How to use GroundSource in 6 easy steps (and 1 kind of hard one)
GroundSource is a platform designed to make it easier to build, manage and directly engage small and large communities of people via mobile. GroundSource powers inclusive outreach, active listening and two-way communications so you can better understand and serve your communities. We work with news organizations, non-profits, NGO’s, community groups, cities, and help build community listening projects with partners*. Interested? Contact founder @andrewhaeg.
1. Feel the need to engage your *whole* community
First, let’s start with the very beginning: Why should you use GroundSource?
A scenario might help:
You’re the new education reporter at a mid-sized daily newspaper serving a diverse community with a strong rich-poor divide.
Your charge: to report on the state of education in your town, to gain perspective on what people feel is wrong with the system, and how it might be improved. Drop-out rates are high. The achievement gap is getting worse. You want to move the needle, some how, some way. You want to start conversations with students, with parents, teachers, administrators and anyone else with relevant experience who steps forward.
You get “solutions journalism,” you’re wise to the power of social, and want to put into action all of the latest thinking on community engagement you’ve been hearing and getting excited to try yourself.
You know how to quickly ID the officials you’ll need to talk to. But you’re more interested in the on-the-ground perspective: real stories from real folks. It’s what some might call “vox” or “man-on-the-street” but you believe that, properly done, talking to “real” people is going to get you closer to the truth.
You have more ambition than time, so even though you’re not opposed to expending some shoe leather, you need something that’s simple to use.
How you might proceed: You could go on Facebook, but given your networks, you’ll probably just be talking to people like you. Twitter’s an option but you discover the local networks aren’t very dense and the people you want to talk to either aren’t on there, or it would be too hard to directly engage them. Same goes for SnapChat and Instagram. Better for distribution than for direct engagement.
What you want is to — virtually and physically — go into neighborhoods where people not like you are living. You face all kinds of issues of trust, of access, of simple logistics — how do I communicate with enough people, and establish contact with them as sources? How do I start conversations with them? How do I get them engaged and on board with my coverage? How do I listen to them?
Enter GroundSource: You learn about GroundSource, which on the surface seems like it may help you solve the problem. You can use it to set up a phone number that people can text into, and you can create surveys and messages that they can get automated to them if they text in a keyword.
Plus: As they respond, what they say go into a feed, which you can publish, sharing back with the sources who responded and embedding on the web as part of your story package. Engagement + unique content = potential winner.
And you can stay in touch with these people for a long time, asking them questions about other stories, building your own base of community sources that you have direct access to (instead of rolling the dice with social media, and even then, not owning the relationships you build). It becomes clear that there’s work involved, but you’re willing to do what it takes to make your coverage more accurate, more grounded, more likely to help the community change for the better.
2. Acquire a dedicated GroundSource phone number
Persuaded at least to try it out, you log into GroundSource (using LinkedIn), and within a couple minutes (Team Settings => Acquire a Unique Number Set) have established a dedicated phone number in your local area code. That number is what people will text or call when they want to get a hold of you.
This phone number will become a powerful channel into your newsroom, and your reporting. Unlike social media, everyone can text or call a phone number. And text messages and phone calls are the most ubiquitous form of communication on the planet, ever. It’s the app that’s on everyone’s phones.
Text messages and phone calls are the most ubiquitous form of communication on the planet, ever.
You log into GroundSource using LinkedIn, and within a couple minutes have acquired a dedicated a phone number with your local area code. That number is what people will text or call when they want to get a hold of you.
3. Create your first prompt or survey w/tags and a keyword
Surveys and prompts are what you use to structure a kind of conversation with people who text in. Add tags so you find anyone who responds to this prompt later on, to send them a follow-up note or otherwise to get in touch with them. If you’re working on a project, you could “pulse” all your education contacts every so often to check in with them, or share news.
Next you attach keywords to them so if someone texts “hello” (for instance) into your phone number, they’ll receive the survey linked to the keyword “school” (like below). It’s really easy, and it’s how people will start making contact with you.
Once you’re all set with the tags and a keyword, it’s time to write the questions. You can choose from “yes/no,” “text,” or “pick one” questions, you can ask for photos (or short videos) and you can simply send a message (we typically close out all of our surveys with a thank you message and a link to the public feed where people can read their response).
It’s important to reframe your outreach from what you need (sources and stories for the education beat) to what people want to talk about — what will make it relatively easy or interesting for them to respond.
