This post is by guest blogger and entrepreneur extraordinaire, Susan Mernit
The Knight News Challenge, a signature program of the Miami-based Knight Foundation,
sponsors an international competition open to anyone who has an idea
that can change the future of news and discourse in a local geographic
community. Every year for the past 2 years (there are 5 years for which
funds are committed), Knight has awarded $5MM to approximately 16
projects from around the world, paying out over a 2-year period.
Projects funded include Placeblogger, the world's foremost local blog directory and aggregator, EveryBlock, a Django-based framework for RSS feeds that organized and presents data based on your zip code, Printcasting, a web to print application tool, and the Sochi Olympics Project,
which will let the people of Sochi, the Russian resort city hosting the
2014 Winter Olympics, use the latest online tools to both discuss and
influence the impact of the games
Program Objectives
For
this year, 2008-09, the team wanted to improve the diversity of the
applications, bringing in more from the tech and social media
communities, as well as the online news area, improve awareness and
grow international submissions, particularly in Asia. Two related goals
were to increase awareness of the program, and to build community among
the applicants.
To help meet these objectives, they retained
me to act as the program manager and evangelist, in conjunction with
Program Director Gary Kebbel, the program' developer and owner, Knight
Journalism Program Associate Jose Zamora, and Knight Community Manager
Kristen Taylor, webmaster Robbie Adams and Marketing and Communications
VP Marc Fest.
Working as a team, along with Heidi Miller, whom
Knight hired as a social media coordinator, we crafted a strategy for
raising awareness, recruiting participants, mentoring prospective
applicants, and raising the quality of the applications. No one on the
team worked on this 100%, but working against a well-crafted plan
allowed us to maximize our time
Strategies for outreach
The
Knight Foundation has well-established relationships with influential
journalists, bloggers and educators in the online news and
international online news arenas, and deep ties with journalism, new
media, and communications programs at many universities. However, for
this program, Knight wanted to reach beyond their core audience to
connect with technologists, social media innovators, product developers
and local organizers who might have innovative ideas for sharing news
and information and supporting engagement and discussion in a specific
geographic area.
To achieve this goal, we did an analysis that
suggested using a suite of social media tools would not only be
extremely effective for outreach, but would reinforce the message that
we were innovative and cool. Our plan relied on using tools that had
worked in previous years--web site, email, purchased ad words--but we
put more emphasis on the new tools: blogging, video blogging, Twitter, seesmic, Flickr in particular
To communicate these messages, we created a three-month strategy to execute against
Some of the tasks in the plan were to:
- Create a means to have on-going events--digital and real-world that we could both blog about and have bloggers cover
- Create a list of about 100 social media and Web 2.0 bloggers,
entrepreneurs and technologists whose attention we could engage with
these events
- Send information about the 2008-09 Knight News
Challenge to about 7,500 people on a mailing list, asking them to
spread the word in their communities
- Create a Twitter account
and twit 3X a day with interesting news and updates to drive
participation in the Knight News Challenge
- Create a #hashtag--a tag that makes a phrase discoverable in a twitter search (search.twitter.com)-- for the Knight News Challenge--#knc08--and promote it, making it possible for interested parties to track our efforts.
- Interview past winners and post to the blog; have past winners do Seesmic videos we could promote
- Conduct a strong email campaign to our constituent base of online
journalists and educators and a wider pool of tech, social media and
community influencers
At the same time as we mapped these
ideas, we explored other ideas that would allow us to create more of an
applicant community to spread the word and support one another. Inspired by incubators like ycombinator and TechStars, we decided to create a Drupal
site called the News Challenge Garage. This
would be a destination where prospective applicants could post ideas
and projects, receive peer comments and request online mentoring before
they submitted their applications for judging. The budget for this site
was low, and we built it within 3 weeks
Finally, we also
decided to create and execute a series of real world meet-ups, in
addition to an online webinar. Knowing how effective the BarCamps
have been, we decided to see if we could create low-cost equivalents
for the KNC08, focusing on cities where Knight staff was already
traveling.
To deliver on our international aspirations, we
built an international outreach and marketing plan that relied on the
support of Jose Zamora, our Journalism Program Associate, Joyce
Barnathan and the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ), Professor Rosental Alves of The University of Texas at Austin, Global Voices,
and other connections with good international contacts. This program
was heavily email based, but also included a real world meet up.
Execution
In
August, 2008, we started our program by updating the web site's FAQ and
call to action to broaden the appeal, then followed up with a press
release and an email blast to about 7,500 influencers, friends of
Knight, past applicants, journalism educations and bloggers. This was
followed by the start of a Twitter campaign, the creation of the #KNC08
hashtag, and an ongoing series of blog posts on the Knight Foundation
blog.
