How to bust down silos in your organization and boost community engagement journalism
Public radio stations, like any media organization, can find themselves full of people working in silos. The pandemic has hardened those silos because there are no water coolers to gather around! Even in the best of times, though, departments often learn what each other are doing during formal all-staff meetings, or after the project is already finished. When it comes to community engagement work, that’s usually too late for marketing departments to successfully promote the work, or for development to get financial support that would sustain the work in the long run.
Here are some natural opportunities for collaboration between content and development on community engagement:
Finding community partners. Your development and marketing team has been building community connections for years. They know the landscape of the community and have relationships with organizations that could turn out to be great partners for listening sessions or writing workshops. Your engagement project may be just the type of work the community organization has been trying to do.
Promoting your community engagement. So you’re hosting a panel in partnership with a community organization next month. That’s great! Are your panelists promoting the event? Do they have the resources or even know how to promote it to their own networks? Your marketing department can help you put together a package of social media graphics and copy to make it as easy as possible for your partners to get the word out. They’ll probably even have ideas for low-cost promotion that you never would have thought about!
Building event templates. Work together to come up with a few types of events (with a lot of flexibility) and create templates to plan the events. That way you can build on past experience and pull things off quickly AND successfully. Let your development and marketing team help you set up the framework of who needs to be involved in a listening session, where and how you promote it, and what kind of supplies you need to make it happen. That way your newsroom can spend more time on the content without worrying too much about the logistics.
Recruiting volunteers. Community engagement events can require a lot of support — event setup and tear-down, signing people in, collecting surveys — and odds are your membership department has volunteers knocking at their doors to help out. This gives them the chance to be a part of your organization outside of a fund-drive!