Experimenting with Engagement and Community for the Female Audience
As professionals all over the world experienced job changes and challenges due to the global pandemic, we at the Journal have been continuing to grow our community-building efforts around professionals who read the Journal, and in particular our female audience.
A foundation of shared interests
Our new efforts this year built upon the foundation started years ago with the Journal’s Women in the Workplace annual forum and special report. The forum and report — which highlight exclusive data from LeanIn and McKinsey & Co. — bring together executives across industries to dissect real solutions to the talent pipeline. Stemming from the event, senior Journal editors collaborated on a newsletter that launched in spring of 2019. At first, the newsletter was sent to a few hundred former Women in the Workplace attendees. Now, it reaches thousands of women each week with a curated selection of Journal stories across management, finance, technology, arts and culture.
Building off this momentum, the Live Journalism team added a series of monthly events designed for professional women, tackling topics such as caregiving, the impact of racial reckoning on company culture and managing career pivots. These online gatherings included interviews and small group breakout sessions.
“As our live journalism moved into the virtual space, we saw a unique opportunity to reach a broader cohort of Journal readers who craved practical, tactical tips on navigating the current business and cultural climate, while looking for connection to one another,” said Kim Last, live journalism & special content editor. “We designed our monthly series with these readers in mind. Our annual forum was redesigned to not only highlight sharp, newsmaking interviews but also cater to the topics female professionals care about, with the hope to generate fodder for connection.”
Several of the women who attended those events were already familiar with the Women In newsletter, which is published on Thursdays and includes a short welcome every week by me or Nikki Waller, deputy coverage chief for corporate news.
The power of two-way communication
But even with the newsletter, events turned virtual and the ongoing opportunity for all members to join the conversation on meaningful news issues, we sought more ways to experiment with two-way communication and direct conversation among our female audience.
In September, at this year’s Women In the Workplace forum, WSJ piloted a Slack community to learn how women who read the newsletter and attend WSJ virtual events would connect and use the experience. More than 100 women participated, many of them holding senior positions. Diversity and inclusion, as well as business-development executives were among the most active. Nico Gendron, an audience interaction producer on the Audience Voices team, worked with Annemarie Dooling, product lead for engagement experiences, to set up and moderate the Slack channel experience.
“Part of the magic is the conversation you have in line for coffee that results in the exchange of your business card or sharing in a moment of awe with the person you were sitting next to during a particularly compelling seminar,” Ms. Gendron said. “We wanted to create similar, albeit virtual, opportunities for networking and connection during this year’s Women In conference. Two-way communication not only between Women In attendees, who are business leaders and professionals, but also between the attendees and WSJ was essential. It was incredible to have a front-row seat to attendees connecting and networking in real-time while moderating the Women In Slack group.”
On the day of the conference, the #general channel was the most active. This channel, where members were asked to introduce themselves when they first joined the Slack group, inspired the most two-way communication. It was the space where members appeared to feel most comfortable sharing key takeaways and quotes from seminars, asking questions about how to navigate the virtual conference technology, or simply networking with one another.
Key components for a community
To start an interactive community from scratch we needed two main components:
- A commonality, which happened to be the conference, with a finite time period and specific days of activity.
- Seeding content as thought starters that we knew would enhance the experience of the conference beyond being a tech support channel.
When building a platform for a community, you want to figure out what everyone is getting out of the experience: both internal and community members. By creating a plan ahead of time with a calendar of prompts and content we were able to create discussion among participants. That helped us run this experiment and create value with WSJ articles.
The difference between a tech support forum for the live event and a community is the two-way discussion that facilitated without us, and so we wanted to make sure community members had everything they needed to take the discussion in their own directions.
This experiment helped us to further understand how we can use Slack or other messaging systems in community-building with other programs and groups.
Ebony Reed is the New Audiences Chief at The Wall Street Journal. She leads the audience and new formats teams in WSJ’s Digital Experience & Strategy unit.