Very soon after, we launched the News Challenge Garage; we
promoted its launch with an email blast to a broad target and
individual outreach to the 100 influencers on our list. The site
generated great interest, and applicants began to immediately register.
Bloggers also began to write about it, and about the program. We used
Twitter to communicate with potential applicants and encouraged people
to follow our twitstream; within a short period of time we had 300
followers on Twitter
To meet our goal of having fresh blog
posts on the Knight blog and the Garage site, three times a week, we
created an editorial schedule and assigned posts out for specific dates
and themes to the team of 3 staffers. In addition, we did some podcasts
with past winners, and asked some past winners to do Seesmic videos
about the program. This material generated page views, commentary and
linking around the blogosphere, driving links and awareness way up
(results date below).
At the same time that we were using the
new tools, we also used the old ones. Three times during the
application period we sent out email blasts; analysis showed that the
email was extremely successful in driving applicants to the site, more
so than advertising.
We planned the meet-ups
so they could piggyback on travel and conferences already planned. We
were able to do 9 meet ups--in New York, Boston, Miami, Washington, DC,
Seattle, Vancouver, Austin, San Francisco, and Chicago. In many cases,
we were able to also visit J-Schools and speak to students in the same
trip, and to add meet-ups to other conferences, such as the Online News
Association. During a meet-up (typically 90 minutes long), we spent 20
minutes explaining the program, using a live web browser to show key
URLs and examples, then used the rest of the time for discussion and
Q&A. Meetings were generally well-attended, with 35-40 people as an
average, but with some meetings have as any as 75 people.
To get the word out, we created Facebook groups
for each meet up, listed them on Upcoming.org, and blogged them.
Interestingly, many people in the social media and online journalism
communities treated them as important events, exhorting friends to
attend (and apply for funding). This drove awareness.
Finally,
to execute on our international outreach we not only asked numerous
international organizations to reach out on our behalf, we also sent
about 200 emails to personal international contacts, asking them to
spread the word in their communities. Finally, during the last three
weeks of the program, we worked with the Knight Foundation Webmaster,
Robertson Adams, to purchase keywords that could drive awareness in
China, Korea, Japan and other part of Asia
Evaluating results
So, what were our outcomes like? Did we meet our goals? The short version would be yes.
- Traffic to the Knight News Challenge site increased 47% compared to
the same time the previous year. The site had an average of 2,930
visitors a day, during the course of the application timeframe.
- On the final day of the contest, 17,000 people came to the site, a
record high. Both these metrics were 50% higher than the previous year.
- 2,323 projects were submitted to the Knight News Challenge. 258 were
invited to submit a full proposal, 70 became finalists for the funding
are going through final review this February (results not yet
released). The staff considers the quality to be extremely high.
- In 2008, there were 224 independent blog posts about the Knight News
Challenge, compared to 24 the previous year. Blog posts appeared in
blogs published in European countries, the UK, Korea, China, Russia,
the Middle East, Africa, Canada and Latin America as well as the US
- The Knight News Challenge got major press during the program-we were written up in Valleywag in October
- A post in the New York Times by "Freakonomics" author Steven J. Dubner, titled "Free Money" sent 1,442 visitors to the site.
- 1,600 people registered for the News Challenge Garage
site (required to comment). 800 posted projects. 466 applied for a
grant. Discussion of the Garage generated 10,000 links that Google
indexed, 6,000 of which did not originate from the Garage site.
- The 8 meet ups had 400 attendees, many of whom blogged, shot video and
pictures and shared about the program. Roughly 50% of the meet up
attendees applied to the program. There are 700 links to mentions of
the events indexed in Google, 30 photos on Flickr tagged Knight News
Challenge meet up, and 4 videos).
- Google reported over
60,000 mentions of "Knight News Challenge" on non-Knight sites in 2008;
this was a 110% increase from 2007.
Conclusion
Social media
tools--combined with the usage of a web site, email campaign and
webinar--vastly increased both the awareness of the Knight News
Challenge and the diversity of the applications, particularly in the
English-speaking world. Marketing costs were applied to supporting a
part-time social media manager, rather than to agency fees, and a
greater return occurred. The innovative Garage site helped to brand the
program as interested in innovation and drove ongoing awareness and
discussion on the net, as did the real world meet ups.
Overall,
we were able to create an interactive, virtuous circle or open loop,
where our real world community, which we successfully targeted online
and off, not only got our message but then went on to publicize it on
our behalf. This created a bigger impact that we might have gotten
otherwise and led to a lot of success with carefully measured resources.
Note,
this is an excerpt from a much longer white paper with three case
studies, written on using social media for social good. The paper is
available here-
309Social media for social causes white paper.pdf
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