Case Study Tag: Public media

Newsroom overview

Who They Are
A Spanish-language narrative storytelling podcast distributed by NPR
Location
Global
Founded
2011
Membership program launched
2019
Weekly unique listeners
90,000
Number of members
1,325
Percentage of revenue coming from membership
10 to 15 percent

Narrative podcast Radio Ambulante gets 90,000 listeners a week who listen to an average of 80 percent of every episode. When you ask listeners what they love about it, they’re likely to say that it feels like the hosts are telling their story and that they feel like they’re part of a true community. 

Most listeners will never meet because they’re spread across at least three continents – South America, North America, and Europe. But Radio Ambulante knew if it was going to build a sustainable media organization with a loyal audience, it needed to find a way to help their listeners feel each other’s presence – and it needed to be able to offer that consistently.

They provide that sense of community through the podcast by including stories from listeners; through listening clubs, where people gather in person to listen to episodes; and through a corresponding Facebook group. All of these are initiatives that they’ve been able to make routine, so that they’re always there for listeners. 

All that work has not just created a strong community around Radio Ambulante – it’s created a community of people willing to support it financially. In September 2019 they launched membership – still a nascent concept in Latin America – and a year later they have 1,300 members.

Why this is important

One of the main reasons people become a member of a news organization is to be a part of something bigger than themselves. If your members don’t feel each other’s presence, you’re not offering them one of the most common motivations for membership: community. 

But a community can only flourish when it is consistently there for its members. By cultivating community in a few targeted ways, Radio Ambulante has been able to routinize that work and consistently deliver. 

As your community grows, it can be hard to find the resources to support it. By making it easy for their biggest fans to host listening clubs themselves, Radio Ambulante was able to grow that community without spreading the team any thinner. They found the intersection between audience members’ motivations and their needs that MPP has found lies at the heart of memberful routines. 

What they did

Before the listening clubs, there was the Club de Podcast Facebook group. Radio Ambulante launched the group in January 2018 so that listeners could gather to talk about the podcast, much like a book club. Growth Editor Jorge Caraballo said they wanted to make it possible for listeners to talk to each other, without Radio Ambulante staff as the go-between. 

The Facebook group took off. Listeners dropped in every week to talk about what episodes made them feel and ask questions about where the season was headed. The community grew so much that other listeners often beat Caraballo to answering listeners’ questions. 

“When you listen to Radio Ambulante, you become a character of Radio Ambulante,” Caraballo says. “The episodes take you deep into subjects or things that make you feel, that make you want to understand them through your experience. So you have to share your own experience to be able to talk about the episodes.”

It was the way the community supported itself that made Radio Ambulante realize there was potential for creating listening clubs. By the time they decided to launch the clubs, the Facebook group had 7,500 members. (Today the group has 9,500 people.) 

Staff members hosted 20 pilot listening clubs across the U.S. and Latin America from February to May 2019 (the team is fully remote, and is spread across the regions). The format was pretty simple: help participants get to know each other, listen to a 30 or 40-minute episode together, discuss the episode afterward, and then take a photo together, as Nieman Lab reported. The feedback in post-club surveys was overwhelmingly positive.

Survey results from the listening club pilots (Courtesy of Radio Ambulante)

They began having staff members host the clubs, but Radio Ambulante soon realized that they had many listeners who were eager to be hosts themselves. To support those volunteers, they created a guide that includes advice on everything from how many hours to book a venue to how to guide a discussion (Spanish guide, English guide). It even includes coloring sheets to help break the ice and help listeners focus on the podcast. 

“From the beginning the idea was to connect listeners with themselves,” Caraballo said. “We want them to take responsibility and ownership of the community.”

The results

Today, at least 3,000 people have participated in a listening club, and at least 118 people have hosted one (it’s hard for Radio Ambulante to be certain, because you don’t have to register with them to host or attend). Some listening clubs gather every week during a podcast season, from Panama City to Paris. A Colombian-Argentinian listening club host living in New York recently reached out to Caraballo to thank Radio Ambulante for helping him find friends that feel like family. They get messages like that all the time.

