PROJECT:
Talking Points Memo
PROBLEM OVERVIEW+STATEMENT
News coverage of presidential elections often comes from the top down - reporters ask questions and produce coverage they believe constituents need to know before making decisions at the polls. This often leads to important questions which affect the lives of voters left unanswered by politicians and candidates.
THE ASK:
How can we use the Citizen's Agenda, a model for deepening existing relationships with the audience by putting their needs and questions first, to better inform TMP's audience members around the policy issues they care most about in the 2020 election?
WORKFLOW
Problem identification
Audience engagement
Curation & Editing
Newsletter Output
Role: Audience Engagement Editor
Timeline: September - November 2020
My cohort and I embarked on a semester-long project to understand the needs of TPM's audience in the lead up to the 2020 election. We engaged with TMP's members to understand their most urgent questions around each candidate's policies and curated answers for them TMP's Election Issue Urgency, a weekly newsletter we created to meet the needs of TMP's audience .
AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT
As the Audience Engagement Editor for TPM’s Election Issue Urgency newsletter, my role was to create a bridge between my team and The Hive, TPM’s online member forum. In this capacity, I made contact with Hive members, encouraged their participation in the Election Issue Urgency newsletter, and implemented a multi-channel call to action to ask TPM members what election issues they found most pressing. I reported my findings back to the team so we could build polls using audience data to ask members to vote on which policy issues mattered most in their decision to vote for each candidate. Once we had enough initial responses, our team created a database tallying which election issues were most urgent to Hive Members, and sent out our first poll to The Hive. We would repeat the polling process each week for the next several weeks.
CURATION & OUTPUT
During the curation process, my team and I split up to find relevant and in-depth coverage of each election issue each member found urgent. We designed a template of the election newsletter and wrote overviews answering each member's questions, supported by links from diverse national outlets, including TMP's own coverage of each issue. At the end of each issue, we included a poll for the subsequent week's newsletter coverage.
IMPACT
Engagement increased week by week as we continued to poll the audience and produce coverage around their interests. Over 300 of TMP's members subscribed to the newsletter and up to 1,200 members participated in the polls.
Our team understood pretty quickly the important benefits of connecting with the audience at the ground-level: we fostered relationships with the people who cared about our work; we gave them an opportunity to tell us what their interests are and in doing so we built trust, loyalty, and retention for TMP's brand.