Quality community engagement involves listening and responding to the needs of the community. This kind of meaningful and useful engagement can be immensely attractive to local sponsors – but how do you find those opportunities? We have some tips from WFYI’s sponsorship team that might also work for your station.

Community engagement journalism offers nonprofit media outlets a chance to strengthen their work AND their sustainability. As you work to deepen your reporting practice, don’t forget to invite donors, grantmakers, sponsors and other key stakeholders to learn about how they can be a part of your sustainability.

Public radio stations produce a ton of local content on a wide range of platforms: news features, digital stories, videos, talk shows, newscasts, announcer breaks, promos. But it’s difficult to actually listen and read in real time to evaluate how well we are serving communities. News directors and other managers may carve out time to evaluate the work, but we really need more diverse observations to continually improve.

Ed Mahon, now with Spotlight PA, was a legislative reporter for WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a partner station of America Amplified. His 2020 community engagement work centered around being embedded in Erie, a city in the northwest corner of the state.

When the newsroom at WNIN first discussed expanding our coverage to Spanish-speaking communities, the intention was to become a trusted news source for those communities. It’s crucial for your community engagement to get to know the audience you are trying to reach – to understand their needs, their listening habits, and what type of content engages them – before you create the content or start thinking about story ideas.

As many of you have discovered by now, doing real community engagement is a time-consuming task. It is really difficult to be a deadline driven reporter AND build that reporting off of meaningful engagement.

Instagram isn’t just pretty pictures and selfies anymore. People are heading to the platform to get news and information, and to connect with their communities. From infographics, to short videos, to quizzes and polls in the Stories feature, your content can be both informative, engaging, and perfectly aligned with your mission.

You’ve started tracking the diversity of your sources. Hooray! Now, there are a few things you and your newsroom can do to make sure that source diversity tracking becomes a lasting habit.