This document provides guidance for developing a community strategy and content plan for a community-led journalism project. It discusses the importance of understanding the target community, defining objectives and goals, and creating a mission statement and long-term strategy. It also covers identifying a community-driven story to pursue and engaging the community through feedback and participation. Students are asked to define the characteristics of their audience, goals, and mission statement, and to publish an initial community story and regular updates and feedback.

1. Community Strategies
POST
City University, Magazine
Journalism MA workshop
9 November 2011

2. What we'll do today
-- Talk about why you need a community strategy
-- What the hell a community strategy is
-- Identify what you need to be doing with your community
-- Decide what content you're going to produce that meets the
needs of your readers
-- What's this about? COMMUNITY-LED JOURNALISM

3. What does the assignment require?
● Understanding of literature on community management
● Community management strategy
● Content strategy (that's what we're doing today)
● Use of Twitter, Facebook, comments and other platforms (credit
will not be given for only using these for one-way broadcasting)
● Consideration of copyright, libel, contempt, data protection and
other laws where appropriate
● Consideration of online ethics where appropriate
● Consideration of commercial and market context (what are the
business opportunities in this field?) where appropriate

4. POST means....
People - who
Objective - what
Strategy - how (long-term)
Technology - how (now)

5. PEOPLE
-- where do they live
-- what jobs do they do?
-- what sort of income do they have?
-- how will you reach them?
-- maybe create one or fictional reader profiles

6. OBJECTIVE
What do you want?
● Get to stories first?
● Get exclusives and scoops? (Not always the same)
● Write fuller, deeper stories with greater impact?
● Be able to talk about the great engagement stats on your
site?
● Be able to boast of high visitor numbers?
● ...or something else?

7. STRATEGY
MissionWhat is it? This is your pitch to new members of your
community and is likely to relate to their objective, e.g. ‘make our
local area better for young people’, or ‘make more money, faster’, or
‘become a better skateboarder’.
Opportunities:Why would someone join and contribute? What might
happen? That might be obvious from the mission, but it may need to be
made more explicit, e.g. ‘Increase local pride’; ‘Perform well at a sporting
event’, etc.

8. TECHNOLOGY
Now think about community-driven stories
-- It should be a question that's already been raised by the community
-- Something that only your readers can help you solve
You may need to spend a bit of time looking at what your community is talking about online
to identify an appropriate issue first. For example:
-- Why are there so few gay sports teams?
-- Where are the best car boot sales in London?
-- What's the best way for indie book shops to increase revenue?
-- Where are the best Middle Eastern cultural events?
-- Which screen/stage writing school is the most successful in terms of
works commissioned?
-- Which country has the most UK foreign students and why?

9. NOW GO DO
1. People - Write a list of characteristics of your audience:
2. Objective - Decide what your goals are
3. Strategy - What's your mission statement?
4. Technology - Think of a community-based story you can
do
DEADLINES
HAVE A MISSION STATEMENT ONLINE BY THE END OF
THIS SESSION
PUBLISH A COMMUNITY-LED STORY BY NEXT SESSION

10. Independent study
● Draw up some simple terms and conditions for your site. What
behaviour is encouraged? What is unacceptable?
● Write at least one post about the community-driven story you are
pursuing. Continue to post updates as it develops.
● Make an effort to provide feedback to your community over the
following weeks. Think about the following:
● Respond to comments, emails and other contacts
● Recognise contributions through showcasing the best in a regular
post; commenting on it; or just paying a simple direct compliment.
● Revisit people you haven’t heard from in a while
● Review what’s happening on the site and give users an input
● Relate the latest news across the network

11. BLOG FEEDBACK

12. General housekeeping things
● Bylines - your FULL NAME
● Pictures - on EVERY POST
● Spelling, grammar, punctuation - NO EXCUSES
● URL structure - change it so it's WORDS not code
● Use Creative Commons licence notices properly: "Picture via (link:
psmith) on Flickr on a Creative Commons licence)
● Get a proper About page
● CHANGE YOUR TAGLINE FROM "JUST ANOTHER
WORDPRESS SITE" !
● Put your twitter/facebook address on your homepage

13. cont...
● TWEET MORE (and follow more people and TALK TO
THEM)
● TWEET LINKS TO YOUR CONTENT
● READ MORE (RSS reader?)
● Learn to link properly:
○ Highlight the words you want to be linked text, click the
link button and paste in your link like this.
○ Or know the html (it's easy):
<a href="link">text that's visible to the user</a>
● Think about headlines - i.e. not boring!

14. Questions?