Refining, Research And Going All-Remote
The work of the Public Radio Incubation Lab is all about challenging assumptions.
Asking pointed questions. Connecting dots and departments and stations. Pushing the public radio system to take risks. Be better now and prepare for a changing future.
With that spirit in mind, the current Incubation Lab team approached the challenge statement we were given — and decided to (lovingly) tear it apart.
Our original challenge statement:
The new frontier of audio discovery: driving local engagement in non-localized contexts.
Through the course of our first sprint, we used a variety of methods rooted in design thinking to expose assumptions and reshape the statement.
Our current working challenge statement:
Pathways for listener curiosity and community: re-imagining local engagement through digital audio discovery.
In our re-worked version, we wanted a greater focus on the user — the people — we serve. If local engagement is being “driven,” who is in the driver’s seat?
That thinking, a focus on the “who,” also carried through to how we chose to structure our research study.
NPR and member stations have consistently shared the goal to better reach and engage a younger, more diverse audience across platforms.
The Lab team considered this goal and decided to focus on two distinct listener groups. We also made some hypotheses about them:
Young donors who are new to donating
- Presumably aged 25–45, but may include even younger people too
- More likely to be in stable careers and have the financial ability to pay for their media
Potential listeners who are new to public media
- Presumably aged 18–24, but may include older people too (up to around age 45)
- In earlier stages of their careers, less likely to be able to pay for media content
The age delineations are more estimates for us, and less important than the actual behavior difference of donating vs. not. Someone could be 45 years old and not yet a donor, and the reasons for that are more interesting to us than their age.
We will be talking to 10 people through our research study from a mix of these groups, though a majority of those recruited are people of color.
Questions for study participants include:
- How do people discover new audio/media?
- How does media make people feel connected to their communities?
- How do people decide to pay for media consumption?
We’ll be diving even more into the study itself, and sharing some of what we hear from participants, in our next post.
A Note On Pandemics — And Opportunities
It’s amazing how two short weeks can change things.
At the beginning of our first sprint, the Lab team had no concept of what the coronavirus pandemic would bring and what it would mean for not only our work, but also the world at large.
But, as the sprint went on, and the world became more aware of what it’s facing, we realized that our work would both have to be done a little bit differently this time — and that it could have a different kind of impact than work done under more typical conditions.
Could there be opportunity in this challenge? Could we do something better because we’re all working remotely?
Could we learn important lessons about community and how people define it?
About what’s truly valuable and why people will pay for what they value?
How about the value of engagement that’s not rooted in money?
Or how people rely on local news and information, especially in a crisis?
Most broadly, what will we learn about the strengths and challenge points of the public radio system when it’s put through these extreme paces?
We think there will be interesting and useful answers ahead to these questions. And we welcome your input and ideas as to how this challenging situation could actually benefit our work together and the public media world as a whole.
Thanks for following along — it should be a fascinating path ahead.
Have any questions for us? Leave a comment! And stay tuned for more progress updates.
