1. Media research project
“Hot Bills”
Laura Zvejniece
Project coordinator

2. What is “Hot Bills”?
 Innovative media research project
 Collaboration between biggest media in Latvia
 Crowdsourcing
 Usage of the social network
 Research involving regular people

3. Project partners
Biggest media in all fields:
Social networks:

4. Task and Goals
 Goals :
 1. To show costs of heating system / to change
payment system
 2. To crowdsource data and understand how
many people will be interested
 3. To make a website with publicly displayed
data
 Task :
 Encourage people to send their heating bills

5. Project steps
 1. Work with tool/website
 2. Searching for background information
 3. Searching for media partners
 4.Planning a campaign
 5. Start
 6. Placing interviews in media
 7. Getting data
 8. Dealing with data
 9. Explaining heating system and main problems in media and public
 10. Results
 11. Discussion with experts and Minister of Economics
 12. Conclusions

6. Technical issues
 Social city network socmap.com integration for
project needs
 Three ways how people can send there bills –
email, post box, uploading on website
 Processing all bills manually – changing some of
the positions to make them comprehensible
 Data Base

7. Examples of Bills

14. How it looks

17. Campaign
 Logo/banners and appeal in start and once in
month (from date 5 till 15, when people get there
bills)
 Ads in print media, stories, interview in radio,
explanation in rebaltica.lv web page
 Story integration in different media (audio and
video in web)
 Social media

18. Data
 Data protection – data processing
 We have got more then 3 000 bills and we
processed 2406
 Every day we get around 80 bills and half of them
came together with “story”
 Every month we made a chart with cheapest
and most expensive heating prices
 Media from data made more than 15 stories

19. Stories and reporting
 The project and stories were made collaborating
with people involved
 Figures and calculations/data and charts
 Real problems and solutions

20. Opinions and discussions
 A lot of experts called and gave their advices
 A lot of experts worked to help understand the
heating systems
 A lot of experts worked together to come up with
the project conclusions and main solutions
 At the end we held discussions with those
experts as well as Minister of Economics, and got
a promise that they will solve problems
connected with payments

21. Conclusions
 The timing of the project was extremely right
 There are numerous problems with the heating
system
 Payments are important to people and they are
interested to solve problems if there are any
 Media field can work together
 The inside system (technical resources) weren’t
successful

22. Explanation of heating
system payment

23. Present situation
 The Ministry of Economics created work group to
solve the problems in payment system and will
came up with one joined calculation
 People know their rights and pay more attention
to their bills
 Municipality agencies are working to explain and
inform the public

24. Thank You.
For more information feel free to
contact –
laurafromlatvia@gmail.com
+371 2 60 36 329
facebook.com/laura.zvejniece