Three Things Datebook for the Week of 3/7/2022
This week's Datebook recommends the next Local That Works webinar discussing successful local podcasts. Plus, scaling your culture as your organization grows and some ideas to address donor fatigue.
Before we get to some of the things happening this week that might be of interest to folks in public media, a “forward promote” that later this week I’ll be sharing the results of the Public Media Staff Vacancy Survey that was out in the field last month.
We collected 147 responses from a good cross-section of large, small, and moderately sized organizations. Current, who has been a terrific partner in promoting the survey through its social media channels to stations across the system, will also publish the results.
Another good read about staffing at media organizations is a piece published this past Wednesday from Insider’s Steven Perlberg on the push and pull happening at The New York Times regarding staff retention at the “Grey Lady.” The story explored how the creator economy impacts even the top echelon of journalism organizations as high profile talent seek opportunities outside of their specific roles at The Times.
Perlman writes in the article:
"When you think about the future of media, it's much more distributed and about personalities," said Taylor Lorenz, a former Times tech reporter who recently left for The Washington Post. "Younger people recognize the power of having their own brand and audience, and the longer you stay at a job that restricts you from outside opportunities, the less relevant your brand becomes."
Simon Owens’s Tech and Media Newsletter on Substack took on that same subject recently noting four dynamics at play that will make it increasingly difficult for The Times and other traditional media outlets to retain talent in this new environment:
The Creator Economy platforms are built for solo operators and provide the freedom that many are seeking in the “next normal.”
New startups and writer cooperatives, many with VC funding, are attracting talent willing to depart from their traditional media jobs.
There is an attraction for reporters in 2022 to want to produce outside projects that may not precisely align with their “day job.”
There is increasing competition for talent across other traditional media outlets.
Since public radio is also experiencing a similar exodus among its ranks, particularly high profile departures from NPR, both the Insider report and Owen’s post are very timely and worth a look.
THING ONE: Making Local Podcasts Work
I’ve written a few times over the past year in this newsletter about the David Plotz startup City Cast as a local competitor for public radio and that we should be keeping our eyes on as it rolls into markets across the country. City Cast is now in five markets and is currently advertising for lead producers in Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Columbus (OH), Philadelphia, Portland (OR), and North Carolina’s Research Triangle. They also produce a daily newsletter to accompany the daily podcast in each market.
The link below is from this past Friday’s City Cast Chicago podcast. Host Jacoby Cochran talks with WBEZ’s Mariah Woelfel and Justin Kauffmann from Axios Chicago in a very “public radio sounding” podcast.
And there’s a good reason for that.
Andi McDaniel is the Chief Content Officer for City Cast and Sarah Menendez is the company’s Head of Operations. McDaniel joined City Cast after nearly seven years as CCO at WAMU and Menendez spent five years at Marketplace.
And it’s been a pretty good first year for City Cast. The Chicago version was recently named “best podcast” in the city by Chicago Reader.
One of the markets that City Cast moved into at the end of 2021 was Salt Lake City, and it’s in the 27th market in the country that KUER, the NPR station in SLC, is competing with its weekly political podcast State Street. The sample below from February 21, 2022, features a conversation between hosts Emily Means and Sonia Hudson discussing the housing market in Utah.
I’m showcasing these two podcasts because the next webinar in the Local That Works series from Current will feature Andi McDaniel from City Cast and Emily Means from the KUER podcast State Street talking about Secrets of Successful Local Podcasts.
Joining in the conversation is Harry Clark, the Chief Revenue Officer for Market Enginuity. As you probably know, Market Enginuity sells sponsorships for fifteen local stations, PRX, and others. Clark is one of the smartest people around when it comes to successfully selling sponsorships for podcasts for public radio organizations.
KPCC’s Mariana Dale will host the session that happens (tomorrow) Tuesday, March 8, 2022, at 2:00 pm (Eastern).
I’m looking forward to this conversation because the focus on producing a podcast designed for local audiences is something that many stations are working on finding a model that works in terms of audience development and revenue.
The webinar is free and you can register at this link.
The Local that Works webinars are a collaboration between Current, Public Media Journalists Association, Poynter’s Local Edition, and Gather, with funding from the Wyncote Foundation.
