This document summarizes lessons learned from projects funded by the Knight News Challenge in 2010 and 2011. It discusses eight key lessons: 1) Measure success based on how funding improves the field rather than just individual projects. 2) Target users with needs you can feel. 3) Be open to appealing to different audiences than planned. 4) Spend time getting the user interface right. 5) Provide substantial support beyond funding. 6) Anticipate resistance to innovation. 7) Identify elements that require staff vs volunteers. 8) Recognize the benefits and challenges of open source code. The document also briefly describes the 2011 and 2010 Knight News Challenge winners and their current status.
The document summarizes lessons learned from analyzing winners of the 2010 and 2011 Knight News Challenges. Some key lessons include: measuring success based on how funding improves the overall field rather than just individual project adoption/impact; targeting users with a clear and proven need for the innovation; and recognizing that projects may appeal to different audiences than originally intended. The Knight News Challenge has funded over 100 projects totaling $37 million to support media innovations.
The document summarizes lessons learned from analyzing winners of the 2010 and 2011 Knight News Challenges. Some key lessons include: measuring success based on how funding improves the overall field rather than just individual project adoption/impact; targeting users with a clear and proven need for the innovation; and recognizing that projects may appeal to different audiences than originally intended. The Knight News Challenge has funded over 100 projects totaling $37 million to support media innovations.
Finding a Foothold: How Nonprofit News Ventures Seek SustainabilityKnight Foundation
A new report offers an in-depth view into the nonprofit news industry, revealing the significant progress that news organizations have made toward sustainability and the challenges they still face. The report, “Finding a Foothold: How Nonprofit News Ventures Seek Sustainability,” provides data and analysis on 18 nonprofit news organizations between 2010 and 2012.
A follow-up to the 2011 Knight study, “Getting Local: How Nonprofit News Ventures Seek Sustainability,” the new report takes a deeper look, expanding the number of nonprofit sites included in the research. It also broadens the focus of the study from just local, to state and national organizations. Find out more at www.knightfoundation.org/features/nonprofitnews.
Organizations should (1) articulate clear goals for their digital storytelling, such as increasing donations or volunteer recruitment. They should (2) identify their target audiences and understand those audiences' interests and motivations. Finally, organizations should (3) set specific, measurable objectives for their storytelling, such as getting 1,000 shares of a story on social media. Developing a clear strategy is necessary to craft engaging content and reach the right people.
Digital Storytelling: Understanding Social Media and Visual Storytelling Tool...TechSoup Canada
This presentation will explore how digital storytelling, through visuals, videos, and live stories can amplify and better communicate your nonprofit story. This presentation will also show how some nonprofits are using social media platforms for digital storytelling, with examples of successful campaigns on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat.
In this presentation you will learn:
- How to tailor content and visuals to your organization’s social media platforms;
- Tools you can use to create images, infographics, and fonts to build your visual storytelling elements;
- Tangible ways to employ ethical practices into sharing digital stories.
nonprofits to find effective and creative ways of sharing their stories.
Soliciting contributions from large crowds has been proven to deliver better results than from experts alone, and has also saved time and money for businesses. Learn why crowdsourcing is so valuable to businesses, the various types of crowdsourcing, who is doing it right and what these businesses have in common. Full webinar at:
How to leverage social media data for crowdsourcing business insights
MAYO Communications is a woman-owned public relations firm founded in 1995. It has offices in Los Angeles, San Diego, and New York. The firm specializes in crisis communications, media relations, and social media strategies. It has won several awards for its media placements and corporate communications work. The firm has 12 contractors and is led by President Aida Mayo and General Manager George McQuade, who have extensive experience in public relations, media, and government affairs.
Dr. Lisa Dush gave a presentation on using digital storytelling for social impact. She discussed how academics have used digital storytelling in four ways: 1) counternarrative research by discovering stories from communities and sharing them, 2) studying how digital storytelling helps with professional socialization, 3) civic mapping initiatives that combine community stories with public data, and 4) dialogue projects that encourage sharing stories from conflicted areas. Dr. Dush is interested in collaborating on a project using digital storytelling methodology to better understand how stories shape thought and experience or to teach effective story production and dissemination.
The document summarizes lessons learned from analyzing winners of the 2010 and 2011 Knight News Challenges. Some key lessons include: measuring success based on how funding improves the overall field rather than just individual project adoption/impact; targeting users with a clear and proven need for the innovation; and recognizing that projects may appeal to different audiences than originally intended. The Knight News Challenge has funded over 100 projects totaling $37 million to support media innovations.
