While New England sweltered this summer, Reporter Amy Feiereisel put together a fun summer engagement project around ice cream.  It was a great lesson in how fun news and projects can really engage audiences and communities.  

Tell us who you are, and share a brief summary of the reporting project?

I’m Amy Feiereisel, and I’m a reporter at North Country Public Radio in northern New York. I manage our community engagement projects and outreach. 

Over the last six months, we’ve been reviving and rebuilding the NCPR Texting Club (using GroundSource). We’ve used it to promote our online surveys, ask folks about high gas prices and housing, and get feedback on potential stories. By late July, we had about 290 people on our texting list. 

During a news meeting, David Sommerstein, NCPR’s news director, joked about asking people about where they like to get ice cream. But I thought it sounded like a great idea, and proposed we text our existing list the question, as well as blast the question out online and on the air (text ICE CREAM to 315-978-6277). It was really spur-of-the-moment, and we pulled the whole thing together in less than two days. We started asking on July 22, and we gave people about a week to respond, then started sifting through the responses. 

We were delighted to receive about fifty responses from our existing list, and another forty from people who had texted in. We made a map of the recommendations, pulled fun quotes from responses, and published the map on August 1st. The same day, I went on the air and shared stories I’d gotten from calling texters. 

We then had another SEVENTY people text in to cast their votes over the next week. Right now our texting list stands at 406, an increase of 116 in a month long period. 

How did community engagement inform your reporting? 

It was the bedrock and basis of it all! We wanted to give our audience a chance to build something with us, and we used texting and  online and on-air callouts to do it. 

How did you build trust in the community you were reporting on?

We asked a discrete question, and delivered a product that proved we were listening, and in a timely manner. 

How are you bringing this reporting back to the community?

With a week and half we had the North Country Ice Cream Map published, and a reporter on the air sharing back responses. We also continued to update the story as more responses came in, which people could see. 

What lessons do you take away from this project in terms of strengthening your engagement?

The big takeaway was that people love to help build something, and goofy, silly ideas can be an amazing way to build audience.