Using the Web to Build Citizens – and Audience

For the most part, broadcasters establish a web presence out of a sense of obligation. It would be hard to say that a web page raises money or increases audience, but it’s a bit like a logo – you won’t be taken seriously without one.

It doesn’t have to be that way. At my station, New Hampshire Public Radio, we experimented last year with using the web to strengthen ties with our listeners. It has worked, and we will do more in the future.

About a year ago, New Hampshire was in a tax crisis. The state Supreme Court had, de facto, ordered a massive change in the state’s revenue structure to pay for public schools. NHPR responded by giving citizens something they had never seen before. NHPR created an interactive web tool called the On-Line Tax Calculator as part of a project supported by the Pew Center. The calculator allowed users to “test-drive” various tax reform plans. They could see for themselves whether their combined state and local tax bills would go up, or down, under different proposals.

It was a service with a very high “gee-whiz” factor. We ran the project for nine months. In that time, we had over 31,000 hits (our total radio audience is about 100,000). One local newspaper tried to imitate us; others wrote articles about us. Cities and civic organizations created links to our page. Lobbyists told their clients about us. Listener feedback was enthusiastic.

Now, I won’t say that our web idea made our audience figures go up during this period, although they did. But I will say the On-Line Tax Calculator outperformed everything else we offered on our web site. And the statistics show that the web kept us in touch with our listeners at a time when they weren’t listening to us at all on the radio.

The numbers couldn’t be clearer. Our strongest audiences are – like at many radio stations – best in the morning and the evening. But just when our listener numbers began to drop, the web user stats began to climb. Between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., during the audience trough, web use was at its highest level. There was a similar, but less dramatic, trend in the evening.

The “why” is no mystery, or at least I don’t think it is. Our audience is made up of radio listeners, dashing around the house or driving to work. But when they get to work, they become web users – especially during the lunch hour. The office often is an easier place to use the web. It’s less hectic than home, the web time is free and generally the connection speed is much faster. Not to mention that when we are at work, we may actually be looking for the occasional distraction. (This never happens to me, of course, but I’ve heard it’s true for other people.)

Are the data rock solid? Absolutely not. Not all web users are radio listeners. Plus, the drop-off in listeners in absolute terms is greater than the gain in web users.

But as an experiment, these results are tantalizing. They begin to define what it means for a news organization to be truly multi-modal. Through the day, people in our audience change the way they might want to connect to us. Sometimes, they prefer the airwaves. At other times, they prefer a computer link.

In the past, our only way to satisfy them was on the air. The rest of the time, we did little for them and they had no immediate connection to us. Now, with a good, useful web site, the number of hours each day when they can connect to NHPR, on their terms, has practically doubled.

So how does this create better citizens? The On-Line Tax Calculator drew people to the site. Once there, they found many clear charts and reports to help them understand how the state raised money the old way, and what exactly the court was telling the state to do differently in the future. And what the key options were for doing that.

Plus, there was a Feedback Zone where people could post comments and read comments from others. Those comments allowed NHPR to contact individuals and put their voices on the air to say what they believed the state should do and why. This gave us many opportunities to report the personal dimension of a major public issue.

Beyond that, NHPR worked with 15 civic and news organizations to hold 10 forums across the state. More than 250 people participated. The forums were partly educational, partly a way for local lawmakers to hear what their constituents had to say.

In the months ahead, NHPR will be using this general approach to help cover the presidential primaries, utility deregulation and public schools. As we go down this path, here are some of the main lessons we will keep in mind:

1. Focus. Pick your issue and use the web to distinguish your coverage of an issue from that of your competitors. Avoid taking on too many issues at once.

2. Talk. Before you pick your issue, before you design your web service, talk to as many average folks as you can. Find out whether your ideas make sense to them. They can point you in very useful directions.

3. Simplify. Make your web site as easy as possible to navigate on the first try. The less information on the home page of your special site, the better.

4. Promote. Use your regular media outlet to draw people to your special service. The greatest bottleneck in the world is the one that people pass through to get to the web – their computers. Your broadcasts and your articles can break through that bottleneck. Also, give the promotions time to work. The audience has a learning curve. When we first launched the Tax Calculator, response was thin. By the time we launched the third version, a high number of hits was almost instantaneous.

5. Re-invent. If you do this once and you want to do it again, throw out every detail of the way you did it the first time. Every issue demands a different approach. There are general guidelines and absolutely no templates.