The document summarizes lessons learned from analyzing winners of the 2010 and 2011 Knight News Challenges. Some key lessons include: measuring success based on how funding improves the overall field rather than just individual project adoption/impact; targeting users with a clear and proven need for the innovation; and recognizing that projects may appeal to different audiences than originally intended. The Knight News Challenge has funded over 100 projects totaling $37 million to support media innovations.
Finding a Foothold: How Nonprofit News Ventures Seek SustainabilityKnight Foundation
A new report offers an in-depth view into the nonprofit news industry, revealing the significant progress that news organizations have made toward sustainability and the challenges they still face. The report, “Finding a Foothold: How Nonprofit News Ventures Seek Sustainability,” provides data and analysis on 18 nonprofit news organizations between 2010 and 2012.
A follow-up to the 2011 Knight study, “Getting Local: How Nonprofit News Ventures Seek Sustainability,” the new report takes a deeper look, expanding the number of nonprofit sites included in the research. It also broadens the focus of the study from just local, to state and national organizations. Find out more at www.knightfoundation.org/features/nonprofitnews.
Organizations should (1) articulate clear goals for their digital storytelling, such as increasing donations or volunteer recruitment. They should (2) identify their target audiences and understand those audiences' interests and motivations. Finally, organizations should (3) set specific, measurable objectives for their storytelling, such as getting 1,000 shares of a story on social media. Developing a clear strategy is necessary to craft engaging content and reach the right people.
Digital Storytelling: Understanding Social Media and Visual Storytelling Tool...TechSoup Canada
This presentation will explore how digital storytelling, through visuals, videos, and live stories can amplify and better communicate your nonprofit story. This presentation will also show how some nonprofits are using social media platforms for digital storytelling, with examples of successful campaigns on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat.
In this presentation you will learn:
- How to tailor content and visuals to your organization’s social media platforms;
- Tools you can use to create images, infographics, and fonts to build your visual storytelling elements;
- Tangible ways to employ ethical practices into sharing digital stories.
nonprofits to find effective and creative ways of sharing their stories.
Soliciting contributions from large crowds has been proven to deliver better results than from experts alone, and has also saved time and money for businesses. Learn why crowdsourcing is so valuable to businesses, the various types of crowdsourcing, who is doing it right and what these businesses have in common. Full webinar at:
How to leverage social media data for crowdsourcing business insights
MAYO Communications is a woman-owned public relations firm founded in 1995. It has offices in Los Angeles, San Diego, and New York. The firm specializes in crisis communications, media relations, and social media strategies. It has won several awards for its media placements and corporate communications work. The firm has 12 contractors and is led by President Aida Mayo and General Manager George McQuade, who have extensive experience in public relations, media, and government affairs.
Dr. Lisa Dush gave a presentation on using digital storytelling for social impact. She discussed how academics have used digital storytelling in four ways: 1) counternarrative research by discovering stories from communities and sharing them, 2) studying how digital storytelling helps with professional socialization, 3) civic mapping initiatives that combine community stories with public data, and 4) dialogue projects that encourage sharing stories from conflicted areas. Dr. Dush is interested in collaborating on a project using digital storytelling methodology to better understand how stories shape thought and experience or to teach effective story production and dissemination.
This document discusses the opportunity for social impact networks to engage businesses by delivering business value while also pursuing social goals. It outlines five models of social impact networks:
1) Networks that steward natural resources, which directly benefit businesses that rely on raw materials.
2) Networks that enable market-based solutions, benefiting businesses by developing new market opportunities or increasing supply chain stability.
3) Networks that raise industry standards, benefiting businesses by elevating practices within their industries.
4) Place-based networks that align solutions within communities, indirectly benefiting businesses through local improvements.
5) Networks that mobilize action on large-scale issues, indirectly benefiting businesses through helping address societal challenges.
The information in this brief is drawn from a case study of the JLN conducted by Mathematica Policy Research in consultation with the THS team and the Evaluation Office of The Rockefeller Foundation. The study, completed in 2016, was undertaken to assess the extent to which the JLN had achieved its goal of becoming a country-driven, sustainable network helping to advance progress toward universal health coverage in low- and middle-income countries.
