Australian Community Media (ACM) is Australia’s leading regional and rural digital media company and publishes over 100 brands. ACM seeks to keep communities strong, informed and connected by creating unique local content that is valued by the communities they serve.

ACM noticed that their readers regularly engage with hyperlocal non-news content (classifieds, tributes etc) regularly, however the content is often disconnected with news content or fragmented across multiple websites or social media groups.

In partnership with Google, ACM created Noticeboard, which aims to bring all hyperlocal community free content to one destination, a landing page on ACM’s mastheads that features notices, events, emergency alerts and job opportunities, as well as local news.

ACM has launched Noticeboard across all regional mastheads, including The Canberra Times, Illawarra Mercury and The Courier. ACM’s communities have been highly engaged, with a substantial amount of notices and events submitted to Noticeboard, which has been used in Newsletters as well as in our Noticeboard Index. This engagement has driven traffic back to ACM’s websites, increased ACM’s content offering and increased subscription conversions.

Community contributions have also freed up ACM’s journalists from curating this type of content, so they can focus on news and investigations in the local community.