Station Survey: What We Heard, What We’re Hearing

The Public Radio Incubation Lab launched with the goal of “bringing transformative ideas to life in public media,” with equal emphasis on how we set about that work as well as what that work eventually produces. The first Lab team is tackling the question of how to leverage digital scale to drive value to NPR Member stations.

After interviewing and meeting with staff from around the public media system, the Lab team decided to conduct an informal, voluntary survey as a way for staff from more stations to share their feedback and ideas. What we heard from the survey added to, and aligned with, what we heard in conversations and research.

We’ve been dedicated to keeping Member stations in the loop as we work to address the Lab’s theme, and that included a survey with responses from nearly 30 stations. | Allison Shelley/NPR

Context & Purpose

After conducting a couple dozen interviews and conversations with staff around the public radio system, we wanted to open a channel where anyone from NPR and Member stations could share their thoughts on these ideas with the Lab Team. So we created a survey and shared it around the public radio system via Slack and email.

We received 32 responses from staff at 29 stations, from small markets to large, mostly from staff in digital and membership roles. This is an informative survey, not a scientific poll: we weren’t parsing the data for results so much as just opening up and listening. We won’t use any direct quotes or open up the full results since we didn’t ask for permission in advance, but if you have follow up questions please contact the Lab and we’ll share what we can.

We’re grateful for all who took the time to reply. The responses were thoughtful, insightful and very helpful, and what we heard in the survey affirmed much of what we’ve heard during all our research, from all directions.

Thoughts On Engagement

Many of us in public media are rightly talking a lot about engagement, and many stations are investing more in new ways of connecting with audiences. As we in the Lab talk about how NPR and Member stations can engage digital audiences together, it has been helpful to to chat with participants about what “engagement” means for them.

So, we asked in the survey: “How do you define the term ‘engagement’ when it comes to your audience? You can be as broad or as specific as you would like.” A few key themes emerged, that Engagement:

• goes far beyond consumption
• involves interaction, sharing, communicating, attending, responsiveness, loyalty
• includes back and forth, two-way, peer-to-peer, reciprocal
• propels healthy discussions, engaged journalism, active communication
• lets the audience drive the station narrative

This echoed what we heard during interviews. It’s reflected around the system in efforts like newsletters, events and models like Hearken. Of course, engagement strategies, tactics and resources vary by station and community, but finding these high level shared themes helps us approach our work emphasizing the areas where we all agree.

NPR One & Tangible Value To Stations

The survey responses aligned with what we heard from interviews and research, that stations value NPR’s ability to connect them with new audiences and potential donors in their markets.

One of the key insights we took from our research was that our approach should deliver tangible value to stations, like audience, leads, donors and data. It’s actually written into the Theme of this rotation of the Lab.

NPR One already does this to some extent, so we asked about it. The results, again from 32 public radio staffers:

• Do they want NPR to help generate leads for stations? Resounding yes.
• Does their station value the current leads from NPR One? Most agree they’re valuable, but the results ranged from strongly agree to strongly disagree.
• Does their station have the resources to effectively cultivate leads? The responses were mixed again, most said yes but many do not or were neutral.
• Would it be valuable for NPR to help develop tools and best practices for stations in this area? Nearly 2/3 said yes it would, but others disagreed or were neutral.

Takeaway: The recurring theme is that stations do want NPR platforms to drive engagement and activity with stations; they vary in terms of their resources and needs; and they’d like NPR to facilitate learning and collaboration in this area. This all aligns with the key insights from our research.

Another takeaway: A consistent message we hear from stations is that solutions must be reasonably scalable to accommodate different stations’ needs. It was one of our research insights. And we hear it again here when the respondents told us they all value the initial leads and contacts NPR can make but differ in how they want to collaborate beyond that point.

How Can We Help?

We asked the respondents directly, how can NPR leverage its digital properties to help your station achieve its audience and fundraising goals?

The result: we heard a wave of creative ideas to advance all these goals, a variety of tactics that would assist with acquiring new audiences, making new contacts, inspiring new donors, retaining current members and reacquiring former members.

The specific ideas we heard included micro-donations, member perks, station messaging on NPR platforms, shared templates & tools, strengthening pathways from NPR to stations, external marketing, cross-promotion and more smart speaker support, to name just a few.

To nobody’s surprise, we can generate lots of great ideas any time. Part of the benefit of the Incubation Lab is that we can step outside the regular to hear and explore in these areas.