Accelerating engagement with local communities 310119Kathryn Geels
Here is the session I ran at the Behind Local News conference in Leicester, 31 January 2019. I spoke about the Engaged Journalism Accelerator, what we've learnt to date from our grantees and other engaged journalism organisations in Europe, and what representatives from established regional press in the UK can learn, take onboard and take back to their teams.
navigating the new social: Gov 2.0 and community engagementPatrick McCormick
This document summarizes a presentation about navigating government 2.0 and community engagement. It discusses how governments are evolving to become more open, collaborative and co-productive by utilizing new technologies and tools. It explores how citizen expectations have changed with the rise of the internet and how governments need to adapt to better meet public needs and build trust through open engagement and sharing information and data. The presentation provides examples of how governments can foster collaboration internally and with citizens by encouraging content creation, gathering ideas and feedback openly, and working across boundaries to solve problems.
Introduction to Implementing the Balanced Value Impact Model - Workshop for N...Simon Tanner
The Balanced Value Impact Model is intended to aid the thinking and decision making of those wishing to engage in Impact Assessment. It also acts as a guide through the process of Impact Assessment to enable the core values most appropriate to the assessment to be brought to the fore and given a balanced consideration when evaluating outcomes. It presumes that the assessment will be measuring change within an ecosystem for a digital resource.
For the purposes of this Model, the definition of Impact is: The measurable outcomes arising from the existence of a digital resource that demonstrate a change in the life or life opportunities of the community.
Who should use the BVI Model?
The aim of this workshop is to provide key information and a strong model for the following primary communities of use:
Memory institutions and cultural heritage organizations, such as libraries, museums and archives.
Funding bodies who wish to promote evidence-based impact assessment of activities they support.
Holders and custodians of special collections.
Managers, project managers and fundraisers who are seeking to justify further investment in digital resources.
Academics looking to establish digital projects and digital scholarship collaborations with collection owners.
Publishing, media and business sectors which may be considering the best means to measure the impact of their digital resources and are looking to collaborate and align with collection owners, with academia or with memory institutions.
Impact Assessment practitioners considering an Impact Assessment of a digital resource.
What the workshop will cover:
Where the value and impact can be found in digital resources,
Who are the beneficiaries gaining from the impact and value,
How to measure change and impact for digital resources,
How to do an Impact Assessment using the Balanced Value Impact Model, and
How to present a convincing evidence-based argument for digital resources?
The Workshop will include case studies of how the BVI Model is being implemented at present.
This week, we distill insights around PlanBig - a platform created by Bendigo and Adelaide Bank to connect changemakers and support them in bringing their ideas to reality.
100+ thinkers and planners within MSLGROUP share and discuss inspiring projects on social data, crowdsourcing, storytelling and citizenship on the MSLGROUP Insights Network.
Every week, we pick up one project and do a deep dive into conversations around it -- on the MSLGROUP Insights Network itself but also on the broader social web -- to distill insights and foresights. We share these insights with you on our People’s Insights blog and compile the best insights from the network and the blog in the People’s Insights Quarterly Magazine, as a showcase of our capabilities.
We have further synthesized the insights to provide foresights for business leaders and changemakers — in the ten-part People’s Insights annual report titled Now & Next: Ten Frontiers for the Future of Engagement, now available as a Kindle eBook.
For more, see: http://peopleslab.mslgroup.com/future-of-engagement
Portfolia creates a social network to connect engaged investors with entrepreneurial ventures. It aims to tap into the $300B US equity crowdfunding market by leveraging professional and social affiliations to attract a new class of "consumer-investors," particularly women who control much of the purchasing power and wealth. The platform will provide a personalized investment experience with curated deal flow and an engaged social community to validate markets and create viral growth, with both short-term perks and long-term financial returns for investors. The experienced founding team understands this emerging market and customer base with the goal of building a "more discriminating and profit-oriented Kickstarter."
This document outlines objectives and plans for a "Human Network Effect" week-long campaign organized by Cisco's Tiger Team. The campaign aims to: 1) Leverage September events to build momentum around the positive impact of digital connections; 2) Highlight how Cisco technology enables borderless communities to drive social good; 3) Motivate action through an online platform. The key messages are that digital tools empower collaboration on global issues and Cisco is transforming work/life through connectivity. The campaign includes advertising, events partnered with organizations like CGI and WBF, and public tours/demos intended to measure increased brand awareness and association with addressing social issues.
Presentation to WARC and ESOMAR digital conference on Web2.0. Processes for research innovation, technology and collective intelligence.
Dr Mariann Hardey, Lecturer in Social Media Marketing, Durham Business School, University of Durham.
