What Nonprofit Newsrooms Can Teach Charities About Attracting Online Supporters

Propublica

Charities of all kinds seek to build communities online, and a pair of nonprofit news organizations can offer valuable lessons from their years of experience boosting digital audiences.

At ProPublica and the Texas Tribune, editors have seen digital engagement and support rise since the election of President Trump. Here’s their advice for taking advantage of a moment when the public is especially hungry for information and people are eager be a part of communities that are driving change.

Go find the audience.

Don’t expect that people will come to you just because your organization has a million Facebook fans, says Terry Parris Jr., ProPublica’s engagement editor.

For a project on the generational effects of Vietnam War veterans’ exposure to Agent Orange, Mr. Parris used a web tool called CrowdTangle to identify more than 100 Facebook groups for veterans.

He joined about 75 of them and started posting a survey supported by Screendoor, a platform for building online forms, asking people if they’d been exposed to the chemical. Respondents shared more than 7,000 stories in those groups and on ProPublica’s website. The news organization received hundreds of follow-up emails and dozens of traditional letters.

Research what the intended audience wants and needs.

Don’t create a Facebook page just because everyone else does, Mr. Parris says. “So often we don’t ask people what they need or how they want to receive it,” he says.

Amanda Zamora, the Texas Tribune’s chief audience officer, echoes this idea.

“Many of us take it as a given that we exist to do X and so of course there’s demand to do X,” she says. Even if that’s true, “you need to really challenge some of the assumptions you have about what you produce and how you produce it, and whether it really is fulfilling your mission or connecting with the people you want to be connecting with as opposed to the people who are already finding you.”

Choose the right technology for the job.

For a project about the connection between a Liberian warlord and American tire company Firestone, ProPublica turned to the popular messaging application WhatsApp, which is widely used in West Africa, to reach Liberians and expatriates. The nonprofit created a “broadcast list,” allowing WhatsApp users to subscribe to a channel where parts of the story were distributed and where readers could ask the reporter questions as the series was published. Sometimes answers were sent to people individually; at other times they went out to the whole list.

Mr. Parris and his colleagues connected with Liberian media organizations, nonprofits, and expatriate forums, asking them to spread the word about the WhatsApp campaign. It ultimately attracted about 250 people who he’s confident ProPublica would not otherwise have reached.

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The Tribune is experimenting with a social-messaging bot, dubbed Paige, that gives audiences a way to talk back. The effort uses Facebook Messenger to push out news stories while also providing another way to listen to readers and gather ideas for future coverage.

Think about how you measure engagement.

Data and measurement should be part of building online communities. But Ms. Zamora worries there’s an overreliance on “vanity metrics” like clicks and page views that create misunderstanding about what effective engagement looks like. Those measures, she says, must be balanced with qualitative data that addresses why you’re doing what you’re doing, and for whom.

For example: The Tribune holds a variety of panel discussions, conferences, and other events with Texas politicians. In an effort to better engage people personally affected by politics and policy, it started asking attendees what work, personal, or other interests motivated them to come.

“If you’re only focused on growth or the number of times people are commenting, you pay less attention to who’s doing the commenting,” Ms. Zamora says. “Diversifying your audience is a much different goal than just growing your audience, and frankly it’s a whole lot harder to do.”

Consider the end game.

If your community is built around a specific campaign or project, consider what will happen with those relationships at the end.

For the Liberia/Firestone story, ProPublica made it clear that the WhatsApp channel would last eight weeks. But for other efforts that aim to build a community around a broader cause or issue, it has thought about the long game.

In one crowdsourcing project, ProPublica fact-checked letters that members of Congress sent to their constituents about the Affordable Care Act. More than 800 people uploaded documents through an online form. “It lit a fire under folks to participate both on the right and the left,” says Mr. Parris.

He and his colleagues are thinking about how to involve those who responded in future reporting projects. “These people are clearly civically engaged,” he says. “What can we do a month from now to keep them involved in other parts of our journalism?”

The Texas Tribune is also looking to retain new readers, and to build a more diverse audience. That requires collaboration across departments, Ms. Zamora says. Some staffers gather for a monthly “audience SWAT meeting” to discuss where their work aligns.

Ultimately, the Tribune hopes to build such a strong relationship with people that they end up becoming donating members. “That’s really the end game,” she says, “but there’s a lot of work for us to do in that middle step of getting to know our audience better.”