Preparing to Engage: Station Managers

How do I set the stage?

It’s critical to be clear about how you see community engagement fitting in with or changing your organization. That means you first have to evaluate your station’s stated mission, establish a vision for how community engagement fits in with that, and then align your organization to deliver on the goals and priorities.

The road to successfully incorporating community engagement into your newsroom’s culture must be paved with clear intention. We encourage station managers to review these steps – whether you are just beginning your journey into engagement journalism or your newsroom has been practicing it for a long time.

Assess your staff and resources.

Take stock of your staff’s current obligations and priorities. Consider these questions:
- Do you understand what everyone on your staff is responsible for?
- Does everyone on staff have a clear job description?

Connect mission to engagement.

Work with staff to review and revise your organization’s mission statement and stated objectives to reflect your commitment to community engagement.

Find your leaders.

It’s imperative that you have an editorial lead who is in sync with the organization’s vision to pivot to an engagement strategy. Get buy-in from your News Director, podcast or talk show executive producers, or all of the above by sharing impactful resources and case studies that underscore the power of engaged journalism.
If you have the resources, hire a Community Engagement Director to build an engagement team.

Use this vision worksheet to make it easier to outline station goals and mission statements with your team

Explore

Engage the organization.

As a station manager, you shouldn’t determine editorial priorities, but rather establish and support the vision for the institution.
Support your newsrooms’ efforts to identify who’s included and who’s missing from your coverage now. See our guide on source diversity tracking.

Establish metrics for success.

It’s important to establish what you’ll be measuring before the work begins. Work with your newsroom manager to establish a system to track some key metrics of impact, and then continually share that impact with your community, your Advisory Board, with other stations and, most importantly, with funders:

Story ideas coming to your from the community.
More diverse voices on the air.
Partnerships brokered with community groups and or other media.
Attendance at listening events (diversity of people invited at those events).
Types of enterprise stories produced.
Number of new sources/contacts established.
New skills acquired by staff (live video streaming on Facebook; organizing and tracking a texting club).
An increase in station membership as a result of community engagement.
Digital audience growth as a result of engagement.
Policy changes – locally, statewide – as a result of the stories that have emerged from engagement.

Consider creating a spreadsheet or document to share with newsroom leaders and staff that tracks the metrics you are measuring. Set up a workflow to ensure that staff are contributing to that spreadsheet and that you are sharing measurements of success with the organization as a whole.