The document outlines plans by the London Policy and Strategy Network to better connect community insights to policy development. It discusses establishing an Insights Hub to showcase non-traditional community data, a learning network to share best practices, and supporting peer research. The network aims to improve how insights are collected, used, and embedded in policy by rebalancing power dynamics and valuing lived experience. It provides examples of past initiatives and outlines pilots for the Insights Hub and learning network to strengthen the connection between community voices and policymaking.
Who are you trying to reach and how? Building and using the modern public sec...Alexander Jasperse
The document discusses tools for public sector marketing campaigns. It outlines 32 common tools categorized by their use in planning objectives, environmental scans, targeting audiences, developing key messages, selecting tactics, and evaluating campaigns. These include free tools from Google, social media platforms, and Statistics Canada as well as paid analytics platforms. The document also provides a fictional example of using the tools to rapidly educate Quebec homeowners about emergency financial aid for flood damage.
Public Good by Private Means: principles of philanthropy policymakingrhoddavies1
Slides from a guest lecture given as part of the Cass Business School MSc in Grantmaking, Philanthropy & Social Investment, based on my book of the same title. (Also see accompanying notes).
These are slides taken from the Digital Catapult's Integration of Health and Social Care Pit Stop, where innovators, SMEs, entrepreneurs gathered to solve health and social care issues.
The document summarizes the purpose, mission, and vision of the Accelerator program to support engaged journalism in European news organizations. The Accelerator aims to accelerate skills, knowledge, and community engagement practices of news organizations to help rebuild trust. It provides grants, coaching, and resources to organizations in multiple European countries. The Accelerator has learned that cultivating internal culture focused on community values, transparency, accountability, and viewing communities as active citizens are important for engaged journalism. Embedding engagement strategies organization-wide and linking local stories to other communities can also help build trust and engagement over the long term.
qw3ries is developing a search engine and Q&A platform that prioritizes diversity, usability, and emotion. It aims to provide better search results than competitors like Google by focusing on building a diverse community. The founder has experience promoting diversity in technology. Revenue will come from advertising, technology sales, and consulting. The goal is to initially build a web-based Q&A system and mobile apps before expanding into enterprise software and services.
The document discusses the learning experience of creating a magazine using desktop publishing software and photography skills. The author learned techniques in DTP, photography using Photoshop, and layout using QuarkXPress that allowed them to take on roles as an editor, photographer, proofreader, sub-editor, and graphic designer to independently produce a professional magazine.
This document discusses the opportunity for social impact networks to engage businesses by delivering business value while also pursuing social goals. It outlines five models of social impact networks:
1) Networks that steward natural resources, which directly benefit businesses that rely on raw materials.
2) Networks that enable market-based solutions, benefiting businesses by developing new market opportunities or increasing supply chain stability.
3) Networks that raise industry standards, benefiting businesses by elevating practices within their industries.
4) Place-based networks that align solutions within communities, indirectly benefiting businesses through local improvements.
5) Networks that mobilize action on large-scale issues, indirectly benefiting businesses through helping address societal challenges.
The information in this brief is drawn from a case study of the JLN conducted by Mathematica Policy Research in consultation with the THS team and the Evaluation Office of The Rockefeller Foundation. The study, completed in 2016, was undertaken to assess the extent to which the JLN had achieved its goal of becoming a country-driven, sustainable network helping to advance progress toward universal health coverage in low- and middle-income countries.
Accelerating engagement with local communities 310119Kathryn Geels
Here is the session I ran at the Behind Local News conference in Leicester, 31 January 2019. I spoke about the Engaged Journalism Accelerator, what we've learnt to date from our grantees and other engaged journalism organisations in Europe, and what representatives from established regional press in the UK can learn, take onboard and take back to their teams.
navigating the new social: Gov 2.0 and community engagementPatrick McCormick
This document summarizes a presentation about navigating government 2.0 and community engagement. It discusses how governments are evolving to become more open, collaborative and co-productive by utilizing new technologies and tools. It explores how citizen expectations have changed with the rise of the internet and how governments need to adapt to better meet public needs and build trust through open engagement and sharing information and data. The presentation provides examples of how governments can foster collaboration internally and with citizens by encouraging content creation, gathering ideas and feedback openly, and working across boundaries to solve problems.
