How KPCC Became "LA's Help Desk" with Texts
Answering Your Covid-19 Questions via Text
This is how you build trust with your audience - reply back.
Engagement muscle memory. That’s what Southern California public radio station KPCC had built up with all their outreach strategies over the years.
They’d texted their audience about civic participation with election deadline reminders. Then, they reached out to folks on various channels with critical news about the California wildfires.
Enter 2020. This engaging response background set them up for success when it came time to receive text messages from listeners about Covid-19. The station asked their listeners to send in any questions they had about the virus and not surprisingly, hundreds of texts flooded in. The incredible KPCC staff tried to answer every single one.
They became LA’s help desk. Here are a few takeaways from their experience:
Texting = urgency. If someone texts you with a question, they expect a reply right away, especially when it’s about health and safety.
Texts are simple. No clicks, no webpages to scroll through, just the little piece of information you need, right then and there. In these confusing times, simple, direct answers to people’s questions can be a powerful lifeline.
“We’re really trying to use the whole hog, a snout to tail approach. What’s the content? What are the sourcing opportunities? What is a trend here that we should do a story or event about? How do we then communicate that to the audience? How to we make it an ongoing proof of concept?” - Ashley Alvarado, Director of Community Engagement, KPCC
Develop relationships. Over time, people would text in and ask for the specific names of folks working at KPCC. They developed big-time trust and loyalty.
Read more about how KPCC executed their texting operation: