Brittani Howell is the community engagement specialist for Side Effects Public Media. She leads various community engagement efforts, from texting exchanges to hosting events. She shared this workflow with us.

With communities isolated from one another during the ongoing pandemic, it’s important for reporters to connect with their audience members and be responsive to their informational needs. Side Effects Public Media and Indiana Public Broadcasting have been using audience questions to drive reporting and coverage. To supplement that coverage, and to address some questions publicly, we are hosting  a Facebook Live series with reporters across our teams.

As we receive incoming questions, engagement specialists sort the questions thematically. Facebook Live conversations are built around those questions and scheduled depending on current reporting or recent breaking news. (Example: After Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb announced the state was working with other Midwestern governors to reopen, our team brought in reporters from three different states to discuss what reopening might look like.) 

For 45 minutes to 1 hour, reporters speak to a host (another reporter or an engagement specialist) about the topic and answer questions we have received, in addition to any questions that may come in through social media during the stream.

At Side Effects, we try to stay within the following metrics for each episode: 

• One livestream every other Thursday, to make sure we can put forward the best product without overtaxing our tech strategist.

• Stream is 45 minutes to 1 hour long, because anything longer would be pretty draining and anything shorter tends not to perform as well.

• 2-3 guests at a time; any more than that gets a bit taxing for the viewer. Also, with a limited time frame, you want to make sure everyone gets enough airtime. 

• Web build turnaround within 24 hours.

Timeline

• Brainstorm. You want a good bank of topics to explore and experts to consult. As we build up audience and enthusiasm, we’ve been keeping our experts “in-house” (i.e. limited to people on our staff), but we would like to branch out into community experts in the near future. Create a shared document with a list of topics and possible guests, and share it with your reporting team/teams to get their feedback and buy-in.
  
  Once you have a few topics you’d like to explore and a rough idea of your schedule, you go through the process of building each “episode.” Here is what that timeline looks like for me:

• 2 weeks out

  • Decide topic, based on current reporting and incoming audience questions

• 1 week out

  • Invite and finalize guests.

• 5 days out

  • Write out a “script” based on the questions and the reporting. Distribute to guests so they have time to prepare.

  • Write up social media promos with the date, time, and a few details of your livestream. Send these promos to everyone on your team and at your organization. Ask them to please share the posts as often as they can to drive up interest and awareness.

  • Create a Facebook Event for your livestream. Plan to share the link, once it's live, to that space.

• 3 days out

  • Send any personalized invitations to people you think would be interested in the topic you’re exploring.

• Day of

  • Send reminders to all station members to share the event details on social media. Include a calendar reminder.

  • Post reminder in the Facebook Event.

  • Send follow-ups to your invitees. 

  • Schedule a “sound check” with all parties to make sure everyone’s audio and video are coming through alright.

• Day after 

  • Thank-you notes to everyone involved.

  • Web build of the Facebook Live to share on the website and over the next few days for anyone who missed the livestream.

• Two days after

  • Start again!

Staffing

This is a team effort, and you need a good group to pull it off right. Aside from guests, you need at minimum: 

• A host/moderator (we’ve been using the engagement team or the host of the statewide talk show)

• a technical director 

• producer monitoring the social media stream and incoming comments

• digital editor/reporter who can commit to turning the stream into a web build the next day 

Some of these roles can be doubled up, but it’s best to leave the technical director as free as possible because they will be carrying a heavy lift.