Introduction to Implementing the Balanced Value Impact Model - Workshop for N...Simon Tanner
The Balanced Value Impact Model is intended to aid the thinking and decision making of those wishing to engage in Impact Assessment. It also acts as a guide through the process of Impact Assessment to enable the core values most appropriate to the assessment to be brought to the fore and given a balanced consideration when evaluating outcomes. It presumes that the assessment will be measuring change within an ecosystem for a digital resource.
For the purposes of this Model, the definition of Impact is: The measurable outcomes arising from the existence of a digital resource that demonstrate a change in the life or life opportunities of the community.
Who should use the BVI Model?
The aim of this workshop is to provide key information and a strong model for the following primary communities of use:
Memory institutions and cultural heritage organizations, such as libraries, museums and archives.
Funding bodies who wish to promote evidence-based impact assessment of activities they support.
Holders and custodians of special collections.
Managers, project managers and fundraisers who are seeking to justify further investment in digital resources.
Academics looking to establish digital projects and digital scholarship collaborations with collection owners.
Publishing, media and business sectors which may be considering the best means to measure the impact of their digital resources and are looking to collaborate and align with collection owners, with academia or with memory institutions.
Impact Assessment practitioners considering an Impact Assessment of a digital resource.
What the workshop will cover:
Where the value and impact can be found in digital resources,
Who are the beneficiaries gaining from the impact and value,
How to measure change and impact for digital resources,
How to do an Impact Assessment using the Balanced Value Impact Model, and
How to present a convincing evidence-based argument for digital resources?
The Workshop will include case studies of how the BVI Model is being implemented at present.
This week, we distill insights around PlanBig - a platform created by Bendigo and Adelaide Bank to connect changemakers and support them in bringing their ideas to reality.
100+ thinkers and planners within MSLGROUP share and discuss inspiring projects on social data, crowdsourcing, storytelling and citizenship on the MSLGROUP Insights Network.
Every week, we pick up one project and do a deep dive into conversations around it -- on the MSLGROUP Insights Network itself but also on the broader social web -- to distill insights and foresights. We share these insights with you on our People’s Insights blog and compile the best insights from the network and the blog in the People’s Insights Quarterly Magazine, as a showcase of our capabilities.
We have further synthesized the insights to provide foresights for business leaders and changemakers — in the ten-part People’s Insights annual report titled Now & Next: Ten Frontiers for the Future of Engagement, now available as a Kindle eBook.
For more, see: http://peopleslab.mslgroup.com/future-of-engagement
Portfolia creates a social network to connect engaged investors with entrepreneurial ventures. It aims to tap into the $300B US equity crowdfunding market by leveraging professional and social affiliations to attract a new class of "consumer-investors," particularly women who control much of the purchasing power and wealth. The platform will provide a personalized investment experience with curated deal flow and an engaged social community to validate markets and create viral growth, with both short-term perks and long-term financial returns for investors. The experienced founding team understands this emerging market and customer base with the goal of building a "more discriminating and profit-oriented Kickstarter."
This document outlines objectives and plans for a "Human Network Effect" week-long campaign organized by Cisco's Tiger Team. The campaign aims to: 1) Leverage September events to build momentum around the positive impact of digital connections; 2) Highlight how Cisco technology enables borderless communities to drive social good; 3) Motivate action through an online platform. The key messages are that digital tools empower collaboration on global issues and Cisco is transforming work/life through connectivity. The campaign includes advertising, events partnered with organizations like CGI and WBF, and public tours/demos intended to measure increased brand awareness and association with addressing social issues.
Presentation to WARC and ESOMAR digital conference on Web2.0. Processes for research innovation, technology and collective intelligence.
Dr Mariann Hardey, Lecturer in Social Media Marketing, Durham Business School, University of Durham.
The document outlines plans by the London Policy and Strategy Network to better connect community insights to policy development. It discusses establishing an Insights Hub to showcase non-traditional community data, a learning network to share best practices, and supporting peer research. The network aims to improve how insights are collected, used, and embedded in policy by rebalancing power dynamics and valuing lived experience. It provides examples of past initiatives and outlines pilots for the Insights Hub and learning network to strengthen the connection between community voices and policymaking.
Who are you trying to reach and how? Building and using the modern public sec...Alexander Jasperse
The document discusses tools for public sector marketing campaigns. It outlines 32 common tools categorized by their use in planning objectives, environmental scans, targeting audiences, developing key messages, selecting tactics, and evaluating campaigns. These include free tools from Google, social media platforms, and Statistics Canada as well as paid analytics platforms. The document also provides a fictional example of using the tools to rapidly educate Quebec homeowners about emergency financial aid for flood damage.
Public Good by Private Means: principles of philanthropy policymakingrhoddavies1
Slides from a guest lecture given as part of the Cass Business School MSc in Grantmaking, Philanthropy & Social Investment, based on my book of the same title. (Also see accompanying notes).
These are slides taken from the Digital Catapult's Integration of Health and Social Care Pit Stop, where innovators, SMEs, entrepreneurs gathered to solve health and social care issues.
The document summarizes the purpose, mission, and vision of the Accelerator program to support engaged journalism in European news organizations. The Accelerator aims to accelerate skills, knowledge, and community engagement practices of news organizations to help rebuild trust. It provides grants, coaching, and resources to organizations in multiple European countries. The Accelerator has learned that cultivating internal culture focused on community values, transparency, accountability, and viewing communities as active citizens are important for engaged journalism. Embedding engagement strategies organization-wide and linking local stories to other communities can also help build trust and engagement over the long term.
qw3ries is developing a search engine and Q&A platform that prioritizes diversity, usability, and emotion. It aims to provide better search results than competitors like Google by focusing on building a diverse community. The founder has experience promoting diversity in technology. Revenue will come from advertising, technology sales, and consulting. The goal is to initially build a web-based Q&A system and mobile apps before expanding into enterprise software and services.
The document discusses the learning experience of creating a magazine using desktop publishing software and photography skills. The author learned techniques in DTP, photography using Photoshop, and layout using QuarkXPress that allowed them to take on roles as an editor, photographer, proofreader, sub-editor, and graphic designer to independently produce a professional magazine.
The document summarizes discussions from an ISOC meeting in Bucharest on December 21, 2011. It notes how the internet has evolved from being driven by universities in the early 1990s to being dominated by a few large companies today. While core internet technologies like TCP/IP remain, users are now closely monitored and their data captured in company business plans. The document recommends ways for ISOC to encourage creativity among users and address issues like copyright and security in order to make users less dependent on large companies and give them more freedom of choice online. It also provides tips for typical and technical internet users.
Energy can take many forms and causes things to happen around us. Potential energy is stored energy something has by virtue of its position or state, like a pencil resting on a desk. Kinetic energy is energy of motion, like a moving pencil. Energy can be in chemical, electrical, heat, light, mechanical, and nuclear forms. An interesting article discusses a company called BlackLight Power that claims to have developed a technology that violates physics by converting water into a cheap, unlimited source of energy using a novel fuel cell and catalyst. However, most scientists are skeptical of this claim.
Teks ini membahas cara mengkonfigurasi koneksi ODBC MySQL untuk memungkinkan aplikasi berinteraksi dengan basis data MySQL. Langkah-langkahnya adalah menginstal driver konektor ODBC, membuat sumber data baru di pengaturan ODBC, dan mengatur nama sumber data, server, pengguna, dan basis data untuk menguji koneksi ke basis data MySQL.
The magazine is aimed at dance music fans and is titled "LOUDER" to represent the loud and energetic genre of music preferred by its target audience. The front cover features a young model holding a record to convey the dance music scene, while an article on influential DJ David Guetta is included to interest readers and increase magazine sales.
ProPublica
600,000
400,000
200,000
CIR
ProPublica
NECIR
JAN
2010
APR
JUL
OCT
JAN
2011
APR
JUL
OCT
JAN
APR
JUL
OCT
2012
k n i g h t f o u n d at i o n . o r g
13
Social Value Creation//Reach and Engagement//Web and Mobile
Mobile Traffic Growth
Mobile traffic as a share of total
Web traffic increased significantly
across all organizations.
Mobile Share of Total
The document discusses using digital technology to address social challenges in new ways. It describes Nominet Trust's mission to support social-tech innovation through grants and assistance scaling impact. Examples are provided of projects that redesigned approaches to scientific research, history education, and mental health support using crowdsourcing, public participation, and co-design with users. The presentation encourages creative thinking about applying technologies like big data, networks, and mass computing to gain insights and improve resource allocation for social issues.
The Nominet Trust uses technology to tackle social challenges through social investments and grants of £5 million per year. It aims to demonstrate how digital technology can redesign solutions to persistent social problems. Some of its grantees include Podnosh, which captures voices of disconnected people for policymakers, and Memory Box, which helps those with dementia through digital memories. The Trust also supports young people through programs like iDEA to develop digital and entrepreneurial skills.
