GroundSource is partnering with Solution Set to continue our SMS newsletter (aka “textletter”) experiment
At the start of the year, GroundSource relaunched its email newsletter. (Subscribe here!) Our goal was to be useful. We wanted to serve as an engagement problem-solving resource. That meant buoying content that offered insight into reaching and building new communities, activating your existing audiences, and staying inspired. That also meant hearing from folks about what their challenges were through calls to actions in the emails. We quickly realized that the second part wasn’t going to work out. No one was responding to our call outs.
Our resolution was that we had a classic email problem. Average email open rates are in the 20–30 percent range, and response rates tend to hover in the 1–2 percent range. (Statistics on those email from MailChimp here.)
In the meantime, we were building a platform and a service — GroundSource — that enables two-way engagement via messaging, where open rates are typically above 90 percent, and in our experience working with customers, response rates can often exceed 10 or 15 percent.
So we made bold move: we launched a SMS newsletter. A textletter, if you will.
We had successes.
We asked our subscribers what inspired them and shared what we heard with the rest of the engagement community.
We also asked the community what challenges they faced. And the responses we received were thoughtful and intimate. That didn’t surprise us. In our experience, texts often contain as much or more richness as emails or comments shared online.
In our conversations with our community, we surfaced four major challenges to pursuing engagement in the day-to-day work of newsrooms:
- A lack of money and time (essentially, engagement work wasn’t a high enough priority to make a claim for scarce resources)
- A lack of clarity in setting and meeting metrics and goals
- Difficulty reaching and engaging enough of the “right” people
- A lack of tools and and platforms that organize and support engagement
We responded to those challenges in an edition of our email newsletter and shared those resources with our SMS newsletter subscribers.
We “Hearken-ized” GroundSource, asking our subscribers what they want to know about their community and then putting the questions to a vote. The winning question was “Where are we all from?” So, we mapped our SMS newsletter subscribers and shared the map with them.
The point of launching our own SMS newsletter was two-fold. First, we wanted to explore the idea of a textletter product. Second, we wanted to put ourselves in our customers’ shoes. We succeeded on both fronts because paradoxically, after four months, we began to flounder.
Successful uptake of the GroundSource platform and process is common. But without clear plans and goals for our work, no tool (even the one we were building ourselves) was going to work very well. We didn’t have an end date for our experiment. We didn’t have clear metrics and goals. We didn’t have a good growth strategy. We didn’t do enough to make our community feel heard.
We had a good idea and we ran with it. But good ideas without proper strategic alignment don’t make good news products on their own.
So when a subscriber asked us where all of the content they were sharing was going, we didn’t know how to answer. And it was another signal that we had yet to explore the how of the GroundSource process and not just the what of the technology.
These were tough lessons, but owning up to our own shortcomings has spurred us to design a new onboarding process for our customers. We’re in the process of finalizing and rolling it out with our second Community Listening and Engagement Fund cohort.
“We are constantly encouraging journalists and newsrooms to be comfortable failing in small ways and owning those failures,” said GroundSource CEO Andrew Haeg, “But even so it felt uncomfortable at first recognizing what we were doing wasn’t working and we needed to take appropriate action. It gave us even more empathy for those navigating the uncertainties and complexities of engagement.”
And it also compelled us to find a new home for our textletter, one that had the resources and strategic alignment to give it the care it needs. So we are handing it off to Solution Set, a weekly email newsletter from The Lenfest Institute for Journalism and The Solutions Journalism Network. Each week, they take an in-depth look at one thing in journalism, share lessons, and point subscribers toward other useful resources.
We’re big fans of Solution Set and not just because their content is on point. They have the service mindset that’s critical to success with GroundSource. Every week, Solution Set editor Joseph Lichterman asks his community what stories he should amplify and what questions he should explore.
And unlike GroundSource, the Solution Set team has the bandwidth to engage subscribers in weekly conversations and research and create content based on their needs. You can read more about Solution Set’s textletter plans and subscribe at this link or by clicking through this form:
As for what we learned about how to run a textletter? Here you go.
1. Give before you take.
Some relationships don’t serve us. They might be extractive or destructive. That framework translates to your smartphone, too. Think about all of those push notifications that light up your phone at all hours of the day offering (usually) little more than stress, anxiety, and hopelessness.
That’s why giving something that’s actual useful is key in a messaging relationship. Think about some of your own interpersonal relationships. When those people share content with you, they’re doing it to be useful, not to drive traffic. Give folks something they need before you ask for something in return.
2. Let the community lead.
Messaging environments should let community members lead the conversation. So don’t expect people to follow the path you set for them. That means giving them opportunities to lead the way. Here’s how we did that in one of our SMS newsletters:
Hi! It’s Simon from GroundSource! We were inspired last week by Kim Bui’s report for the American Press Institute: “The empathetic newsroom: How journalists can better cover neglected communities.” An absolute must read w/solid tips: bit.ly/2HJRCzn.
Which leads us to our Q of the week: How might GroundSource foster habits of listening and empathy?
(As always text STOP to quit / HELP for more, std msg rates apply)
Text 1 for I have a thought
Text 2 for Beats me!
Text 3 for I’d like to talk about something else
3. Keep it to the point.
Overly long messages don’t look good in messaging environments. And extended conversations should be kept to a minimum if you want people to complete them. But that also means giving community members what they need right away and building a conversation that will meet your goals even if its not completed.
4. Show people you hear them.
We learned how important showing people you’ve heard them is through this experiment. No one wants to talk into a void. (That’s what social media is for 😉.) So showing folks you’ve heard them is key to building and maintaining relationships.
This finding has had a profound impact on us. Our best practices now include following up with every user (just a brief “Thank you!” is all you need sometimes) and we’re building a mechanism for this into our platform. Our customers already share what they hear from their communities on social and on their websites and we’re building a way to make that easier.
5. No response doesn’t mean no interest.
This final lesson was a surprise for me. I talked to subscribers about cleaning our list (or unsubscribing inactive community members) — something that’s common in email newsletters. They told me that they loved being a part of the community and that seeing activity in it was all they needed. Responding to our call outs was inconvenient sometimes (we’re working on a fix for that!) but getting that call out meant something to them.
