Chartbeat is a web metrics and analytics platform built to support digital publishers. The product helps news organizations measure audience activity and engagement, which in turn informs decisions about content and promotion. Read more in MediaShift’s 2016 Chartbeat study.
Free Press created a toolkit designed to show newsrooms how they go about doing the engagement they do at Free Press. It’s focused on face-to-face engagement. Fiona Morgan explored how to make it even better.
Today’s talk with Jackie Haim, Ashley Alvarado, and Joy Mayer was about practicing internally the engagement we say we want to do externally. It was both about teaching our newsrooms about engagement and also about using the tools of engagement within our newsrooms.
The Listening Post Collective provides journalists, newsroom leaders, and non-profits tools and advice to create meaningful conversations with their communities. Whether you are a journalist, media outlet or civil society group, these steps will get you into a flow of listening to your community, creating stories that resonate, and fostering an ongoing conversation with people. Learn more about the Listening Post Collective from Poynter, MediaShift, and journalism.co.uk.
We chatted about a guide for journalists about how to host community conversations, hosted by Andrew Rockway and Joy Mayer.
Surveys and forms can be valuable tools in the journalistic toolbox. If you use form tools well, they can help you engage with your audience to find new leads, information, skills, ideas. If you use them thoughtlessly, they can be a waste of your energy and frustrating experience for everyone, including the people you want to respond to them. Earlier in our work, we experimented with a product called Ask, a form-based tool. While Ask isn’t in active development anymore, we learned a lot in our research about how to use forms effectively.
Impact Tracker is an open-source tool from the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR). It’s an interactive database that helps manage records of real-world change associated with a story, project or event. The entered dataset is filterable and searchable to track impact by topic or time period. Here’s a handy guide in how to use the tool, a write-up from journalism.co.uk, and download the open-source version.
The NLGJA Journalists Toolbox is designed primarily to assist journalists who don’t normally cover the LGBTQ community. The advice here is drawn from outside media experts and our own members who are professional journalists for both mainstream media and the LGBTQ press. We also offer story ideas and new ways of thinking for reporters who are experienced in covering LGBTQ life.
Hearken is a consulting and technology company that “help organizations create relevant services and build resilient networks through community engagement.” Hearken began as a public Q&A technology platform and now focuses on processes of change that are enabled by their tech offerings.
Harvis is a mobile web tool for collecting live contributions from audience members. It creates the capacity for users to react in real-time to events and measure their engagement and responses and have conversations around those reactions. Harvis’ public reveal was at the Tribeca Film Institute’s Interactive Day 2014. Here’s a write-up from The New York Times, Fast Company, and A Fourth Act.
GroundSource is a platform that newsrooms and nonprofits use to engage audiences via text and Facebook Messenger. GroundSource has been used to solicit input/feedback from community members, to build customized data services for low-income communities, and to share content and push out live updates. Related references here and here.
Parse.ly is a web metrics and analytics platform designed to help companies “understand, own and improve digital audience engagement through data, so they can ensure the work they do makes the impact it deserves. Reviews from TechCrunch, New York Observer, and ZDNet.
