A Fresh Perspective
Sprint 5 was a deep dive into the station perspective for the Public Radio Incubation Lab
We used the results of our station survey, reported in our last blog post, to further refine our portfolio of station messaging prototypes. Once we agreed upon our prototype designs, we set up interviews with six member station colleagues from around the country to test our ideas.
This is a busy and uncertain time for our member station colleagues across the system, so we want to say a special thank you to those who participated in these 30-minute interviews:
- Alexandra Bacaj of KPBS (San Diego, CA)
- Chris Hagan of CapRadio (Sacramento, CA)
- Colleen Sibthorp of WVIK (Rock Island, IL)
- Elena Lopez of Arizona Public Radio (Tucson)
- Jeff Deneen of Alabama Public Radio (Tuscaloosa)
- Lisa Beckman of WHYY (Philadelphia, PA)
Among our prototypes were four “sticky bar” promotions with localized station messaging that appear at the bottom of a screen after scrolling to the end of a story. In our survey, neither community service nor local events ranked as particularly desirable content to highlight on NPR.org. However, when stations actually saw the prototypes, community-based messaging resonated with our colleagues. More than half said they would want to use this space to promote local events.
With 264 NPR member stations around the country, localized messaging for individual stations would require a thoughtful backend interface to manage localized messaging on NPR properties.
The Lab team does not recommend creating another NPR platform to maintain and populate. Instead, we envision these recommendations being incorporated into existing systems and tools where local brand management takes place. Our end goal is an easy, scalable interface that can help connect new audiences to the rich content and regional flare within the system.
The response from our station colleagues was positive, and the feedback was mostly tied to the addition of features — adding start times for promotions in the brand management mockup, image management, and user impression reporting. Most importantly, we did not hit any roadblocks. Our next step is to incorporate station feedback and further refine our concepts before launching our final user study in Sprint 6.
The end of Sprint 5 is bittersweet: We now enter our final two weeks of focused work before we present our recommendations on May 28th (email us if you would like an invitation). The world that we are preparing to step back into is a different world from which we came. Hopefully our work can be a benefit to our communities now and into the future.