But the vibrancy of the community has made another channel much harder to manage: WhatsApp. Radio Ambulante has more than 3,000 on its WhatsApp list, and unlike the listening clubs, Caraballo has no choice but to be the only host. Last season, Caraballo experimented with posting a link to the latest episode each week, but some weeks he got back as many as 200 1:1 messages from fans. Sometimes it would take him a whole day to reply to all of them, which was unsustainable.

As they prepare to launch a new season for the fall, Caraballo plans to be very clear with people in the WhatsApp group that it’s just one person on the other end of the line, and he won’t be able to answer all of them. 

This intentional community building has cultivated a loyal audience willing to support Radio Ambulante financially. In their annual survey in spring 2019, Radio Ambulante asked respondents if they would be willing to support the podcast with a monthly contribution. Sixty percent of the 6,100 people who responded to the survey said yes. Radio Ambulante launched their membership program in September 2019, and a year later, they have about 1,300 members. 

Caraballo’s had to be careful about making it clear that Radio Ambulante values all of their community members, particularly as the membership program – and the tasks associated with supporting it – continues to grow. When they first launched the membership program, many worried listeners reached out to the Facebook group, wondering if it would soon be a member-only discussion. 

Radio Ambulante has no plans of putting that community – or any Radio Ambulante community – behind a paywall. So far, one of the only things limited to members is a biweekly coffee chat over Zoom with members of the team. “We don’t want the membership program to be seen as fundraising in the worst meaning of the word. We want it to be a consequence of the engagement. We don’t want it to be something for the money,” he said. 

What they learned

Just because you produce journalism, doesn’t mean you have to do journalism all the time. Radio Ambulante builds community by providing connection and joy. Their listening clubs include coloring sheets. They share illustrations and WhatsApp stickers tied to the podcast with their members. In July 2020, with in-person listening clubs on hold, Radio Ambulante hosted a multi-hour online dance party on Zoom. They hired a popular DJ. At least 700 people were on the line at any point between 8 p.m. and midnight (with hundreds staying on until 3 a.m.). The free event raised more than $1,000 in donations. As the main video cycled through attendees, participants toasted, danced, and held up flags and signs letting everyone know where they were listening from. 

This is particularly important in today’s grueling news cycle, when your audience members need something more than information. As Caraballo told MPP, “It can be rewarding to go beyond journalism and open up creative spaces to participate. I think of ‘Listening Clubs’ or ‘Radio Ambulante Zoom parties’ as rituals that connect our community to us (and among themselves) in a deep way. …Memberful routines shouldn’t be restricted to the practice of journalism.” 

Like the listening clubs and biweekly Zoom coffee chats, Radio Ambulante  plans to make this a more regular offering for the community. “This is only a prototype of something that can become much more organized and much more sustainable,” Caraballo said.

Key takeaways and cautionary tales

Members aren’t just the people who support you financially. Radio Ambulante listeners do all kinds of things to support the growth of the podcast, from sending the team voice messages to use in episodes to organizing listening clubs in their community. Like many member-driven organizations, Radio Ambulante is thinking very carefully about how to make sure they continue to feel valued. “They are members. They’re investing resources to help grow the network and the community,” Caraballo said. 

His advice for other organizations trying to strike that balance: “Whatever you do very, very well, keep doing it, keep improving it. That’s why they’re there. And then just imagine, ‘What would you like to receive from an organization that shares your mission? That is aligned with your principles? And that you think makes the world better and makes your life better?’ And then just give them the opportunity to enjoy that and to have that and to be part of it.”

Empowering your members can be powerful for you, too. Radio Ambulante is a small team powering a podcast with global reach. They’ve been able to support the community that has grown around the podcast by finding that critical intersection between audience members’ motivations – in this case, being a part of a community – and their needs – for others to become informal hosts of the community. 