From Where I Sit: The Media Entrepreneurship EcosystemMichelle Ferrier
Dr. Michelle Ferrier reviews the media entrepreneurship ecosystem and what we can do to fill in the gaps for content and technology startups. Includes ideas for higher education institutions and nonprofit organizations.
February 2014 update: Since publishing our original report in December, 2013, we've received dozens of emails from peers in the budding civic tech community proposing additions. On Feb. 26, we released an updated version of the civic tech investment analysis, which includes an additional 34 companies and $265 million of investment. Find out more at http://kng.ht/1cPi3Ar.
Investments by private capital funders and foundations in technology that spurs citizen engagement, improves cities and makes governments more effective is growing significantly, with more than $430 million going to the field between January 2011 and May 2013, according to a major report released today by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
The first report of its kind, “The Emergence of Civic Tech: Investments in a Growing Field,” provides an in-depth analysis of the current state of private capital and foundation investments in civic technology. It aims to help organizations and investors better understand civic tech funding, so that they can strengthen their work and help shape the field. The analysis applies a new approach to research and advances the use of data in the social sector; it showcases an interactive data visualization map that allows users to explore investments across multiple areas of civic tech. Find out more at www.knightfoundation.org/features/civictech
Effective Mobile & Social Media Marketing StrategiesMicheleSullivan
- Leverage mobile technologies as a component of your overall marketing, communications and social media strategies
- Key differences between mobile websites and mobile apps
- Examples of mobile apps to expand member benefits, enhance satisfaction, and ultimately improve retention
Crowdfunding has the potential to help developing economies in three key ways:
1) Crowdfunding allows entrepreneurs in developing countries to access new sources of capital beyond traditional banks and investors. This can help spur innovation and new business creation.
2) Developing countries can "leapfrog" more established financial systems by implementing crowdfunding platforms and regulations that facilitate entrepreneurship and new industries.
3) An estimated 344 million households in developing countries have the ability and savings to participate in crowdfunding, representing a potential market of up to $96 billion annually by 2025. This could provide a large new source of capital for businesses and projects.
However, realizing crowdfund
The document provides an overview of Web 2.0 technologies and how non-profit organizations can implement them. It discusses how Web 2.0 encourages collaboration and user-generated content through tools like blogs, wikis, social media, and folksonomies. It provides examples of non-profits that have successfully used Web 2.0 technologies like social networking sites and user communities to engage donors, recruit volunteers, and improve services. It also notes some infrastructure and security considerations for organizations adopting these new technologies.
Crowdfunding's Potential for the Developing WorldAutonomy Hub
A new report commissioned by infoDev studies the promise and the risks of crowdfunding as a tool to finance innovation and growth in developing countries. It also provides an in-depth case study of crowdfunding’s potential in funding clean energy and climate technologies.
Code for Africa - Building Demand-driven + Citizen-focused Open Data EcosystemsJustin Arenstein
1) The document discusses building citizen-focused open data ecosystems in Africa through a grassroots, demand-driven approach.
2) It outlines a "pipeline" strategy using partnerships, skills training, community building, infrastructure development, tools, fellowships and funding to empower citizens and create social impact through open data.
3) The goal is to seed skills, build local capacity, produce useful tools and prototypes, and ultimately establish self-sustaining open data ecosystems across Africa.
Building a PR Campaign for the Digital WorldAJ Gerritson
The document discusses how to build an effective public relations campaign for today's digital world. It outlines traditional PR tactics and how the landscape has changed with new social media platforms and tools. An integrated campaign is recommended that utilizes both traditional and digital/social media channels to target the right audiences and measure results.
Social Media Strategy at VIA Rail - 2012, including ROI calculation and crisi...Richard Marginson
An up-to-date version of the presentation, given by me at MARCOM 2012.
This presentation includes information about our social media strategy, how to build your own strategy, as well as how to calculate social media ROI and prepare for various real-world or social media crises.
The audio from this presentation will also be available at richardmarginson.com after the presentation.
This document provides a summary of a qualitative research study on the social impacts of the first two rounds of the Mayor's Crowdfunding Programme in London. The study involved interviews and observations of 7 project groups funded by the programme.
The research found that the crowdfunding projects generally had positive impacts on community cohesion by bringing together groups with shared local interests. Participation in the projects spanned from pledging funds to direct involvement. The process of delivering the projects provided skills development for participants and personal or professional growth. However, an initial level of skills was needed for successful delivery.
