We’re All Ears: Gathering Context Around A Complex Problem

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.

We’ve spent the last few weeks embracing ambiguity, and, after a series of interviews with various subject matter experts, we’re about to round a corner by clearly defining some approaches around which we can build, test and iterate.

When it came to research, we wanted to be sure to listen to as many relevant perspectives as possible so our work could be driven by what we heard. | Photo by Mohammad Metri on Unsplash

One of the many challenges we identified is that our focus — Exploring ways to deepen engagement on NPR.org and other digital platforms in order to provide stations with leads for donations and membership — involves so many facets of the public radio network. We wanted to consider as many as we could as we began to do research, so our work could be led by what we heard.

So, we decided to have a series of conversations and interviews (to date, 26) with myriad subject matter experts – including NPR staff, Member station employees and other folks who think about the intersection of digital media and membership.

But where should we even start? Here’s a look at how we prepared for those conversations, conducted our research and began to synthesize what we heard.

TL;DR: Just interested in our takeaways? Head to the end of this post to see what insights came out of this research!

First, We Determined What We Wanted To Find Out

When you start on this kind of extensive research, you’ll find that there are many topics you’ll be curious about. We were able to narrow our focus to a few areas we wanted to learn more about.

From there, we worked as a team to write research questions that would help us frame conversations with our participants. We weren’t writing scripts for our interviews yet; just composing questions that would help us think about who we wanted to interview, and what we might ask them.

We ended up with four research questions:

• How valuable is a traditional “lead?” And, what else might be valuable to stations?
• How do stations view their current relationship with NPR when it comes to digital engagement and revenue? From a station perspective, what are the benefits and challenges of driving more of NPR’s digital audiences to stations?
• What are the different definitions for and strategies concerning “engagement” across the system?
• What impacts do brands (NPR’s and stations’) have on digital engagement?

Next, We Decided Who To Talk To

After you build some context around what you want to learn from interviews, it is time to think about who to include in your list of experts.

It didn’t take the team long to come up with a list that was more than three pages worth of names, teams and organizations that we wanted to reach out to. But, once we thought more about who on the list could best answer our research questions, we were able to narrow it down to a more manageable group.

It would have been easy to conduct our research just within the confines of NPR, but we made sure to reach out to multiple Member stations and beyond the public radio system. The problem we’re tackling is a big one, and we recognized the value that other non-NPR perspectives could provide.

Then, It Was Time For Interviews

You want to make sure everything about your research process is collaborative. Instead of assigning an individual to conducting the research and sharing back with the team, everyone played a hand in forming the questions for our interviews, conducting the conversations and recording what we learned.

Each interview had four key roles:

• Primary Interviewer – Lead the participant through interview guide; especially listened to find connective tissue between interview questions.
• Secondary Interviewer – Followed the interview guide, asked follow-up questions when able. Especially listened for larger themes and constructed follow-up questions based on those themes.
• Notetaker – Watched the interview remotely and took notes using Reframer. Added tags to notes that helped us analyze notes from all our research sessions.
• Observer – Watched the interview remotely and participated in a Slack thread with other observers to discuss in real time

Each team member was encouraged to play a new role in each interview.

In addition to the real-time collaborative note-taking, we also took a few minutes after each interview to generate some “How Might We” statements to further document what we heard in each conversation. These statements helped take the challenges our experts highlighted during interviews and turn them into opportunities.

A chord diagram of how some of our research topics relate to others. | Chart via Reframer

Finally, We Synthesized

Once you wrap up your interviews, you might find yourself – like we did – in a state of information overload. But, for a moment, that’s exactly where you want to be.

By the end of all of our conversations with experts, we had more than 400 “How Might We” statements (along with notes in dozens of Slack threads and numerous takeaways logged in Reframer). The team has been doing the work of taking all of that data and distilling it into themes and key takeaways, which will help us get to the next big step of this process: deciding what exactly to build and test.

So, What Did We Learn?

After a lot of synthesizing, prioritizing, voting, writing and simplifying, these are the key insights we took away from our research, as filtered through the lens of our theme:

• Our approach should take into account audiences’ past interactions with NPR and current contexts for a more personalized experience that features a local/national blend of content.
• Our approach should explore what the user journeys to membership are or could be, and it should define what their milestones are.
• Our approach should deliver tangible and intangible value to Member stations in the form of leads, donors and revenue. It should encourage the sharing of data that is easy to understand, and is valuable to the system and to NPR.
• Our approach should leverage the content that the public radio network makes to find new ways to drive engagement or build communities.
• Our approach should be mindful of donor intent, and it should teach potential donors how they can have the most impact. Also, our approach should discover what audiences consider to be valuable enough to engage or donate on our digital platforms.
• Our approach should reasonably scale with Member station size and resources. For stations that don’t find our solutions to be the right choice, we should provide alternative options. Additionally, our approach should be aware of station resources and abilities to follow through on our suggestions.
• Our approach should be transparent, and we should be as communicative and collaborative with stations as possible.

Do you have something you’d like to add to this list? Or, do you have questions about our research? Send us a note at incubationlab@npr.org!