On the subject of local podcasts, WYPR in Baltimore recently announced Your Public Studios, the home for podcasts coming from the station, its music service WTMD, and independent producers in Baltimore. One of the first productions is a pop-up series titled Wavelength.
The six-part series will take listeners on a journey from public radio’s early days to today. Listeners will learn about the evolution of WYPR, WTMD, WEAA, and WBJC, how the stations responded to major news stories, feature local and national musicians, and how they found their place in Baltimore’s current radio scene.
The podcast is being produced as part of WYPR’s 20th anniversary that it’s celebrating this year.
“The inflection point of our anniversary gives us an opportunity to contemplate additional ways to make content not just for and about our community but with our community,” said LaFontaine Oliver, WYPR’s President and General Manager, in a press release announcing the new podcast studio.
The new podcast studio from the station is one way that WYPR is seeking to distinguish itself in a very competitive market in Baltimore. The market overlaps with Washington, DC, so there’s public radio competition coming from the nation’s capital. On the digital journalism side, The Baltimore Banner, the new nonprofit digital news startup founded by hotel magnate Steward Bainum will begin publishing soon.
LaFontaine will be joining me in a conversation next month at the Public Radio Super Regional in Denver, discussing the new competitive environment for public radio news stations.
Also on the panel will be Stephen George, the President and General Manager of Louisville Public Media, and Rachel Hubbard, the Executive Director of KOSU, the public radio station serving central and northeast Oklahoma, including Oklahoma City and Tulsa.
The session will take place on the first day of the conference on Monday, April 11, 2022 at 1:45 pm (Mountain).
This first major in-person meeting of public radio leaders in more than two years occurs at the Grand Hyatt Denver on Monday, April 11 and Tuesday, April 12, 2022. If you still need to register for the conference, here’s how to do it.
THING TWO: Scaling Your Culture As Your Organization Grows
One of the takeaways that we’ll be sharing later this week with the Public Media Staff Vacancy Survey mentioned earlier is an interesting twist to the story of staffing in public radio. While there has undoubtedly been churn at stations due to staff turnover, many organizations are expanding rapidly to better serve their local communities.
This type of growth, while exciting, brings with it potential perils as you add new talent to achieve an organization’s expansion objectives. Leadership development specialist Jordan Valencia wrote about these challenges in a 2019 piece in the Harvard Business Review. She offered strategies for fast-growing organizations that want to scale their culture as their employee count quickly increases.
Here are a few of her tips:
Define culture in terms of clear, observable behaviors. Valencia describes organizational learning as a social process and that employees learn by observing others. She notes that sometimes culture can swiftly get lost in translation at fast-growing organizations.
Employees can live out values based on their own personal understandings, rather than what the company intends. As such, unintended behaviors are learned throughout the organization, and company values and beliefs are diluted over time.
The author recommends an excellent first step is to define each company value or belief into two or three behaviors that people can observe1. This means that everyone is working from the same cultural definitions, and it ensures that abstract values can be seen in concrete ways.
Therefore, employees can more easily learn, measure, and reinforce values.
Build an accessible, digital library of learning content. This is an area of onboarding that so many organizations come up short for new hires. Valencia suggests that onboarding, particularly related to organizational culture, works best over an extended period of time with the idea that learning is a continuous process.
For learning to be effective, it is not enough to simply “push” learning to a set of people in a closed environment. Research shows that a more open model for learning is needed: employees should be able to access and “pull” learning materials about company culture at any time, whenever they need it.
Valencia’s recommendation is to build a digital library or platform that can showcase the top behaviors you want to scale. Then, for each behavior, include curated learning materials to help employees understand and exhibit the behavior. These can be short articles, study guides, videos, online assessments, or recorded interviews.
Use blended learning programs to scale culture training. For larger organizations, the recommendation is to combine both online and offline delivery of content to bring scale to the company’s culture training program. One of the biggest challenges to retaining talent is insufficient onboarding and training, especially when an organization is going through significant expansion. Valencia suggests a mix of traditional learning and e-learning allows an organization to manage the growth of new staff in the most effective manner.
Ensure managers relentlessly reinforce target behaviors. This is Valencia’s final recommendation. I think it might also be the most important because managers are often so concerned about getting their new hires producing for the organization that they often forget they have a powerful behavior-shaping tool at their disposal: recognition.
Managers are critical to scaling culture. Not only can employees model the behaviors of their managers, but they also look to managers for approval and direction. But hypergrowth can be a dizzying time for companies.
