Photo by Nick Fewings

You Look New Here…

Louisa Conklin
Public Radio Incubation Lab
5 min readMay 7, 2020

--

Sprint 4 has us thinking about public radio’s newest users through a new lens.

With the booming news consumption of COVID-19, more people are discovering public radio and the NPR network than ever before. These users may not have any engagement with terrestrial broadcasting; they may only know of NPR through its digital platforms — perhaps through a side door onto the mobile site, like a story shared on Facebook. As the Public Radio Incubation Lab discussed the next phase of our research, we asked ourselves: what might we create, build upon, or introduce that could serve to welcome the record number of people encountering the NPR network for the first time?

With the rapidly evolving financial and social changes at its back, the Incubation Lab was eager to regroup and refocus our concepts.

Welcoming new faces

The Lab remains committed to bolstering the network’s goal of engaging a younger, more diverse audience. To date, the majority of our end user interviews have been conducted with people of color, and we selected for younger age groups (under 45).

With our end users in mind, we decided the Lab’s greatest impact would take the form of the “welcome mat” approach — developing ways to connect new users directly to their geo-localized member stations on NPR platforms. When considering the difference between the pledge drive messaging and introductory messaging, we hearkened back to the college writing seminar maxim of “show, don’t tell.” Fundraising messages in public radio are often expository, explaining to a potential donor why their support is critical. That might be effective for someone who already knows and values what public radio produces and provides. But since we were trying to connect most with new users of NPR platforms, we knew we had to take a different approach. We agreed a “welcome mat” should instead focus on what our stations can offer new users in their earliest moments on an NPR property: relevant, localized connections to station content that might appeal to them after arriving on an NPR platform.

In a series of brainstorming sessions, we landed on two web navigation features that struck us as compelling tools to explore in our designs. The first was sticky bars, horizontal panels that appear on top of the content at the top or bottom of a web page: this was a less obtrusive space for grabbing user attention with varied content provided by a station.

PBS.org was the inspiration for our second feature, the drop-down menu. Their homepage, when viewed on desktop, prompts station localization and, upon localizing, shows a drop down menu with a primetime program schedule. We imagined enhancing our live player with a schedule showing on-air programming.

Bringing the family together

We wanted our Member stations to have direct input into the process of introducing themselves to new NPR visitors. But with firsthand awareness of the strain that the COVID-19 pandemic has placed on news organizations, particularly smaller outlets, we designed our research to minimize disruptions to our colleagues in the station network. With that in mind, we created a short survey to gauge stations’ priorities in marketing, audience development and content. Respondents were asked in the survey whether they would be interested in participating in a later research study where we would share some designs with them.

We wanted to learn more about our Member stations’ prioritization of audience based on engagement level, and found that station resources are generally focused on maintaining and growing membership among loyal listeners, while engaging less frequent listeners or new listeners is a secondary priority. This both aligned with our assumption that stations are generally well-poised to convert active users to donors, and our goal of increasing the pool of active users by showing them localized messaging from their station. With its national footprint, NPR is uniquely positioned to focus more intentionally on serving the users who are new to public radio, and create direct pathways to member station content.

More than half of member station respondents cited on-air programming and web content as two things they would most like to share with new users; community engagement was another popular choice.

Once we knew what content stations were most inclined to share with new users, we were able to create prototypes of our sticky bar and drop-down concepts to share with the smaller group of member station study participants we planned to interview in the next phase of our research.

Looking Ahead

The Lab is eager to see whether station messaging can make a brand-new user feel connected with public radio: will they take an interest in learning more about a specific community event, or click to hear the segment of a local audio show? Will seeing a “What’s On” program schedule prompt them to livestream their station from NPR.org, or will they be more inclined to learn about a podcast they can subscribe to and listen to at their leisure? As we begin Sprint 5, we move into the final stage of user testing. Our conversations with stations and subject matter experts will inform final designs that will be shared with new end-user eyes. Stay tuned: we’ll be presenting the results of two more user studies and previewing our final presentation in our next few blog posts.

--

--