When someone asks a question in the Facebook group and another listener answers it before Caraballo can, that’s a sign that it’s working – and when Radio Ambulante helps people make new friends through listening clubs, that’s a slam dunk. 

Other resources 

Discovering our Value Proposition Public media Developing Memberful Routines Designing our Membership Program Radio Ambulante

Newsroom overview

Who They Are
A public radio station in Los Angeles owned by Southern California Public Radio. They recently merged with LAist to expand their digital presence.
Location
Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Founded
2000
Launched membership
2000
Monthly unique visitors
2,004,000
Number of members
80,012
Percentage of revenue from membership
48 percent

Between January and August 2020, KPCC/LAist received more than 4,000 questions from the community about coronavirus and answered all but a handful of them directly. They also treated the questions as informal audience research about how the pandemic was affecting Angelenos’ daily lives and used that to shape other editorial coverage, virtual events, and even the methods by which they delivered information to their community members. This is a window into how they managed the information influx.

Why this is important

When coronavirus reached the United States, KPCC had plenty of experience letting community questions guide their journalism. They first began answering community members’ questions in this way for their Human Voter Guide project in 2016. They got a crash course in doing it in an emergency moment during the California wildfires in 2019.

But the volume of questions they received after coronavirus began spreading in California stretched their newsroom capacity, forcing them to systematize their approach at a level they hadn’t before. The Membership Puzzle Project team chose to focus on their coronavirus response instead of previous uses of engagement technology platform Hearken because it offers a question:capacity ratio that can be relatable for much smaller newsrooms. The workflow they adopted is one that could be used by a newsroom of any size.

What they did

It took KPCC four years of inviting questions about the mechanics of voting via their Human Voter Guide project to reach 1,000 questions asked (all of which were answered). They launched their coronavirus question module in January, started receiving questions in significant numbers in mid-March, and hit the 1,000-question mark just four weeks later. They embedded the Hearken module in almost every coronavirus story and at the bottom of their FAQ.

In order to handle the influx of questions, they set up an “If this, then that” workflow (the link goes to their actual workflow template). At the peak of the pandemic, almost every reporter in the newsroom was working on coronavirus coverage in some way, so the engagement team created topical buckets (such as K-12 schools, testing, mental health, and higher education) and assigned reporters to topics based on their areas of expertise. Their template also accounts for language to use for questions they’ve already received and questions seeking medical advice. 

They staggered work schedules for their seven-person engagement team so they could parcel out questions on the weekends and tightened up their coordination with a digital editor of sister site LAist, where the answers to questions appeared as a massive, continually-updated FAQ called the “No Panic Guide” (which morphed into this as time went on).

The volume of questions on a particular topic and the complexity of the answer informs whether KPCC also publishes a standalone, deeper piece on the topic, as it did with this step-by-step guide to getting unemployment benefits. 

KPCC created a master database for the whole KPCC/LAist newsroom of all the questions received, the question askers’ contact information, the status of the question, and whether a reporter wants to speak to the question asker further. By doing this, they ensured that every question asker received a response and that the concerns of the community could be seen by the whole newsroom, influencing and guiding editorial coverage. The rest of the newsroom regularly searched the database for trends, story ideas, and sources.

As the number of questions coming in from outside California grew, they invited journalists in other parts of the country to help them answer questions (see form). The KPCC team grouped and anonymized questions to protect the privacy of question askers, sent them to the volunteer, and then replied to the question asker directly after receiving the answers back. They also offered their coronavirus stories for free republication by other local media organizations (those relationships were already in place because of a previous collaboration on the 2020 census). 

They’ve also adapted this work for Spanish-speaking and non-digital audiences. They created a Monday through Saturday coronavirus news roundup, and they launched a dedicated Spanish line for their Groundsource service. They distributed a mailer with the most essential coronavirus information to neighborhoods with lower access to broadband internet.

