Deep Diving for Data
Latest in a series of articles from Disrupting Public Media (transformation at KQED). Find the other articles here
“We’re trying to change our approach to audiences with our new strategic plan. We used to concentrate on demographic targeting — we need more Latino audiences or more African-American audiences or younger audiences. The new plan focuses on ‘public media inclined people.’ What characteristics of the population would move them to consume our content? We know we’re not going to reach everyone, but we want to reach the people who are inclined to use KQED content and services.” — KQED Marketing staff
To survive in our increasingly information-driven culture, data-collection must be a part of every organization’s DNA. This function, once solely the responsibility of management, is now used by effective organizations to empower staff to make data-driven decisions and take action. In this digital age new markets are being shaped by dramatic demographic and behavioral shifts. At the same time, new types of consumer dynamics and behavior are shaping content creation and acquisition in highly unpredictable ways. Therefore, using fact-based information to drive decision-making enables organizations to more accurately define and refine strategy.
By applying sophisticated data-gathering tools and methods to better understand audience traits and characteristics, KQED is finding that using information to make decisions at all organizational levels can be powerful and transformative. The station expects that new knowledge — powered by data analytics and applied to rich data — will foster a greater appreciation of its audiences, as well as lead to more organized and targeted audience-centric marketing campaigns.
To implement the strategic goal of “audience first,” KQED is gradually shifting its focus from demographic to psychographic data gathering and analysis. What traits (values, opinions, attitudes, interests) help drive audiences to KQED? Who are they? What content do they consume?
New Tools for a New Age
“The last few years we’ve tended to focus our digital marketing campaigns on the popular “Downtown Abbey” series and on encouraging people to buy the DVD of the latest season. We also know that a segment of our audience has absolutely no interest in ‘Downton Abbey.’ So this year we’re going to separate these two groups. Yes, we’re going to send out the “Downton Abbey” messages the same as before, but for people who don’t respond, we have an alternative message more suited to them. I think that’s the kind of the thing we’ll start to do, as we learn more about our audience.” - KQED Marketing staff
From 1999–2014, KQED’s primary customer relationship management (CRM) software tool was Team Approach, an application designed primarily as a direct mail database for nonprofit organizations. The software’s features allowed KQED to store and track a member’s basic contact and demographic information (address, phone number, age, etc.), but did not allow for more sophisticated or granular analytics. In effect, the station’s stored knowledge of its audience was both limited and static. As KQED’s information needs changed, upgrading the system became more difficult. ”Enhancements” to the system were little more than temporary fixes.
Currently, KQED has about 196,000 active members, with records for about 453,000 on its e-mail lists. However, due to system limitations, marketing and membership staff were unable to cross-reference how many of these members were also active on KQED’s social media platforms (e.g., Facebook, Twitter), or what stories or trends they might be following.
For membership staff, the constraints of this legacy system were particularly acute. Historically, most of what public media spends on fundraising is focused on the retention rather than the acquisition of new members. The majority of those who give during pledge drives are generally existing members. In 2015, for example, 70% of the 17,000 donations during KQED’s last radio pledge drive were from current members. Limited information about KQED’s audience prohibited staff from better understanding why people became members and what motivated them to donate. More granular information on its audience could, however, provide a more comprehensive and data-driven intelligence for developing strategies to retain existing members and acquire new ones. This requires thinking about audience in different ways.
“When listeners are regularly tuned to KQED radio on their morning commute and love what we do, they may also comment, tweet, or post. Maybe they come to a live event occasionally. But if they’re telling their friends, and their friends are telling their friends, that’s audience building. They might not become members right away, but we certainly want to know who they are and try to convert them.” — KQED Marketing staff
To improve market intelligence, KQED clearly had to move from its legacy database system to a more robust CRM. In examining system requirements, it was important that a new CRM system be able to simultaneously handle data on transactional donors, as well as on audience members who might be considered leads. The new system also had to “communicate” or be able to extract content information across departments, as well as speak to the station’s other audience data-gathering sources on the Internet (kqed.org) and social media (Facebook, Twitter). The Salesforce CRM appeared to fulfill these requirements, so in 2013 KQED began an organizational migration to this platform
Technology rollouts of this magnitude are often complex and multifaceted. Managing such rollouts across large organizations is not a simple matter. In the case of KQED, the software migration and conversion from Team Approach to Salesforce was far from seamless. Believing it could handle this work internally, KQED did not, at the outset, hire enough individuals with Salesforce CRM experience to plan or implement the process. Staff’s conversion problem was exacerbated by having to integrate the station’s hundreds of pages of reporting requirements as a nonprofit, as well as having to rectify any financial and membership discrepancies that occurred during the conversion.
As one of the cornerstones of KQED’s drive to innovate, it was imperative that the new CRM system meet the needs of KQED’s internal clients (e.g., finance, arts, news, etc.). As such, the “soft” side of this large-scale conversion required that KQED staff in affected departments understand and feel confident that the new CRM system would improve, rather than complicate, their lives. Collecting and analyzing information more cross-functionally forced staff to look at data in a different way. As someone from KQED’s Membership Department commented:
“[Using this CRM system meant] staff had to look at business practices differently and had to think differently. This was the time to do it, as opposed to continuing to replicate what we were doing in our own individual databases. The other challenge was getting people not to replicate but to innovate. We were definitely trying to push that envelope a little bit more.”
