South Dakota Public Broadcasting turned to content sharing and collaboration to reach a statewide audience

Credit: Chelsea Naughton / America Amplified

For the 2024 election, South Dakota Public Broadcasting worked with media partners to create a one-stop shop for voter education

Cara Hetland, director of journalism  for South Dakota Public Broadcasting, had one north star for her Election 2024 project with America Amplified: to create a well-informed South Dakota. To that end, she worked with media partners to create a one-stop voter education shop. The Vote South Dakota website collected election coverage from several different media partners, hosted civics education, and was home to an interactive legislative map. The project also culminated in a live forum dedicated to discussing ballot measures up for consideration in November.  

Objective

Hetland saw her objective for SDPB’s 2024 election coverage as very simple: To make sure South Dakota voters knew about, and were able to make educated decisions about, all of the issues on the ballot in 2024. The state had seven different ballot initiatives up for the electorate to consider, and she didn’t want voters’ education on those issues to stop at social media algorithms that only showed them one side of the issue. 

She wanted the coverage to be thorough and accessible. Which meant she couldn’t do it alone. 

Hetland and South Dakota Public Broadcasting partnered with South Dakota News Watch, the South Dakota News Media Association and the South Dakota Broadcasters Association to create a one-stop repository for statewide election coverage in the form of a website: Vote South Dakota. 

The Challenge

South Dakota has seen a major reduction in its local news landscape in recent years. Many local papers across the state have shuttered, and the remaining local news outlets have miniscule staffs. Through the Vote South Dakota website and partnership, she made all of South Dakota Public Broadcasting’s election coverage available for reproduction on local airwaves and in local print media, and invited other participating partners to do the same. Additionally, South Dakota NewsWatch wrote profile pieces and created the election guide to share through this partnership.

“[We were] making sure even the smallest weekly newspaper in South Dakota has the same kind of content for its readers as everyone else, and they don’t have to kill themselves to get it,” Hetland said. 

This approach has been successful in other states with media collaborations, notably Outlier Media in Detroit, a collective of several different organizations of print, radio, commercial and digital media. But the attempt to replicate this model in South Dakota was not without its bumps. Different funding models among the organizations Hetland approached threw up roadblocks; commercial stations did not want to contribute to the content sharing, because making their content more widely available diverted attention from the channels they owned. 

“I get it. I respect it,” Hetland said. But public media’s mission is about making information as accessible as possible. She prioritized collaborating with the one-person print and radio shops, giving them feature stories, candidate interviews and transcripts of the congressional and issues forums SDPB produced in the fall.

“I’m not competing,” Hetland said. “I’m trying to provide a service.” And while the commercial stations were reluctant to contribute themselves, Hetland pointed out that they did share SDPB’s content, including the televised forums, giving the information a wider platform for South Dakota’s electorate.

The other prong of SDPB’s elections approach was engaging new, young voters. Hetland wanted to be present on college campuses, but given how spread out the campuses are in South Dakota and the constraints around staffing, it wasn’t feasible to visit in person. So SDPB leaned hard into the social media channels young consumers used, going to where they “lived” online since they couldn’t be where they lived in person.

The Solution

The crowning element of SDPB’s elections strategy for 2024 was an issues forum: A live panel discussion focusing on six initiatives on the state ballots. To make it more accessible to students, SDPB partnered with Dakota Wesleyan University to hold the event on campus.

They also brought students into the forum’s programming. Two local journalists from the Vote South Dakota partnership met with a class of students at DWU’s McGovern Center for Leadership and Public Service. The journalists worked with the students to craft the questions for the panelists. With six ballot initiatives to talk about and two representatives for each initiative – one for, one against – time was tight: about fifteen minutes per speaker. So the questions had to be workshopped thoroughly to make sure they made the best use of the limited time.

“We made it a requirement that they had to get past the ‘tell us what this means’ softballs,” Hetland said. It required the journalists to bring the students up to speed on the nuances of the issues, which ranged from abortion to taxes. “It made for some fabulous conversations in the classroom, I’m told.”

The forum was a success on several fronts: SDPB got good feedback from both attendees and participants, and multiple outlets aired the forum on their own airwaves. SDPB also enlisted a translation service so they could provide a livestream of the event in Spanish, which the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce shared on their Facebook page and website. The Vote South Dakota partners who helped to host the event are eager to replicate it for the 2026 primaries, Hetland said.

But one of the biggest signs of success came after the forum, through SDPB’s social media strategy. In addition to sharing the full forum, the station divided the recording into smaller segments based on the issues. That way if people wanted to learn about one issue, they could watch a 15 to 20-minute segment on YouTube rather than clicking through the full two-hour recording. These pieces were shared widely, both by the interest groups for the ballot issues and their aligned political parties as well as individuals looking to get more informed. While the YouTube recording of the forum got about 2,000 views (as of February, four months after the event), the YouTube short had anywhere between 1.7k to 4.6k views each. These segments also ended up in the voter guides South Dakota NewsWatch produced, and the station’s education department employed them in some of their classroom resources.

Takeaways

• When considering working with other media outlets, be aware of the needs and structures of those potential partners. Ask how you can help them, and whether that method aligns with your mission. 

• If you end up with a bank of educational resources after an event, have a plan for how you’re going to promote them and distribute them.

• SDPB did this project with the thought of piloting their approach for 2026, which will be a much bigger election year for the state. The website was a success, but Hetland wonders if forums are the right approach for the next election considering how many races will be on the ballot. She hopes to find ways to incorporate more audience engagement as well.