Topics covered
Best practices for developing a promotional strategy
Examples of promotions at different stages of the public-powered process
Best practices for developing a promotional strategy
Think about each stage of the public-powered process: Launching your effort, soliciting responses, soliciting votes, announcing a winner, and publishing a story. What promotions will you need for each stage of the process? How will you communicate the process to your audience? Sketch this out. Write sample language and test it.
Here are a few things to keep in mind:
Go where your audience already is to tell them about your series. If you're a print outlet, introduce your series in print. If you're radio or TV, get it on the air. If you've got a website, make sure it's online (and easy to find).
Tell your social followers. Leverage the social channels you use to communicate with your audience. Post about the series on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, wherever you already have a presence and relationship with your audience.
Email people about it. Email newsletter lists have some of your most engaged subscribers / members. They've agreed to let your content into their inbox, so make sure to take advantage of that access. It doesn't hurt to make them feel special, offering them a first look at your new effort, or a targeted invitation for their questions.
If you feel like you're annoying your audience or sounding repetitive, remember this: your audience accesses your content through different channels, and it may not be all of them!
Now we'll walk through some of the promotional steps you can take — starting from launch and working through publication of a story.
Make an introductory piece
Make an introductory video
Promote on social
Invite questions
Solicit votes
Promote a published piece
Make an introductory piece for print / web / broadcast
This is your chance to set the tone for your series and tell your audience what you're about to do - and how they can get involved. Here are a few examples from partner newsrooms:
What works in these intros:
Tell the audience why you're doing this new thing
Explain the process (in text / graphics / both)
Give examples of the kind of response you're looking for
Invite them to participate
Include the form embed so they can easily ask a question
Include a link to the landing page so they can get more info
Make an introductory video
This is another way to set the tone and make a shareable, bite-sized way to tell your audience what your new project is all about. Here are a few examples:
Promote your project on social
If you want to dive deep into launch posts on social here are some examples of social media posts when other partners launched their first Hearken-powered engagement efforts.
Overall, here are our tips for how to craft your social messaging:
Be clear. Make it clear you’re looking for questions. Make it clear you want to help find answers for people. Mention that if a response is chosen, the question-asker will be invited to talk to the reporter who is working on finding the answer.
Repeat, repeat, repeat. Only a tiny percentage of your audience sees any one post to your account. Schedule posts for different times of day, different days of the week, using different language.
Go to where people are and invite them from there - not just on your own pages.
Facebook groups
Local newsletters
Subreddits
Slack groups
Community events / festivals
Find ambassadors - other people who are excited about this who will share the invite with their networks. Often question-askers can be these ambassadors for you.
Use your “stars” to also invite questions. At TV stations, that’s meant on-air talent, including the weather guy, occasionally ask for questions both on-air and on their social pages, with a link to where to submit. Even if they aren’t the ones who will be answering or reporting out answers, they are still the “face” the newsroom and can help bring attention to newsroom’s efforts. For newspapers, that might look like top critics or columnists sharing a link to where to send in questions.
Highlight the kinds of responses you want to receive. Can be responses you’ve answered in the past, or questions you don’t even know if you’ll answer yet but they are good questions.
Need some inspiration? Here's a doc with some draft social posts that you can tweak / fill out.
To invite responses
Letting your audience know that you're ready to hear their questions is important. Here are a few different ways partners have chosen to do that:
The Star Tribune's opinion team collected questions from its audience around gun laws in Minnesota. Their piece told readers what they were doing and why, and proved incredibly successful.
LancasterOnline regularly promotes its question-collection efforts on Facebook, online and in print. Here's an example of one of their Facebook posts.
And UNC-TV in North Carolina has taken a similar approach with this post from reporter Rossie Izlar, soliciting questions for their science-themed curiosity project.
Voting rounds
Getting people to your page to vote for their favorite question means you've got to tell them a new round is open.
Kansas City Public Television reaches out to question-askers for more context around their question and uses that information when building the web story that tells the audience it's time to vote for their favorite question.
The Columbian does an excellent job informing the audience of the winner of a round, as illustrated in this post announcing the end of a voting round. They give background on the series as a whole, plus details about the round that just ended.
The host of WFAE's FAQ City takes to Twitter to ask for votes, as in this example:
Published story
WBEZ's Curious City has a dedicated (and very active) Twitter page. Among other things, they use it to promote their finished pieces, as in this example tweet, on an answer about the history of the nation's largest tuberculosis sanitarium. (Read and listen to the story)
