How to involve your community in your work
You’d be surprised how far your community is willing to go to support your project
A decent chunk of your readers, listeners or viewers will be willing to support you with regular membership payments, but there are many other valuable ways for them to support your work that have nothing to do with money.
Involving your community in your work can be a great way to offer your members added benefits while increasing your team’s capacity and strengthening your community.
Understanding motivations
Members who are willing to go above and beyond to help you out can generally be split into three groups, each with their own motivation:
- Wanting to pitch in as part of a community, because they care deeply about your project
- Wanting to learn a new skill, or
- Wanting to gain more insight into how you work
Figuring out which members are driven by which motivations, and how you can match these motivations with tasks, will help ensure that there is mutual benefit. You may not be able to pay your community members for their work, but that’s all the more reason to ensure they come away from the experience feeling valued.
Once you’ve got your head around motivations, it’s time to think about the tasks. There are a whole plethora of ways you can involve your community in your work.
Generating story ideas
At member-funded journalism platform Krautreporter, the authors consider themselves not only reporters but conversation-starters. Their job isn’t just to deliver stories to their 13,000+ members, but to engage in dialogue with those members about which stories they are interested in and how the platform can better serve their curiosity.
Conversation-starter tools
There is a wide range of tools available to reporters wanting to create regular opportunities for dialogue with their communities: customizable forum tools like Discourse, private Facebook groups that allow members to open up, as well as newsletters dedicated to specific topics.
So, what do you want to know?
Simply asking your community what’s on their mind seems almost too obvious, too easy. And yet, it’s been one of the most effective ways for Krautreporter to generate good story ideas. When members are part of the story selection process, they’re much more likely to return to read the results, because they’re already invested in the idea.
Three of the most effective ways to canvass your community for story ideas:
- Surveys: to find out what they already know about a given topic, or what their blindspots are,
- Polls, where they can vote on a range of topics,
- Or the very open question Krautreporter likes to use: “What questions do you have about [a certain topic]?” When editor-in-chief Rico Grimm asked Krautreporter’s readers which questions they had about bitcoin, he was able to steer his reporting to cover the community’s information gaps.(More about Krautreporter’s engagement strategy in their Engaged Journalism Playbook).
Members as sources
Members are already invested in your project, so why not use them as sources in your reporting?
Take a leaf out of Krautreporter’s book and get to know your community members as they sign up. Ask them to fill out a short form about their occupation, educational background and interests on sign-up and then you’ll have a nice fat database of sources ready to go whenever it’s time to start researching a new story.
Members make great interviewees on the subjects on which they are specialists, but they can also give excellent first-person accounts of all manner of human experiences. Send your members a questionnaire as part of your reporting and see what comes to light.
Once you have included a member as a source, make sure to make their impact visible. This is a great way to reward members whose key motivation is their desire to be part of something bigger — they want to feel acknowledged. So quote them in your stories, give them a shout-out on your podcast or in a tweet, or link to their great new project in your members’ forum. Seeing that you celebrate your members also serves as encouragement for other members to participate.
Resource collection
Sometimes when Krautreporter’s journalists are working on a big story, they will reach out to their community to ask whether they can recommend any articles on the topic, or have any books they might be able to lend for research purposes. This is an easy way to include members who may not have a lot of time to give, but who have resources or insight they can offer you at no cost.
Data collection and analysis
Are you a reporter dealing with large volumes of data? Then this one’s for you.
Some members might be happy to help collect raw data for your project, or spend a couple of hours a week sifting through data to help you crack a fraud case, identify inconsistencies or search for the outliers that will become your next big story.
For example, non-profit research platform Crowdnewsroom’s recent research into housing markets included contributions from 1000 locals in Hamburg, all keen to help get to the bottom of their city’s housing challenges.
Just make sure you’re clear on local data protection laws before you get started — the last thing you need is to put either your members or yourself at risk.
Developing and sharing professional skills
Some members will be happy to offer you their professional skills for free if it enables them to access a new audience, while others will be more interested in learning new skills. Make sure you’re clear on which of the two categories a member falls into when you’re assessing whether they would be right for the task, and that it will match their motivation and skill-level.
These skills might include: graphic design, photography, copywriting, proofreading, or even accounting. Tell your community what you need and see what they have to offer.
Members should never feel like they’re being used as free labor. So make sure that however you involve them, it’s going to be mutually beneficial. And remember to say a big thank-you.
Recruiting new members
Who better to advertise your membership program than the people already getting so much out of it? Members make for compelling membership ambassadors.
You might like to host a meet-up for potential ambassadors to train them in how you communicate about your project. The benefit for them: greater insight into the way you work and a chance to celebrate their belonging to a project they’re proud to be part of.
Or if that’s out of reach, you could try a referral program. Publications like the newsletter Morning Brew have built referral programs to reward members who recommend them to others.
Moderating forums
Moderating online discussions can be labor-intensive, but your most trusted members can make great forum or Facebook group moderators. It’s a task they can do from home, in their spare time and if the forum touches on topics they care about, they’ll gain valuable insight along with a new skill.
There are a plethora of ways to engage your community and enable them to take part in your mission. We’d love to hear which engagement tools are working best for you.
