Don’t let turnover overturn your engagement plans
One way to embed engagement into the culture of your organization is by having reporters weave some engagement tools into their everyday reporting. Giving reporters time to connect with the communities they are covering will enrich their reporting as they will better understand the information needs of that community. This may require reevaluating what’s on a reporter's plate and what can give way for this work.
Here are a few ways reporters can work engagement into their workflows:
Join local Facebook Groups about relevant topics
Don’t just drop in to post stories and leave. Listen to what folks are talking about. Ask people in the group what information they aren’t getting from the reporting that is available. Share your reporting that was sparked from that group.
Hold ‘office hours’
Find a common place in the community you cover to work from. Bring your work and set up at a park, coffee shop or community center. Then share it out on social. Set up a Calendly link if you’d like to offer virtual chats where people can drop in at a time they choose.
Check in with sources regularly
Find time to reach out to your sources when not on deadline. Just to check in on what is going on and what’s happening in their neck of the woods. Try making a rotating list of people to check in with every so often.
Collect testimonials
When out in the community you cover, collect anecdotal testimonials about what “showing up” and how your coverage makes a difference in the community. Share those throughout your organization regularly to win support.
Create an automated newsletter
Set up an aggregate newsletter using an RSS feed from your website. Using Mailchimp or another email service provider, it can be a weekly or daily list of headlines sent straight to your audience’s inboxes. Check out more about newsletters from our training with Emily Roseman, research director at the Institute for Nonprofit News.
Embed Google Forms
Use forms at the bottom of your articles to ask readers what questions they have after reading. Google Forms are easy to set up and embed, they are also great for getting readers feedback.
Are you baking engagement into your workflow already? Email me at matt@americaamplified.org, I’d love to hear about it.