Developing a cycle of engagement
Developing a cycle of engagement
Media is evolving rapidly from a kind of industrial mindset we make stories and distribute them to a service mindset we understand our audiences needs and serve them with information.
Why? Pick your trend — the declining value of clicks, the rise of reader revenue, the increasing importance of trust and loyalty, or the steady drumbeat of crises creating constantly evolving information needs. They all point to a need for putting audiences—their questions, their information needs, their perspectives—at the center of everything your newsroom does.
Unlike other texting services that take your credit card number and then let you sink or swim, we spend time with each customer to put audiences first by building a cycle of engagement.
The cycle of engagement consists of the following elements:
Inviting your audiences to engage
Listening to what they share or ask
Creating content that reflects what you hear
Communicating that back to the audience.
Notice there’s no mention of email, or texting, or social, or any other specific channel. The cycle works irrespective of the tech—the idea is that to become truly indispensable to audiences and communities, we need to meet them where they’re at and make our service reflect their needs and concerns.
Each element of the engagement cycle engenders deeper loyalty; but linked together, they form a flywheel that provides lasting audience value:
Audience members feel included
They feel respected, and involved
The content you create aligns with your audiences’ interests and curiosity, leading to more clicks, shares, and deeper engagement
They feel like your organization follows through on its promises
A key part of the GroundSource onboarding process is thinking through what this cycle looks like for the audience or community the news organization is trying to reach. For client Mississippi Today, they wanted to convert new audiences coming to them for COVID updates into loyal audiences who see Mississippi Today as a critical resource worthy of their attention and support.
Mississippi Today reporter Will Stribling hosts weekly AMA's via text message
We worked with them to develop a cycle of engagement via COVID news that included:
A COVID texting line with daily updates (invitation to engage)
Calls for questions and invitations to contribute to weekly AMA’s (ask me anything) with their lead COVID reporter Will Stribling (listening)
Articles and FAQ’s published based on audience questions and AMA’s (creating content that reflected what they heard)
And texts / emails back to those who participated with links to the articles (communicating back).
In one case, the calls for questions yielded nearly 100 questions, 20 of which Stribling answered, leading to an AMA story with more 3,000+ page views, a follow-up piece on boosters yielding another 2,500+ page views, and a detailed COVID-19 vaccine FAQ (opens PDF) developed with answers to audience questions.
And all of these pieces continue to live online as useful resources, and valuable reference points whenever news hits that brings these questions back into frame. For a medium-sized news organization like Mississippi Today, these are solid engagement numbers—and what’s more, they speak truth to the organization’s mission:
“In order to be an authoritative source for news and information for Mississippians, we have to center every experience on the readers themselves. They need to have access to our reporters and have information that can help them improve their lives at their fingertips — literally. As an organization, we are committed to listening to people in the communities across Mississippi to allow them to help inform our coverage. We want to be able to amplify diverse voices across the state. Our text lines are a big part of creating trust and deepening engagement with our readers.”
The engaged approach is attractive to sponsors, too — in this case, the Partnership for a Healthy Mississippi paid to have its name associated with what, effectively, is a public health campaign in the guise of a news project.
And the process itself is simple enough, once you’ve prioritized creating a cycle, vs. churning out serial one-off pieces of content whose success is measured only by clicks and shares. That means assigning people the tasks of managing the engagement, coordinating with the reporters creating the content, and developing processes for listening to what you hear back and — more importantly — actually doing something with it.
We know that the hardest part of developing a cycle of engagement is creating new habits and routines in the midst of busy days, with scarce resources, facing long-standing newsroom workflows set up to generate content vs. cultivating engaged audiences.
We have many years of experience, plus plenty of case studies like this, working with even the most resource-scarce and tradition-bound newsrooms to become strategic partners in developing a cycle of engagement with audiences—and imagining new audiences that could be reached in this way.
We’d love to work with you.
Get in touch by emailing andrew@groundsource.co.