Audience staff made considerable strides toward growing their audiences after the first round of INN’s Audience Studio, a new peer group launched to respond to member demands for spaces beyond trainings and cohorts.
Building off the success of INN’s Audience Survey Bootcamp, the group allows participants to test and apply lessons quickly with support from their peers and tap into INN’s vast selection of resources.
From May to August, the nearly 50 members of the Studio defined the most pressing issues they’re facing and then broke into small working groups where they ran three-month sprints, working collaboratively to find shared solutions.
The groups found new ways to focus their whole newsroom toward audience growth, had their best month of newsletter list growth of the year and removed many of the burdens of creating social video for a small staff.
The Audience Studio opens to new members each quarter. The next round will kick off with a virtual meeting on Sept. 16. Members can register to attend here.
Members of the summer Audience Studio rated the experience highly positively and said they were able to address challenges as they’re experiencing them in the moment. They also found unique benefits hard to access in most trainings or cohorts.
Better metrics for decision making
The challenge of metrics: It is difficult to identify which stories could perform better with follow-up content, and then make the case to editorial staff for further reporting.
Progress: The group identified search referral patterns and keyword trends that better predicted when a follow-up story would engage readers. The group tested how to present audience data to editorial departments to drive internal buy-in on clear opportunities for growth.
Newsletter engagement and analytics
The challenge of newsletter value: How can news organizations best present the value of their newsletters to new potential audiences — while keeping existing readers engaged?
Progress: Several members of the group decided to let readers themselves make the case and tested refer-a-friend campaigns, which produced some of the largest newsletter list growth of the year for participants. The group is iterating to make the strategies more broadly applicable and understand how it can be extended to similar campaigns on Bluesky and other social media platforms.
Social video for small teams
The challenge of social video: It can be difficult to know when to invest time and money into better production value for social video.
Progress: The group analysed each members’ videos and found they could compile a set of tactics allowing them to speed up production of social video with a small staff and maintain a more consistent identity on social media, which contributed to growing followers and engagement.
In an initial evaluation, the Audience Studio received overwhelmingly positive feedback from the members as a space for support amidst the significant structural challenges audience editors are facing in the current media landscape. The vast majority expressed their desire to stay on with the group during the fall round and several volunteered to step into leadership roles that would allow the group to expand.
Why did this work?
Members of the group said there were several key elements that they saw as both unique and critical to the success of their efforts.
Centering members: Each group said it was both unique and highly beneficial to have the majority of the hands-on work driven by peers, rather than experts or coaches. They felt more willing to try things peers recommended and expressed they were more likely to follow through on advice when it came from a peer.
Mutual obligation: Each member felt an obligation to follow through because they felt an obligation to their peers, who they also expected to contribute. Many left saying they felt like they had a stronger peer group they could now rely on compared to other types of training.
Adapting to success: The groups each changed their goals over time as they adapted to what worked and provided the greatest value to the group as a whole. The members said this kind of flexibility is rare in trainings or cohorts but allowed them to aggressively chase what success looks like today, rather than what it looked like when a training was designed.
The INN Audience Studio will reopen to new members Sept. 16. The members will decide where existing working groups can push their work forward or create new working groups to tackle more pressing problems. The group is open to anyone directly involved in audience issues in an INN-member news organization.
The group is facilitated by Sam Cholke, manager for distribution and audience growth at INN; Fabienne Meijer, head of journalism products for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project; audience expert Gracie McKenzie; and Peter Heckendorn, audience research fellow at INN.
