Build Communities of Purpose—Not Audiences
by Mariano Avila
Communiteis of Purpose-Image created by Mariano Avila using Dall-E text to image generator.
One success, one failure
Let me tell you about a success and a failure that might reframe your station’s outreach and content strategies.
The success: Some years ago, I produced an investigative journalism series with a town-hall format for the Public Media station where I worked. Each episode was an in-depth look at a different topic, complete with a mini-doc, a stage conversation and a well-curated audience. The first episode was on child trafficking. The response I received during production truly surprised me. Rural, conservative politicians and urban, progressive officials reached out with story leads, studies, books, invitations to events, and introductions to parents and survivors. Word spread quickly and I was able to invite a senator, state reps, FBI agents, our police department and all kinds of relevant people.
The failure: I should have known better after the years I worked as an organizer, but because my focus was on journalism, after the show I simply moved on to the next topic. If I knew then what I know now, I would have collaborated with our outreach and marketing team to foster that group into a community of purpose.
“…a group of people actively building community around a common goal or interest is a community of purpose.”
Having trafficking as your station’s singular focus might not be sustainable and most local newsrooms can’t afford reporters with a single focus. However, four or five deeply engaged communities, each focused on their cause and advocating for more content, events, and engagement could make a significant contribution to the station’s sustainability. For a typical NPR reporter turning dailies, producing one thematic story each week is not a heavy lift and allows for four thematic stories per month—each serving a passionate community you’ve fostered.
Audience vs Community of Purpose
“Communities of Purpose” is a term I picked up doing community organizing. Before I became a producer in Public Media, I spent several years supporting nonviolent peace efforts between Israelis and Palestinians. I traveled all over the United States and Canada working with college groups focused on peace. I worked with Christian, Muslim and Jewish congregations on interfaith initiatives. I promoted musicians and art collectives, raising funds for peace. Demographically, these groups had nothing in common—we had 18-85 year olds, spread over two countries, with different religions, racial and ethnic backgrounds, and even voting for different parties. Their common purpose for coming together was their commitment to a specific cause—peace in the Middle East. To give it a clear definition: a group of people actively building community around a common goal or interest is a Community of Purpose.
From a media standpoint, it is far more than an audience. It is a group of people who are happy to open your newsletter, attend your events, view your content, engage online, and even give regularly to you because you convene and support them with content, resources and events around the issue that they are passionate about.
Why are they engaging so deeply? It’s because you are helping them find each other. People working on an issue like child trafficking or peacemaking on their own can feel isolated, especially in rural areas. A Community of Purpose can help people feel seen, empowered and connected with others who share their concerns in their wider geographical area and beyond.
Note: You’ll likely need more than one community of purpose to sustain your station, but start by building one. Also, you don’t have to be the one giving them answers—this isn’t advocacy. You convene, inform and foster.
Using data to develop a Community of Purpose
To identify and nurture a community of purpose, you’ll first need to develop what we call a data-driven mindset. That means leveraging data you already have from the platforms you own—your app, your newsletters, your website or events—to offer increasingly tailored experiences for folks with a narrow subset of interests.
Here’s what that looks like: Make a list of what links people click on most consistently in your newsletter, and who is clicking. See what you can distill from comparing that data to your social post engagement and your linear or app viewing/listening numbers. What kind of people engage with each of your events? You’ll start to see patterns emerging. You can take this further to track trends throughout your station’s ecosystem as you view data to see which engaged viewers or event attendees are also giving to fundraising drives or becoming members.
What would this process look like? Not every “purpose” has to be based on matters as serious as trafficking and geopolitics. Groups that use your app to listen to NPR true-crime podcasts might also watch BBC mystery shows on PBS and attend your gala events. Parents who go to book readings and watch PBS Kids might also love cooking shows and engage with your Instagram content, but don’t open your newsletter often. Ask yourself, what kind of experiences or shows or touch points could you design for each of these two groups? Now consider each of the touch points you’ve designed as opportunities to ask yourself (not them) new questions that make the touchpoint after that more effective.
KEEPING THEM ENGAGED
Ok, so you’ve found some groups with common interests, how do you keep them engaged long enough to learn what their preferred touch points and messages are?
Going back to the true crime and BBC mystery folks, what if you organize escape-room experiences, or mystery book clubs or mystery writing clubs where you invite guest authors to speak? Could your team produce a limited podcast or digital show with local true crimes or unsolved mysteries, marketed specifically to those folks and going out with a specialized newsletter that wraps all of this content? Could you test cross promotion of all these shows and events to the different audiences?
What won’t help
These are three things will NOT help you on their own, but can be useful as part of a data ecology:
Un-segmented broadcast audiences: We are at least a decade beyond the days where just getting more eyeballs and ears meant success. Sustained engagement is the game and that game means knowing who you’re serving.
A program focused on a community of purpose (as in the examples above) can be a catalyst in this endevour.Demographic Data: a 65-year old, white woman from Milwaukee might be as interested in news as a 45 year-old Black man in the suburb of Brookfield, and they might both really love local food shows, therefore having more in common than you would assume based on demographics. Demographics can be a starting point, but you need to go into habits, values and interests.
Social Media alone won’t sustain a show let alone a station: Social Media is an introduction; a handshake. Virality and social media views are not an end in themselves, but they need to have a clear path into a long term relationship via email, SMS or attending an event. Let’s say a post about teenagers goes viral and you get massive numbers in that demographic showing up, but there’s nothing other than that one post to engage them—now you’ve taught them that only your posts are worth their time and you’ll be hard pressed to convert that into web traffic or content views. Financially, ask anyone with even moderate success on social media and they’ll tell you that it takes big numbers to turn views into a steady flow of dollars—even if you can legally monetize. If you think YouTube alone is the key, consider that it pays about $0.002-$0.0012 per view after 1,000 views—assuming you meet their criteria.
Ten steps to develop a Community of Purpose
Take a deep breath, you’re on the right path.
Gather your teams and get them in the habit of mining data from the touch points they produce within your community. Include subscription services, email marketing, social media, community events/outreach, and content producers (broadcast or digital)
Put them in a room together so they can share data in their department and compare it so they can collaboratively find those connections and that psychographic threads.
Once they’ve found some potential threads, help them write a hypothesis of what these groups might like.
Design touch points that test that hypothesis while providing meaningful engagement: a limited series or story for content, a drip campaign for email marketing, a set of boosted posts promoting the content or drip resources, events where you can engage these narrow audiences and see what you can get them to sign up for. Set clear goals with metrics that will help you identify whether you were successful in identifying a Community of Purpose.
Launch your new touch point!
Check your data to test the hypothesis: Was your new touch point successful? Did you meet your metric goals? Is there a community of purpose to be developed here? It's equally helpful if the hypothesis fails or points to new directions as it is to have it confirmed. No wrong answers here, only an increasingly narrow set of questions.
Pivot where your hypothesis fails and dig in where it succeeds.
Keep that group engaged with a constant stream of increasingly specialized touch points that always point forward to the next thing.
Congratulate your team — you have your first community of purpose!
Now rinse, wash, repeat.
If you’re ready to build your first Community of Purpose but have questions, let’s talk.