You’re a journalist, you know the power of a good question! You can try fill-in-the-blank questions (“I wish my schools were…”), or you can set up separate surveys and ask a yes/no question (“Are you getting what you need from your school? Text YES or NO to xxx-xxx-xxxx.”). Suffice to say: This is an important step. The system will give you some suggestions and inspiration as you start writing your question.
Once you’ve got your questions set (you can reorder them using the handle on the left), and a closing thank you message, go ahead and test the survey with your phone, and get some colleagues or friends to test it too to make sure it flows. (Or you can try one of ours: Text “school” to 478–202–2500 and see what happens.) Done? Then you’re ready for the next step!
4. The hard(ish) step: Start inviting people to engage via SMS, calls, webforms
At first, you can start simply, by using your GroundSource for your readers to talk to you, via text or phone calls. Print the number on your stories online and in the paper, get a box set aside with a specific call-out.
Once you’ve done that, start doing outreach. Set aside an hour or two a week to get out into a specific neighborhood and post signs — in barber shops, corner stores, information kiosks, bulletin boards.
If you work for or with a radio or TV station, broadcast the number at the end of a story and ask people to text in their reactions.
At a public event, take a minute before things kick off, ask people to pull out their phones and text into the number. Within seconds you can get the majority of the audience to start communicating with you, and by searching on the tag later on you can follow up with everyone who texted in.
Every survey you create you’ll also get a webform like this one that you can brand with your organization’s logo and style. You can share a link to the survey on social media.
People can also call your phone number, and you can record the questions in your own voice so they hear the questions (great for low-literacy communities) and leave voice mails as answers. No matter how they respond, everything will funnel back to mobile engagement.
5. Monitor the responses and publish into an anonymous feed
You know how with most surveys, you feel like what you write goes into a black hole? Like: Does anybody actually read this stuff?
We designed GroundSource to solve this problem, and make the act of reaching out and listening to a community more participatory and engaging.
To start: You can immediately reply to anyone who responds from within the feed (or just pick up the phone and call them using the phone number listed).
You can also press publish, which will instantly create or add to a public but anonymous feed of responses (and the system will send an SMS back to the respondent telling them their response is online and inviting them to read what other people are saying).
The feed (as you can see below) is an iframe you can embed on any site. You can also tweak the look and feel of the feed to suit your web styles (using our API). You’ll soon be able to embed specific responses in the middle of stories. The feed, to use a phrase, is the rug that ties the room together. Sources feel listened to, are invited to engage with others who were motivated to respond, and help you build original content you can promote on social media.
6. Follow-up, build lists, engage!
As people connect, they’re all added to your bank of “sources.” On your Sources page, you can search for respondents to previous questions (by using the tag search) and make a list with them in it. This part is not that different (and easier actually) than building lists in MailChimp or any other newsletter tool.
And, come to think of it: Why not start sending your sources a biweekly or monthly news-text? You can share a recent story with them, and ask them questions to take their pulse on a story you’re working on.
As they respond to more prompts, you’ll be able to learn more about them (their demographics, location, expertise, etc.) which in turn will enable you to target future messages to them.
7. Invite others into your team and out GroundSource in your engagement toolkit
On your team settings page, add the emails of your colleagues who you want to monitor the feed, and engage sources. Whoever builds and edits a survey will get email notifications of responses.
Once you decide that you want to start using GroundSource in earnest, it’s time to pay up: My kids need to eat!
GroundSource starts out very cheap and you “pay as you grow” with tiers starting at Free (up to 250 msgs in/out per month); $20/mo (up to 1,000 msgs in/out per month); $100/mo (5000 msgs); $250/mo (12,500 msgs) and $500/mo (25,000 msgs). The more you pay, the more one-on-one consulting you get, and the more you can customize GroundSource and integrate it into your enterprise systems (SalesForce, Constant Contact, etc.) using our API.
And, that’s it: Simple to get started, and built to help you build inclusive outreach throughout your community.
We’ll be publishing more how-to guides here in the coming months. Fire any questions our way to andrew@groundsourcing.com or tweet us at @groundsource.
*GroundSource is proud to work domestically and internationally with respected partners including Internews, @mercerccj, Raymond Joseph, Jesse Hardman, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, @indigotrust, @code4sa, Swahili Box, ICFJ and others.