Studies show that highly personalized recognition is crucial in reinforcing desired behaviors. While recognition is important for most companies, it is especially valuable for hypergrowth firms because it requires little to no resources to execute: it is free, very easy to implement, and highly effective in shaping employee behavior.
I’m sharing these recommendations because there’s a webinar this week that will focus on this very subject: Managing a Growing Team.
On Wednesday, March 9, 2022, at 1:00 pm (Eastern), Claire Lew, the CEO of Grow Your Team, will share her firm’s methodology to best manage a growing team.
This interactive session will specifically focus on:
What actions are most high-leverage as a leader when your team is rapidly growing
How to enable robust performance during times of growth and transition
Biggest pitfalls to avoid when managing a team during fast growth
The one-hour webinar is free and you can register with this link.
If you’re doing anything specific in your onboarding process, share your ideas in our comments section.
THING THREE: Steps to Address Donor Fatigue
It was two years ago this week when, for most Americans, the pandemic hit home. I view the date of March 11, 2020, as a marker.
On that day, the World Health Organization officially declared the novel coronavirus a pandemic, Tom Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson, announced that they had tested positive for the virus while at work in Australia, and the NBA suspended its season.
This was the moment in public radio that stations quickly “pivoted” (a term that has outgrown its usefulness 24 months later) to remote operation, and many stations postponed their on-air pledge drives.
It’s almost a blur to look back to that week and the weeks that followed two years ago when our broadcast audience collapsed with the lockdown and underwriting fell off a cliff.
What followed though was that public radio news stations stepped up with extraordinary coverage of the pandemic and music stations connected with listeners in new and innovative ways to address the crisis impacting all Americans’ lives.
And what happened next, as is so often the case in times of crisis, public radio’s most loyal listeners responded to fund the work that public radio was providing to communities large and small across the country.
The constant barrage of news that started two years ago with the onset of the pandemic, continued through the summer of 2020 as the country grappled with addressing long-standing issues of racial injustice, and into the fall with the Presidential election and then early 2021 with the Insurrection of the Capitol resulting in our most loyal listeners maintaining and often increasing their support of stations.
However, two years into the pandemic, we’re seeing news fatigue result in a drop-off in audience at many stations coupled with reports of little or no growth in individual support.
And this weariness is happening elsewhere in the nonprofit sector.
For many nonprofits, the past two years’ events initially resulted in an increase in giving from first-time donors in response to the crisis over the last 24 months.
Research shows that more than one-third of supporters gave more during the pandemic than before it started. But some fundraisers worry many of these individuals may not give again.
To discuss this critical issue, The Chronicle of Philanthropy is sponsoring a webinar on Thursday, March 10, 2022, at 2:00 pm (Eastern) that will share ideas on “How to Retain Donors Who Gave During Crises.”
The session will feature two veteran fundraisers offering proven tactics to stay in touch with big and small supporters, get them more involved, and inspire their loyalty:
Helene Erenberg is the Director of Major Gifts and Individual Support at the CDC Foundation. The CDC Foundation is an independent nonprofit and the sole entity created by Congress to mobilize philanthropic and private-sector resources to support the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s critical health protection work.
Christa Floresca Evans is the Vice President of Development for First Book. First Book is a nonprofit that has distributed more than 200 million books and educational resources to programs and schools serving children from low-income families throughout the United States and Canada.
The webinar will provide ideas on keeping donors engaged despite fatigue from two years of crises. In addition, the session will offer suggestions on how to communicate the impact of gifts and inspire supporters to give again and authentic ways to deepen connections with donors online.
Erenberg and Evans will also share some simple ways to gather meaningful data on donors to personalize your outreach and raise more.
There is an $89 fee to participate in this webinar, but fundraisers seeking continuing education will receive 1.25 CFRE credits for attending.
Here’s the link to register for this session.
That’s the Three Things Datebook for this week. Thanks for reading.
For example, “respect” can be defined as 1) being a great listener and 2) giving equal consideration to different ideas. The output of this exercise is a clear list of the top 10-15 observable behaviors that define your culture. This has two purposes. First, it ensures everyone is working from the same cultural definitions. Second, it ensures abstract values can be seen in concrete ways. Thus, employees can more easily learn, measure, and reinforce values.