Community events and “the new normal”
How The Compass Experiment is building virtual events with a small team
Events are becoming a crucial part of local news organizations’ efforts to build trust, engage readers, and create community spaces to hold necessary conversations. Many large news organizations use events, and even day-long conferences, as ways to generate revenue. With dedicated marketing and events staff, they make it look easy. But, when you don’t have staff whose core focus is on that kind of work, can you make it work? We are finding the answer is yes.
Check out the Texas Tribune Festival, as one example of how the Texas Tribune has taken events to a whole other level. Ditto The Atlantic, which has its own events arm called AtlanticLive. Finally, The 19th launched its news and a series of high-profile events featuring well-known and influential women leaders.
These events do more than just raise revenue or generate new subscribers: they inform, they engage, they bring people together for discussions about important issues, and connect newsrooms to their communities. That’s certainly been the experience of Scalawag.
At The Compass Experiment, community engagement and feedback is core to our mission. When we were building Mahoning Matters in Youngstown, Ohio last year, we conducted initial audience research through listening events at the local library. After launch, our team held “pitch nights” as a way for readers to tell us what stories they thought we might be missing.
But then coronavirus happened, and we had to think about how to connect with readers in a virtual space. This opened up new opportunities to hold targeted, smaller events on reader-driven topics with less overhead and logistics costs and hassles.
Since early this year, we’ve been testing events in a variety of formats — from pre-launch, virtual focus groups on Zoom and behind-the-newsroom discussions on Facebook Live, to larger community conversations on Crowdcast and Zoom*. We use these to create public, community conversations that give our team and local leaders a chance to engage with our readers on timely, relevant, topics.
These virtual events have also helped our sites forge partnerships with local civic groups and organizations that are no longer able to host in-person gatherings due to COVID-19 restrictions and concerns.
At Mahoning Matters and The Longmont Leader in Colorado — both of which are less than a year old — these events are key ways in which we are not only building audiences but introducing ourselves to the broader community. We also use these events to invite these readers to support us, either with a contribution or subscribing to our newsletters.
In “normal times”, we might do this kind of engagement at the county fair, farmer’s market, or local microbrewery. But we’ve had to adapt to the era of social distancing by creating our own virtual spaces and hosting conversations on topics that are abuzz in our communities.
To date, we’ve seen these events as a way to build our subscriber base and brand loyalty. We do this by creating an open and honest relationship with our readers by including them in these conversations and inviting them to ask questions, and even shape which topics we discuss.
After multiple events at both our sites, here’s what else we’ve found:
- It’s not just how many people show up to your forum, it’s who watches after. You can push an event out to other audiences after the fact on your website or via email or social channels to give it more chance for impact. Our recent event at Mahoning Matters on racial justice and policing had more than 100 attendees, nearly 200 registrants, and 2,500 views on Facebook in the week after the event. Our most recent Longmont Leader event on the reopening of local schools had 175 attendees. 250 registrants, and 1,300 views on Facebook in the week after the event.
- Bring in new readers. While events can be great perks for trusted readers, subscribers, and financial supporters, it’s alway a way to bring in new readers and supporters. More than 50% of the people who register for an event later subscribe when asked. Those new subscribers are then placed on our welcome series email list, which tells the story of our newsrooms and asks for support. Direct appeals for support hover in the 1% or less range, which is fine for what is essentially a virtual passing of the hat approach to collecting donations during, or at the end, of an event.
- Write a story about it. Not just an event press release beforehand, but plan to cover the event and invite other media to cover it, too. Invite key elected and civic leaders to be part of the conversation. In Ohio, we’ve had U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, Youngstown Mayor Jamael Tito Brown, and other local civic figures with strong name recognition take part in newsworthy discussions.
- Invite local groups to co-host. Building relationships with other media, civic organizations, and readers is critical to demonstrate that you’re doing more than just showing up. You’re listening.
- Survey people after the event to get feedback — on the topic, on the technical aspects of it, and learn from each time to make the next one that much more inclusive and better.
- Pick a timely topic. From schools re-opening to racial justice, pick a topic that is at the forefront of your community’s mind right now.
- Advance planning is a must. If you have co-hosts or partners, be sure to work on a joint press release, social media outreach plan, and to cross-promote the event to each organization’s audience. Start promoting at least two weeks in advance and be sure to do one final reminder and round of promotion within 48 hours of the start time, as some folks just need that extra nudge.
- Have a back-up plan. While it’s great to have a streaming platform, make sure you have a way to record the event separately if possible in case things go awry. For in-person events, set up a separate camera (or phone) to just record the whole event. If you have a local public access station in the community, see if they’ll record the conversation. Some will do that even if you are only doing it virtually. We learned this the hard way and thanks to a great community partner, we were able to salvage what we thought was a completely lost event. Here’s our mea culpa.
Currently, we are working with local civic partners and other media partners to create enough value around these events to attract paid sponsors and underwriters.
At Mahoning Matters, we are working with a major local cultural venue, Stambaugh Auditorium, on a series of virtual events around the issue of race and equity in the Mahoning Valley as well as the upcoming elections. The events have gone well enough that we’re starting to plan out a series of events for 2021. At The Longmont Leader we partnered with the Longmont Chamber of Commerce and Longmont Public Media on a special panel on racial equity and policing, and are in talks with other core civic institutions about hosting a series of discussions around race and equity in Longmont.
Going forward, we plan to experiment with smaller, exclusive virtual events designed for our contributors, loyal readers, and subscribers as a way to thank them for their steadfast support.
In addition, we’re certainly hoping that when it’s safe to do so, we’ll hold live, in-person events again.
*A quick note about platforms. We used Facebook Live and Zoom for our earliest events and starting in May we tested Crowdcast. After a few very disappointing and frustrating experiences with this platform — from repeated livestreams to Facebook cutting out or the entire platform going kaput less than five minutes into a major event — we’re moving back to Zoom and will be using their webinar feature. Sorry, Crowdcast.
Shay Totten is Growth and Membership Specialist for The Compass Experiment, a local news laboratory founded by McClatchy and Google News Initiative’s Local Experiments Project. This Medium site is set up to share news and learnings from The Compass Experiment’s local news websites, which include Mahoning Matters in Youngstown, Ohio and The Longmont Leader in Longmont, Colorado.
