Most nonprofit news startups say that good content is king. But they will also tell you not to assume that just because you build a great journalism site, people will come to it.
Identify the communities you need to reach and make the time to reach out to them.
Plus, a lot of your site visitors will find you by looking for a particular topic on a search engine — and they will go directly to the article page, bypassing the home page that introduces you.
So, how to you begin to let people know what you have and, more important, build buzz around your initiative?
A key strategy is to identify the communities you need to reach and make the time to reach out to them.
As a startup, you need to think of at least four target communities:
- Your geographic community, especially if you are reporting on a particular community or state.
- Your community of potential contributors. Do you aspire just to have people comment on your stories? Or contribute tips, full stories, photos or videos? Do you want to develop a network of contributors, like ProPublica, that can be tasked with doing document searches or localized news gathering? Or are you just looking for volunteers to answer the phones?
- Your potential collaborators. Who might co-report a story with you? What other news outlets might also publish your journalism — either for free or for a small fee? What other sites or bloggers are doing good work that you might link to? What other community assets — creative technologists, journalism students, survey researchers, graphic designers — might be open to working with you?
- And finally, there is your community of supporters — both current and future supporters. These might include individual donors, philanthropic foundations, and corporate sponsors and advertisers. Start collecting early metrics — such as the number of site visitors, Twitter followers, Facebook friends, number of stories — to share with them your early successes.
Plan on doing a significant amount of ambassadorial work to build understanding, generate support and create buzz.
As you can see, garnering the support of these communities is an essential form of marketing, outreach and collaboration. Plan on doing a significant amount of ambassadorial work to build understanding, generate support and create buzz. As a startup, it is unlikely that you will have a big marketing budget, so you’ll have to be creative. You will need community support to survive.
Unlike some media outlets, nonprofits cannot afford to be standoffish. For starters, think about your voicemail and the signature on your email. An automated phone system that intones: “Your call is important to us,” sends the wrong message. Instead, tack on advice for how people can email you or post a comment on your site.
By all means, establish a project Facebook page, put an introductory video on Vimeo explaining the project, create a LinkedIn group, and use Twitter as an informal way to let people know what you’ve published, what you’re working on, and who you are partnering with. Be approachable and make it a two-way conversation.
Establish a project Facebook page, put an introductory video on Vimeo explaining the project, create a LinkedIn group, and use Twitter.
Be pro-active in reaching out to the community. Make a list of the community groups and individuals with whom you want to connect. Then think of new ways to reach them, draw up a plan and make a schedule.
As you grow, you may want to consider running training workshops, like the Twin Cities Daily Planet has done, to teach people to basics of newsgathering. At some point you may be in the position to give selected community members an inexpensive handheld video camera or mobile phone they can use to contribute news to your site.
Make sure that anyone who produces content is aware of your editorial policies, and provide any partner with a contract or memorandum of understanding.
Once you launch, look for tips on user engagement from this Outside-the-Box Engagement learning module on the Knight Citizen News Network.
Here are some easy and inexpensive ways to reach out:
- Arrange meetings with key figures in the community, from neighborhood leaders to city officials to professors in local colleges or universities to explain what you are doing. If they ask how they might help, have some ready suggestions for them.
- Look for ways to include diverse parts of your community — different income groups, ethnicities, political affiliations, You might consider recruiting members of these communities to your Advisory Board, invite them to be guest columnists, offer to share content or link to their sites.
- Solicit introductions to potential donors. Don’t make cold calls. Instead, find out who can open the door for you. Here’s where you can draw upon your board members or existing contacts, particularly within the nonprofit world, to open doors.
- Begin gathering every email you come across to launch an electronic news alert or newsletter.
- Use social networking and email to tell the community what you are doing and to enlist advice and support.
- Build innovative collaborations with others, including other news outlets you may once have considered the competition. This is easier if you produce content that other media outlets will want to publish or link to.
- Recruit individual users and freelancers to your team. Will some like to be invited as guest bloggers?
- Seek out invitations for media interviews, guest lectures and speaking engagements. It’s an effective way to get the word out about your project.