Indiana Public Broadcasting is a statewide network of reporters mainly focused on policy and policy impacts. They began embedding question boxes within stories in early March 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, aiming to capture readers’ urgent questions and worries amidst frequently changing health guidance. A few months later, they began a similar approach focused on the 2020 election — and the questions came pouring in! The result was Civically, Indiana: A one-stop shop landing page for all the resources they create and questions they answer about participating in elections and the legislative process. Robin Rockel, community engagement manager for IPB, spoke with America Amplified about how the project came to be. 

What was the main objective of the initiative when it was originally launched?

Our team at Indiana Public Broadcasting wanted to help lower the barrier to entry for Hoosiers to engage with their state government, and to gather questions specific to our reporter’s beats to drive community-informed coverage. Our mail tools are a question embed, which we place in all our stories, and a text group called the Indiana Two-Way, which we use to communicate directly with group members. Civically, Indiana is the culmination of years of communicating with our audience and community members — a one-stop shop for all the resources we’ve built on how to engage with the Indiana legislative process. 

How is your station addressing local information needs through active listening and engagement?

The questions we’ve received over the years communicated very clearly: Many Hoosiers don’t know how to engage with their legislature, and this knowledge gap keeps them from participating in the legislative process. The Civically, Indiana project is our answer to that need. 

We have been able to create reporting and tools that help readers and listeners better understand and engage with information and systems in their community. We have created multiple digital FAQs and explainers about elections, Indiana’s legislative session, news literacy, and voting, based on questions people submitted through the embeds and our text group. Over the years we’ve also created tools like Digital Editor Lauren Chapman’s bill tracker, which gives the latest updates on the status of bills we are reporting on; and games like “Can You Survive Indiana’s Legislative Session?” to educate audience members on the legislative process of a bill going from proposal to law. All of these resources live on the Civically, Indiana page and are embedded in news stories where visitors can find them easily when they need them. The bill tracker, particularly, gets a lot of engagement during legislative sessions.

What challenges did your station face when trying to reach the community?

Through the years we have adjusted how we share and consider what is coming through our engagement channels. At first, it was just me reviewing the incoming responses from the embeds and texts, reading them, sharing them with the reporting team and managing reporting outcomes. As the effort has borne fruit and proved itself worthwhile, now an editor and I share the work of reading all the incoming responses and sharing useful takeaways with the whole team, and the reporters have considerably more buy-in and participation. We have weekly team meetings with editors and reporters to go over the responses. Reporters can decide what they think they can follow up on and editors can also pull out themes and individual responses for follow-up. We can also discuss progress on past ideas. It’s a continual conversation and tracked in meeting notes and outcome spreadsheets. 

A recent success: Our environmental reporter recently released two explainers on committee meetings, laying out what they are and how they can often be the public’s only chance to weigh in on a bill before it’s killed, and how the public can testify in a committee meeting if they feel compelled to do so.

How did your station partner with local organizations and community leaders to increase outreach efforts and build trust with the community?

Before launching the page, Lauren Chapman and I took time to talk to community groups to get a sense of their needs. We conducted listening sessions with housing experts, racial justice and environmental activists, health care and voting advocates — people who have done this work in Indiana for decades and organizers who are fairly new to the legislature. We asked these community groups about what kinds of questions they receive from their constituents, and what news was most relevant for those constituents. We worked with those partners to identify how we could most effectively share the information we came up with, and what information was most useful. When the reporting went out and the project page was created, we were able to share that back with people and groups we spoke with for feedback and to show how they helped inform our work. 

What were the results of your station’s efforts to reach the community?

We generated so much good reporting, and established a continual stream of questions coming from people around Indiana. And this goes beyond the legislative session — while we tailor our embeds to be session-specific and elections-specific at relevant times of the year, we continue the practice throughout the rest of the year as well. It has worked with both topics/beat specific questions and also generic, general questions. We now have a more informed audience that becomes a part of our editorial process. 

The success has enabled us to expand into in-person engagement. We’ll be having an event Jan. 18 in Jeffersonville, Indiana, to coach people about how to stay informed during the legislative session. The event will include community members as well as lawmakers and reporters, giving constituents a chance to ask their questions directly to decision-makers. We’ll also teach them about the resources we’ve created so they can use them going forward.

How does this case study demonstrate the importance of actively listening and engaging with all communities to better serve their information needs?

Our text group typically gets about 40 new sign-ups a month, but we’ve seen spikes related to major political events. For instance, during the August 2022 special session in which Indiana considered banning abortion (and did), we saw a rise in new-sign ups in both July and August. This showed us that our efforts to put these tools in place and growing a reputation of being a resource, particularly during important political moments, had paid off. When people went looking for help understanding the events, they came to us.

Anything else you would like to add for other stations to consider?

We were able to make Civically, Indiana after years of asking our community members questions about what they wanted and needed to know. It takes time to figure out how to make this work for your team and readers! If you decide to implement question embeds into your reporting process, your team should answer these questions beforehand to make sure you have a process for handling them:

• Who will go through and read all of the responses? And how often?

• How will it be shared with other team members (editors, reporters, etc.)?

• How can we track potential story ideas and who will do the reporting? 

• How will we follow up with the people who are leaving responses? How will we share story links with people whose questions have been answered? 

Additionally, we’d like to note that we are a statewide, daily outlet. This works in our favor in a number of ways. We’re able to include our question embed and any associated resources, like the Civically, Indiana page, in content that goes out daily. Because we’re statewide, the number of people engaging with those resources goes well beyond a single municipality, increasing the number of questions we get coming back to us.