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How to grow an audience and engagement team: From the ground up or within existing roles

Caroline Bauman
Let's Gather
Published in
8 min readFeb 9, 2023

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At last fall’s Online News Association conference, we kept getting into side conversations centered around the same questions: How do new and growing news organizations build or grow an engagement/audience team well? As an individual, how do you build new skills even while staying in the same role? What does growth even mean?

Gather’s January 2023 lightning chat focused on tackling these tough questions. We were joined by:

We split our time into two panels, with audience questions and input driving the conversation. You can find our collaborative note-taking document here, and read on for a summary of our learnings and a collection of Gather-fueled resources.

How to build an audience/engagement team from scratch

Tip #1: You can’t do everything all at once, so be smart about what you can do.

Hannah Wise has built audience teams numerous times, most recently for the Kansas City Star and The Wichita Eagle. She said to be upfront about the fact you can’t do it all as you start a team, but you can begin with a community assessment to see what your audience most needs and go from there.

Zoom chat excerpts:

  • “I would add to the assessment piece: Assess not just community needs but also community assets. Who can help you? Where are people already turning?” — Fiona Morgan
  • “Adding to what Fiona just said: I always work on a “network map,” so we can find where we should be looking for people within the community who might be interested in what we do and might have not been in contact yet with what we do.” — Sebastian Auyanet

Nico Ríos, like so many of us, started as a team of one person when he joined Documented. He encouraged asking early and often, “Who is our audience? Who do we want our audience to be?” And using those questions to determine how you invest and grow. For example, Documented hasn’t spent time on an Instagram account — it might be worthwhile at some point, given a larger team — but for now, most of the folks they want to reach are on WhatsApp. And that’s where they want to spend their time.

Tip #2: Need leadership buy-in to start or grow a team? Talk about the problems you can solve.

Growing or building teams takes investment, and investment takes building a strong argument to newsroom leadership. Dissatisfaction can be a really powerful motivator, Wise said.

“If you’ve got a leader who really wants to meet a goal, come to them with a solution that says, okay, we see you,” she added. “We see where you want us to go. Here’s how we could get there. But in order to do that, I’m going to need another person or some part-time help.”

Tip #3: Track your team’s impact, and report up.

Another powerful way to get leadership support: Prove your projects are making a difference. For Chalkbeat and Votebeat, community impact is an incredibly important metric, said Nicole Avery Nichols. Since 2014, we have been using a system of tracking this impact called MORI — measuring our reporters’ impact — where our journalists log instances like TV appearances, Chalkbeat-hosted events, and laws changed as a result of our journalism.

Other metrics panelists recommended regularly tracking included page views, event engagement, and audience growth (like a growing number of newsletter subscribers). These systems don’t have to be fancy, depending on where your company is, but they do need to be consistent.

Zoom chat excerpts:

  • “Impact helps make our business case. But it must be well documented.” — Nicole Nichols
  • “^^ in our newsroom, we track impact manually via spreadsheets which of course takes time + energy. we’ve found the best way to stay on top of it is to track throughout the project — much easier than trying to go back and dig through everything after the fact” — Lauren Katz
  • “New and Improved: IA’s Impact Tracker relaunch coming *soon*! (is) a free tool that might help the ones who don’t have an integrated solution for documenting impact.” — Sebastian Auyanet

How to grow your career or your team’s — even if your audience/engagement team isn’t growing

Tip #1: Growth can be a fuzzy concept. Put a system in place.

Audience and engagement folks know the power of clear objectives and good systems. Your professional life is worthy of these things. Wise suggested writing your own personal formula: three things in your professional/personal life that you enjoy and want to prioritize. Hamid-Rivera writes out a list every six months or so with the headings: “What do I love, what am I good at, what do I hate,” and also keeps a running list of praises for their work.

“It’s helpful for me when I’m feeling down on myself,” Hamid-Rivers said. “I’m able to use that praise doc plus this list exercise to help me make sure that I’m living how I want to be living and getting what I want out of the moment.”

