Taking It To Stations: Sharing A Concept To Get Insightful Feedback

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.

Recently, the team worked to develop and evaluate ideas that we were interested in pursuing further. (You can read more about that in Michael Chaplin’s blog post.) Since then, we created a prototype and gathered feedback from a few folks who think about membership and digital engagement at NPR Member stations.

A very early, very illegible, very low-fidelity version of our prototype.

What We’re Focused On
As a reminder, the concept we decided to explore first is all about enabling and tracking user actions to help do the work of moving users on national platforms toward donating to their Member station. By using tailored experiences like smarter calls to action, we can drive users through the often-referenced funnel, from low-commitment digital engagement to membership.

What We Prototyped
After research and a series of ideating, sketching and storyboarding exercises, we knew that in order to effectively drive value to NPR Member stations, our concept needed to consider two distinct user groups: audience members on NPR.org and staff at Member stations.

We decided to prototype what our Member station experience could be like first, in hopes of assessing value and learning about the workflows of our colleagues across the public radio network.

The goal of our prototyped product was threefold. We hoped it would represent a tool that could:

• Increase visibility into NPR’s digital audience for stations
• Generate more leads for membership for stations (including more information and context than NPR currently provides)
• Offer best practices to stations about communicating with leads

Our prototype of a station-facing tool had three screens: one to see audience metrics and engagement, one to view and download leads, and one to display messages NPR might send to leads captured from national platforms like npr.org. Click on a screen for a closer look.

We kept our prototype pretty simple. Visually, it wasn’t much more than a wireframe – we wanted to give our participants a chance to grapple with our larger concept without getting distracted by design elements. And technically, the whole experience was just a series of static images – nothing was hyperlinked or connected to any backend systems.

What We Were Curious About
There were two main topics we were curious about with this research: value and workflow. As we crafted our test, we made sure our research would strive to answer these questions:

• Do stations see the value of this concept?
• Which pieces of the prototype are most compelling?
• Does our concept address an existing pain point that the station has?
• Would this tool fit into existing workflows at stations?
• What would keep Member stations from using something like our prototype?

Who We Talked To
Once our prototype was ready to share, we reached back out to the Member stations we had talked to in our primary interviews. We hoped to start the deep dive into our concept within the context of our previous conversations.

Six of them (75% of the stations we interviewed) graciously agreed to participate.

What We Learned
Following our research, we had five key takeaways that will help us shape the work we do going forward.

1. Stations See Value In Our Concept
   All of our participants believed our concept was valuable. The Audience and Leads components of the prototype got the most enthusiastic responses, and generally, people loved the idea of smarter messaging driven by user events.
2. When It Comes To Details About Data, More Is More
   We received lots of valuable feedback about which analytics the tool should display, and what data should be included in a downloadable “lead.” Generally, participants wanted to access more data, but with two caveats: They wanted transparency into how data was being gathered and shared, and they wanted more context as to how they could leverage that data to deepen their relationship with users.
3. There’s A Real Desire For Cross-Platform Reporting
   Our prototype focused mostly on how we could leverage more strategic engagement points and gather data from them specifically on npr.org. But, most participants wanted to see data from our other national platforms as well (i.e., NPR One, the NPR app).
4. The Communication Tool Led To Some Uncertainty And Confusion
   The communications tool raised more questions than the other pieces of the prototype. Most participants needed more clarification about what this tool did and how it might work (especially in the context of their existing ecosystems and workflows). As we move forward, finding a better solution to help stations communicate with new and existing leads will be a major focus of the Lab team.
5. We Need To Clear Up Ambiguity Regarding User Cohorts
   Another part of the prototype that needs more clarification is what cohorts we break the audience into, and how those cohorts are defined. Our participants liked the idea of learning more about how engaged their local audience is, or which categories (like news topics or podcasts) drive more interest, but they expected a specific set of rules that would dictate how those groups were created.

What Comes Next
The Lab will be iterating on this prototype and refining our station-facing concept based on what we heard in this research. We’ll also be taking a look at the audience-facing side of our concept to identify how we can use engagement points to better personalize experiences on npr.org and in NPR’s emails.

Do you have questions or comments about our concept? Or, would you like to take a more in-depth look at our prototype? Send us a note at incubationlab@npr.org!