Ask for help and let yourself fail

Reporters have used our staff blog, Catch of the Day, to seek sources, information and story angles.  Later this summer we hope to take that concept a step further as we blog about another group’s documentary while it’s under production.  Each week we will run excerpts of the footage the producers have shot.  It won’t be a story, but rather the disjointed building blocks of what will become a story.

Our hope is that readers will suggest other people to interview or new angles to pursue.  It may build interest in the final product and perhaps reach people who will not otherwise see it.

You could try this with any meaty issue that you commit to over time.  And it wouldn’t have to be a video. Put up an incomplete story and ask readers to tell you where to fill in the blanks.  The transparency helps users feel more connected to what you’re doing.

Track your impact

Be aware that community engagement flares up in unexpected places and not necessarily where you are hoping - your own site. 

Unknown to us, a mountain biking group pulled an RSS feed of our recreation stories into its own forum. When a story broke about the threatened closure of a park popular among the biking crowd, the forum erupted with comments, links and stories.

A community of angry mountain bikers grew up around the threat. It’s exactly the kind of thing you want to happen - except, of course, you want it on your turf.

Even though you may initiate it, the community decides where it will happen. It’s frustrating when your efforts produce community elsewhere, but it also can have some upside for you.  It could connect your name to an issue.  Linking to it can show your readers that a story from your site has traction.  And tracking it is still important as you justify your impact to funders.

Failure is okay, too.

Reader engagement is not an exact science. Sometimes nothing happens when we throw community engagement efforts against the Echo wall. We’ve asked readers to submit links to stories elsewhere to help with our aggregation efforts. Rarely do we get one.

I had hoped for reader help with a tedious task.  I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that readers, too, thought that it was a tedious task.  You have to offer them something they want.

When something works, we’re not always sure why - in the same way you can’t create a video and make it “go viral”.  You can, however, make a great video - or carp bomb or Facebook quiz - and give the community a forum to make it happen.

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