It's unusual when a magazine editor can look at a budget cut and see a silver lining.

But that's exactly the way things turned out for Debra Bassert, assistant vice president of land use and design at the National Association of Home Builders.

After shuttering its 25-year-old print magazine Land Development in 2012, NAHB launched Best in American Living, a digital-only publication that it soon realized offered new opportunities for content as well as exponential audience growth. (It also earned NAHB a 2015 ASAE Gold Circle Award in the "e-magazine" category.)

"We can cry about what was cut for a day, and then move on, because things have changed," Bassert says. "Today's world requires a lot of reinvention to survive; not everyone is able to move past what came before."

But her small team of three did, after learning that budget cuts during the course of the downturn would hit the print version of the magazine, which focused on the land-development industry.

Today's world requires a lot of reinvention to survive; not everyone is able to move past what came before.

The first step was to analyze the smaller digital budget allocated for the magazine. Then, the team decided to integrate NAHB's already-existing Best in American Living Awards, a premier national industry awards program recognizing residential design excellence, into the new content mix.

"We decided it was a good opportunity to build up the prestige of the Best in American Living brand, and a good time to look at the readership as well," Bassert says.

Land Development had a small but fiercely loyal audience of 3,000 subscribers, who passed it along to about 8,000 others annually, according to Bassert's estimates. But, by refocusing the content of Best in American Living more broadly on home and community design, her team knew it had the potential to reach beyond the prior audience of site planners, engineers, and the business side of homebuilding. This new publication would reach the builders, developers, site planners, architects, interior designers, and homebuyers who followed the industry. They also realized these additional readers would include young professionals who were newer to the industry and with whom NAHB wanted to connect and deepen its relationship.

The successful journey started with three months of research alongside its graphic design partner, LTD Creative. "We knew from our analytics that people love looking at home design," Bassert says.

Initially, at the 2013 launch, the team went with a classic PDF flipbook—but it proved "a bit clunky" for the audience. Diligent audience research also showed that most of the readers accessed the e-magazine on smartphones and tablets.

To accommodate that better, the platform was redesigned with a more responsive digital format offered by Nxtbook Media. "We wanted to improve the ability to view the content, especially the photos, so the new design is horizontal and works like flipping through photos on your phone or tablet, allowing you to slide through a page at a time with your finger," Bassert says.

Moving to a digital magazine also allowed Bassert to encourage her team to connect readers to the magazine through social media as well, including a blog that helps drive readers to magazine content. NAHB metrics show that this bundling is connecting the magazine to more than 100,000 people (57 percent are NAHB members), to more than 3,500 Facebook followers, and to upwards of 12,000 blog readers.

Bassert advises others faced with moving to new publishing formats to research and work closely with expert consultants who can push to think creatively. "Think broadly, talk with a lot of people, and look for other examples of what you want to do," she says.