced a number of micro lessons that challenged their initial assumptions. 

• Messages had lower read rates than expected (closer to social-media engagement levels) — their initial assumption had been that read rate would be around 90 percent.
   
• Polls were one of the most-used features, with some getting as much as a 40 percent response rate from the list.
   
• Conversion rates were lower than the team had expected (they measured a 20 to 30 percent join rate after visitors reached the channel page on the NPI website). 
   
• They stopped some sharing experiments when they noticed audience fatigue.
   
• Voice memos and content with a more personal feel received the most reactions.

These insights helped the team determine a consistent strategy: sharing links to helpful content, polls, and audio messages a few times a week.

Lesson 3: Set boundaries, even in success

Despite the WhatsApp’s channel’s success and steady engagement rates, the team realized that the platform’s long-term growth potential with their audience was limited. Initial growth had been achieved through carefully crafted cross-promotion with other social-media distribution channels such as Facebook, and the team had to make a conscious decision to pull back on their efforts. 

They eventually had to deprioritize work on WhatsApp, and be satisfied with the community they were able to create organically. Attempting to push the channel’s growth beyond those levels would have diminishing returns. 

“I see this as successful,” Laura says. “The channel was a good place to distribute content, but organizations shouldn’t overinvest in any platform without careful consideration of their long-term goals and the impact versus investment needed in those platforms.”

It can be difficult for staff to refocus on other projects after achieving success on a project where they’ve invested considerable time. But “good enough” can be a great place to land.

“There was value here, but with very limited staffing capacity, is this the value that we need right now?” Laura says.

Ultimately, for Laura, the project demonstrated the rewards of lean experimentation. While the team experienced setbacks in learning the platform and determining metrics to use, the small wins from discoveries and low barriers to entry for testing in WhatsApp made it worthwhile. 

"[It’s] a really good place for news organizations to maybe think about leanly testing if WhatsApp is an interesting place for their audiences, because it’s not a huge tech lift to start a channel,” she says. “You can repurpose your content into audio messages and polls to get to know your audience and have a bit of a more personal distribution channel."