These suggestions are akin to a user manual, which Gather explored in its last Lightning Chat and post: Want to understand what your colleagues need to thrive? Try a user manual.

Tip #2: Pitch projects you are passionate about, and learn to scale down if the first answer is “no.”

Lauren Costantino, audience engagement producer at the Miami Herald, joined the newspaper in a position on the opinion desk that was brand new. Early on, she wrote out a vision for her role and the projects that she felt were most useful to work on. But one mistake she said she made early was “pitching too many things at once,” and she learned how to scale big projects down and focus on smaller projects that could have big impact.

For Constantino, this looked like adding “transparency cards” at the bottom of opinion stories or in social media posts that explained the difference between an onion piece and a news article (see an example here that explains why the editorial board endorses candidates).

[If your boss isn’t initially supportive of an idea], just learn from those, and try to

maybe take a smaller piece of that project and pitch it, and celebrate the wins, even if they’re really small,” she added. “Your company is still learning about you and trying to figure out how to trust you…Try not to get frustrated, and keep going.”

Zoom chat excerpts:

  • “Lauren, what you said reminded me of something I think about in each new audience role: the first audience I’m trying to build trust with is my own newsroom.” — Eba Hamid-Rivera
  • “So smart, Lauren! In addition to everything you said: Point to peer orgs or aspirational peer orgs that do similar things. Be super clear what it will require — how much time and $ — so it doesn’t feel like a huge lift. For your first project, pick something that has a very high probability of success. Find at least one advocate within the organization and work with that person on a small win you can share as proof of concept.” — Fiona Morgan
  • “Yes, ^^ Being super clear about what you need from management and the outcomes of the project is really important. You can always find someone on your side and use that to your advantage.” — Lauren Costantino

Tip #3: Be super specific with your boss about how you want to grow (and ways you can achieve it) — and look outside of work for opportunities when needed.

When it comes to advocating for professional development opportunities or growth at work, make your manager’s life as easy as possible, said Lauren Katz, manager of projects and strategy at Vox.

If you want to advocate for funds to go to a conference or time from your daily tasks to participate in a training, try to anticipate their questions ahead of time and go into the conversation with confidence.

“Be prepared to tell them what you want and exactly how it’s going to play out,” she said. “So they have all the information to make that decision for you, and they don’t have to do any extra work.

And if there are specific skills that you want, sometimes you can get them by doing things outside of journalism, Katz added.

“Just an example, I’m on the board of my local rowing community because I’m a rower, and I head up the marketing committee,” Katz said. “Graphic design is not my skill set, but if I wanted to get really into it, this could be a way for me to gain experience and bring those skills back to work.”

Special thanks to Susan Gonzalez for contributing.

Bonus! Lauren Katz’s tips for how to grow when there isn’t obvious room to grow:

  • Mentors! Find mentors to connect with inside the organization >> that could lay the groundwork for a potential shift in work or departments in the long run
  • Communication! Make sure your manager knows you’re eager to take on new projects and initiatives. The more specific, the better. You’re planting the seed in your manager’s mind for when something comes up.
  • Manage up! What opportunities exist to create your own growth? What can you take off your manager’s plate? What project can you spearhead? Is there a gap that you could fill with a new job title?
  • Professional development! If you’re not learning something in your current role, can you learn it somewhere else? This doesn’t even have to be within the industry — maybe you can volunteer or sit on a board or get coffee with someone.
  • Be open! Don’t box yourself in. If an opportunity comes your way, be open to you. You never know where it could take you. Important to find the balance between what you’re interested in and what your company needs you to do because at the end of the day, it’s a business.

Resource List

Conferences:

Newsletters:

Groups/Mentorship opportunities

Trainings/Other resources

Caroline Bauman connects Chalkbeat with their readers as the Community Engagement Manager. She also served as Gather’s January Guest Curator.

Journalism
Audience Engagement
Audience
Professional Development
Culture Change

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Caroline Bauman
Let's Gather

Written by Caroline Bauman

65 Followers
Writer for

Caroline Bauman connects Chalkbeat with our readers as the Community Engagement Manager.

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