The results

As of August 7, 2020, KPCC had received 4,005 questions about coronavirus via Hearken and answered 3,961 of them. Almost a third of those questions came from outside California. They also received more than 200 questions via Groundsource. At two points they were receiving so many questions – 10 questions per minute – that they had to hire an additional part-time engagement producer to handle the volume. 

They sent 12,670 physical mailers, 7,199 of which were in Spanish and included the number for their new Spanish-language Groundsource service, which they are just beginning to develop.

More than half of the people who asked a question via Hearken also opted in to receiving an email newsletter, making it KPCC/LAist’s single largest source of email address acquisition and therefore a critical part of its member acquisition strategy. More than 800 donations – nearly 40 percent of all funds raised in their most recent LAist drive – came from emails appeals, a big shift from traditional public radio pledge drives. KPCC/LAist also made sure to emphasize newsletter signups elsewhere on the site, which was experiencing record traffic as a result of their “No Panic Guide” FAQ and other coronavirus coverage (from March through May, traffic to LAist.com was 200 percent above normal).
The questions themselves helped them design more resonant editorial coverage as well. They became insights into how the pandemic was affecting their community members at various points in the pandemic, from the mother early on wondering if she should cancel her daughter’s wedding to nursing home residents being threatened with eviction for not following their facility’s coronavirus rules. An investigation into the unemployment crisis and accompanying virtual event prompted 750 new unemployment questions about unemployment, Hernandez writes.

What they learned

Since KPCC began receiving questions from the community via Hearken in 2017, the station has received more than 10,000 community questions and answered 5,100 of them. (The unanswered questions are mostly stories that would require enterprise reporting that KPCC is unable to do at this time). KPCC replies to those question askers explaining that.) From what they’ve learned that:

Journalism is about meeting information needs. “I’ve learned, journalism can be — and sometimes needs to be — the simple, straightforward answering of somebody’s question. It’s not just 3,000-word narratives or a sound-rich audio feature. It’s meeting information needs — in whatever form that needs to take,” KPCC intern Caitlin Hernandez wrote on Medium. 

The questions are also insights that guide them to higher impact journalism. “When our audience comes to us with a question, they also provide insights into how the pandemic is affecting their daily lives in real time. This has guided KPCC-LAist’s reporting to some of our best performing virtual events and stories this year — and ever,” Hernandez wrote.

You don’t have to wait until you know the full answer. During moments of uncertainty and isolation, a partial answer right away is appreciated, even if it’s not the full answer. 

This could be at least partially automated. The success of the “If this, then that” framework showed KPCC that they could remain human while being more systematic. Now they’re exploring how they can use machine learning to answer some of the simpler questions, freeing up staff time to focus on those that require a higher, more human touch. Although the pandemic will eventually cease to be the main news story, KPCC anticipates that this approach will serve them well during future prolonged breaking news, such as wildfires. 

This kind of high-touch help requires mental health breaks. Spending all day helping  community members experiencing grief, fear, financial loss, frustration, and anger takes its toll. KPCC has learned to stagger work days and provide mental health breaks, particularly for the engagement team, which has to engage at a deeper level with community members.

Key takeaways and cautionary notes

A simple“if this, then that” approach can help you greatly expand your scope. KPCC’s newsroom is much larger than most newsrooms practicing engaged journalism. Their engagement team of seven is the size of many local news startups! But their “If this, then that” approach is one that can help even a team of two or three efficiently meet their community’s needs. 

Let the whole newsroom see the work. Their approach of making it easy for the whole newsroom to see the questions coming in and use them to design higher-impact editorial coverage and virtual events also helps the practice of engagement gain credibility and enthusiasm across the newsroom – a good lesson for larger newsrooms struggling to gain buy-in.

Other resources 

Local/Regional Public media Developing Memberful Routines KPCC