KQED has since hired staff with Salesforce software experience to streamline and customize implementation processes, as well as facilitate use of the system with staff. The addition facilitated the collaboration between marketing staff and content teams.
“Great producers and writers can engage in social media, but they don’t understand how to do data segmentation in a complicated e-mail and then get that information into the CRM. Content producers are the constituency we will serve across the organization. My hope is that a content producer will populate the e-mail with great content, and let marketing worry about data segmentation and pulling the behavioral information into the CRM. ”— KQED Marketing staff
New Audiences for Public Media
KQED’s goal for employing sophisticated analytic methods is not simply to determine what audiences like or don’t like, but also to identify patterns and trends of online behavior to create ways to help them find their content preferences. The ability to curate content tailored to an individual’s behaviors or interests expands KQED’s knowledge of audience beyond simply age, gender, or location. It inspires the development of more sophisticated user profiles that better characterize who the audience is and what kinds of programming would best appeal to them. Content and marketing teams can now use data to identify which types of content (e.g., news, art, science, etc.) are most successful in driving engagement to specific audience segments. As more information is gathered on specific viewing preferences, targeted e-mail marketing can become more efficient and personalized, ultimately impacting the bottom line.
One example of this data-driven strategy is KQED’s ongoing campaign to attract and engage millennial audiences. Like most media, KQED is fighting for attention in this very competitive space. The challenge is getting younger audiences to understand more about KQED and for KQED to differentiate itself in a highly diverse environment. In other words, KQED must persuade a generation brought up on “Sesame Street” that public media has much more to offer than a quality children’s educational show. To spearhead this campaign, KQED has created a new position focused strictly on researching and engaging new audiences.
To begin collecting data, developing relationships, and testing out different strategies for curating content to millennials, KQED used the online tool Qzzr to create an interactive quiz. The quiz consists of a series of questions on interests and lifestyle intended to classify millennials into three “brain type categories” — “news buff,” “science spotter,” and “culture cruncher.” http://ww2.kqed.org/you/.
An example of one question:
After completing the quiz, respondents are given an opportunity to sign up for a seven-day Brain Flex Challenge. By entering an e-mail address, respondents receive two pieces of content a day based on their profile type — stories, news, and tidbits that will give their brain “extra flex.”
“We give them two pieces of curated content (stories) a day. About 85% of it is our own (KQED) content. The rest is national content from NPR and PBS. For KQED content, we strategically chose stories that wouldn’t normally be thought of as traditional KQED subjects, like videos about hip-hop groups or an article about how to cure a hangover, things like that. The idea is to take what we already have and repackage it in a way that is appealing to younger audiences, as opposed to forging new content.” — KQED Marketing staff
Thousands of people have completed the quiz, and nearly half have entered their e-mail address (a 48% conversion rate), allowing KQED to keep the conversation going with their new ‘friends.” The feedback on social media has been very positive, many commenting that it’s a “smart and fun campaign.” Overall, KQED has collected nearly 2000 e-mails, almost 60–70% of which are brand new contacts for KQED.
KQED hopes to harvest information from these millennial respondents to develop targeted audience engagement campaigns across content areas. KQED recently created a Millennial Task Force, consisting of members from KQED’s Board of Directors and KQED Marketing staff charged to develop new initiatives aimed at this audience. At the most recent KQED Board of Directors Meeting held in early February, two new ideas for engaging millennials were presented to Board members from KQED staff for discussion. Over the next few months, these ideas will be field tested in part with those who responded to the Brain Flex Challenge.
Audience Insights and Ingenuity Team
KQED’s new approach to audience-centric, data-driven decision-making is not just about generating reports; it is also about increasing audience engagement with the KQED brand. After all, data doesn’t always point to well-defined solutions. It may instead indicate various trends or gaps that need further analysis. KQED content groups, membership, and other “back-office” (HR, legal, finance) departments do not, however, have the budget or bandwidth to conduct their own internal data segmentation or analysis. This is where KQED’s new Audience Insights and Ingenuity Team comes in.
The Audience Insights and Ingenuity Team will be housed within KQED’s Marketing Department. Team members will consist of managers for CRM, Research, Data Analytics, and Digital Marketing/Fundraising. This team will be responsible for developing a comprehensive, 360-degree view of KQED’s audience and donor base, essentially helping other departments make sense of the data derived from internal and external sources through the use of sophisticated tools and methods. This structure represents a uniquely horizontal approach in consolidating research as a service function to all departments. Few, if any, public media stations have a single research manager, let alone multiple individuals with deep backgrounds in CRM, data, research, and analytics. This could very well be the first coordinated team of its kind at any public media station in the country.
One of the team’s first initiatives will be to continue to refine the Salesforce CRM build-out and create better efficiencies in e-mail and general communications. Team members are currently working closely with KQED staff from Membership, IT, and Interactive Departments. During the next few months, team members will meet with other departments to familiarize them with the team’s purpose and to assess how best to provide support.
What KQED is learning is that, in addition to helping diverse audiences find content that best suits their interests and needs, its new data-driven approach has encouraged staff in all areas of the organization to think about their work in new and different ways and to collaborate with each other more effectively.
Follow Disrupting Public Media to read more about KQED’s transformation. Up next: how the application of design thinking strategies with staff is creating an entrepreneurial spirit within KQED.
