2021 Michigan Journalist of the Year Portfolio
Web, Social Media, and Audience Engagement
Heard Through The Vine: Small, Yet Mighty
After spending my sophomore year of high school working to get the fledgling Heard Through The Vine off the ground, it was clear to both myself and my team at large that the podcast had the potential to make a big impact.
However, with first-year analytics like the ones shown above, increasing both our listening base and audience engagement were two of my top priorities as the new Senior Fellow for Podcast.
To elaborate, the yellow spikes represent how many listeners "start," or click play, on any episode, while the red spikes represent how many listeners listen to more than 60 seconds of an episode-- in other words, the closer the yellow and red spikes align with one another, the more successful your podcast is with your audience. Looking at the data, I knew listeners were paying attention to our uploads, but their actual interactions with our content were infrequent, inconsistent, and often didn't extend beyond the introduction of the episode topic.
Without the luxury of an independent social media page, there was only one option: return to my reporting roots and find the angles listeners actually cared about.
As an eclectic contributor to The Joyce Ivy Foundation's alumni projects, I had spent October of 2019 crunching the numbers on the academic interests, ambitions, and goals of the foundation's 2019 scholar cohort. The original purpose of the report was for bookkeeping, but it was now my own window into the personal lives of my very listening base; because the data represented 2019 graduates, I could use the same data to "predict" the application behavior and interests of my 2020-2021 audience.
How many scholars are now applying to out-of-state schools? How many scholars have access to supportive counseling at school? How many scholars rely on The Joyce Ivy Foundation for "near peer" support? And, most importantly, how many of these answers can be applied to needed yet engaging episode topics?
Thus, our team moved away from the obligatory "who are we" content and used concrete research to support our content's meaning; for example, with 80% of 2019 scholars applying to "highly selective" institutions, we recorded our "Countdown to Decision Day" episode. And, with only 32% of 2019 scholars possessing "increased knowledge about financial aid," and more scholars confident in their academic ability than their "social fit" for college, my team recorded our "Wait, There's More?" episode to not only address the initial post-admission financial aid process, but the emotional turmoil of application season.
After revamping this strategy, I also began writing bubbly and captivating episode previews for both the foundation's scholar Slack channel and Alumnae Newsletter, Connected By Our Roots; these blurbs not only describe the episode of the month, but suggest examples of possible listeners who may benefit from the specific episode.
All this being said, by March 2021, our analytics went from those at the top of this page...
... to the above analytics in under a year of frequent recording, posting, and engaging!
The GIF at the left is intended to better illustrate magnitude of this change.
As shown by the 2020-2021 data, listeners are not only engaging with our content more consistently throughout the year, but are also clicking "play" with the intention of truly listening to our commentary and advice; this is shown by the increase in streams (red).
Because Heard Through The Vine is a monthly podcast, prolonged engagement-- especially on dates when a new episode is not released-- is at the heart of one of our most critical goals: audience retention. Moving forward, I am eager to continue implementing thoughtful episode planning and personable audience connections to further boost our stream rate.
The Looking Glass:
By Creatives, For Creatives
When I first joined The Looking Glass staff, I was surprised to discover just how few students actually knew about the publication's existence. Aside from the senior leadership, the only underclassmen were the younger sister of the submissions manager, a male classmate (who moved to Russia the next semester), and myself.
Needless to say, the creation of a genuine school and community presence-- a "face" to The Looking Glass-- was critical to the publication's survival.
The image at the left shows examples of The Looking Glass' social media posts in 2017. Though the visuals are colorful and eye-catching, the content itself does not encourage audience retention or engagement; out of these nine posts, six are calls for submissions, and only one showcases an example of The Looking Glass' true artistry and page design skills. With an active feed lacking in both substance and the "voice" of The Looking Glass-- beyond "South's art and literary magazine"-- I knew I would have my work cut out for me when I was named Editor-in-Chief.
In other words, on top of learning how to lead a publication, I was also learning how to specifically create an entire social media presence-- essentially, I was the publicist of my own publication.
And yet, that hard work was most certainly worth it. The video at the right walks through what a viewer may see when visiting The Looking Glass' Instagram today.
My first step was tackling the problems of the "what" and the "who," as even if students had heard of The Looking Glass, I was often myself asked who the Editor-in-Chief was (which was simultaneously humbling and motivating!). I utilized the story highlights feature to showcase individual staff members, answer frequently asked questions, outline the publication process, and explain what the purpose of The Looking Glass itself is: to celebrate student creatives. In doing so, our posts no longer needed to revisit the "basics," such as deadlines, meeting times, or the submission process-- it was now all available at the click of a highlight, giving my staff the freedom to get creative with our actual posts.
However, navigating social media design was, in my opinion, the most rewarding part of the Instagram redesign. Though pre-made post templates are a great start for any platform, a publication that revolves around design needed to convince our audience of our skills (and thus bolster our credibility and increase future sales!). At the same time, the use of student artwork and writing to merely serve as the backdrop for a call for submissions read as disingenuous; for a staff intending to celebrate young creators, taking their courage to submit and transforming it into a pseudo-advertisement for other students' work seemed to say the exact opposite.
Serious commentary on using creative work respectfully online aside, this stage was where I could have my fun.
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Referencing the successful Instagram pages of literary magazines such as The Adroit Journal, I used my own artistic skills to pair original, simplistic illustrations to snippets of submitted writing. Nowhere on the post do we ask for submissions-- those comments now being relegated to captions only-- allowing for The Looking Glass' Instagram posts to echo its print mission: to draw attention to and commend students on their raw artistic prowess through thoughtful, unique design.
That is what The Looking Glass is, in its most basic form. And now we had a social media presence to match, with our posts using the very student work included in our magazine to build anticipation and excitement for the upcoming issue-- all with an inviting "Coming Soon."
Reflecting on my time overseeing The Looking Glass' Instagram, the experience afforded me with the opportunity to fully understand the versatility of social media when paired with specifically creative publications. For The Looking Glass, social media and audience engagement were inherently linked. While social media is a vital tool in the world of traditional journalism, the same storytelling skills can be applied to a literary magazine, encouraging readers to stick around and read more-- even if that means waiting for the annual issue in May.