The research also found that stress, anxiety and fatigue emerged as potential negative impacts of the crowdfunding delivery process
Demonstrate ROI from successful completion of Social Media Strategies Training for Key PHFH personnel such as the ability to continuously raise awareness of the work Habitat delivers to the local community and the great need that continues to exist mobilizing target audiences to action: donate, volunteer, advocate.
Nominet Trust Social Tech Seed pre application workshopDannno
The Nominet Trust provides £5 million per year in social investments and grants. Their Social Tech Seed program provides up to £50,000 in funding and support to test ideas that use digital technology to address persistent social challenges. Applicants should have a tested team or MVP, commitment to testing their approach, and a plan to develop their product or activity within a year. The program aims to demonstrate how digital technology can redesign approaches to social issues.
This document discusses the audiences that the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation (NNMI) needs to engage with and how they relate to each other. It defines key audiences for NNMI as the general public, media, policymakers, manufacturing community, institute organizers, members, and funding agencies. It presents these audiences as existing across different stages from unaware to participating. The goal is to strategically move audiences along this path in order to increase awareness, foster participation, and grow the NNMI program by engaging the right audiences and understanding what participation means for each group. The document prioritizes these audiences, with the manufacturing community, policymakers, and general public seen as the top three audiences to focus engagement efforts on.
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Social Media Outreach. This deck provides an overview of how to develop an online grass roots campaign, with an emphasis on the tactics and strategies employed by Bloggers Unite. Bloggers Unite was one of the first social action campaigns ever developed as a pro-bono cooperative effort for organizations such as Amnesty International, March of Dimes, The Gesundheit Institute, and AIDS.gov. among others.
While the focus of the case study relies heavily on the Human Rights campaign developed for Amnesty International, the techniques used by this approach also benefited several smaller, hyper-local efforts as well. The deck is presented as a supplement and course outline for a class taught by Richard Becker, ABC, president of Copywrite, Ink., at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Becker developed the social outreach campaign for all Bloggers Unite benefactors and others. The campaign was then coordinated as a joint-effort by his team, the nonprofit, and the fastest-growing blogger network at the time.
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KNC report
1. Knight News Challenge
A look at what
we’ve learned
Observations and lessons from our
2010-2011 News Challenge winners
what
we’ve learned
Observations and lessons from our
News Challenge winners
Commissioned by The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation • Prepared by Kenneth Dautrich, The Stats Group
2. Knight News Challenge Findings Report 1
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 United States License.
To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/ or send a letter to
Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.
ABOUT THE JOHN S. AND JAMES L. KNIGHT FOUNDATION
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation advances journalism in the digital age
and invests in the vitality of communities where the Knight brothers owned newspapers.
The Knight Foundation focuses on projects that promote informed and engaged
communities and lead to transformational change.
3. Table of contents
Executive summary 3
2011 News Challenge Winners 6
2010 News Challenge Winners 8
Lessons Learned 10
Lesson one 11
Lesson two 12
Lesson three 14
Lesson four 15
Lesson five 16
Lesson six 17
Lesson seven 19
Lesson eight 21
Knight News Challenge Findings Report 2
4. Executive Summary
D
isruption and innovation have
become regular features of the
news and media landscape.
Social media feeds and newsreaders
are replacing printed words and pages.
Ordinary citizens with smartphones
and Twitter or Instagram accounts
increasingly stand in for trained
reporters. Hacker journalists—wearing
the hats of both journalist and coder—
crunch massive data sets to find the
insights buried within, as major news
media organizations struggle simply to
keep up with the crowdsourced pace of
social media.
Knight News Challenge Findings Report 3
5. That’s where the Knight News Challenge comes in. Launched in September 2006 by the John S. and James
L. Knight Foundation, the News Challenge invests in people who are testing new ideas for engaging citizens
with news and information. It is an open contest designed to accelerate innovation in the ways that we create,
consume, and share news and information by developing new ideas to reach more people more effectively. In
each round of the News Challenge, Knight Foundation trustees approve the winners as recommended by Knight
staff, with the advice of outside advisers. Since its inception, the Knight News Challenge has provided more than
$37 million to fund 111 projects in the United States and around the world.
In 2010 and 2011, the Knight News Challenge supported a diverse set of media innovations—from a platform to
help local newsrooms use and analyze municipal data to a tool to help journalists make sense of vast amounts
of social media activity. In Vermont, 2010 News Challenge Winner Front Porch Forum uses an online platform to
strengthen the sense of offline community in towns and cities across the state. When Hurricane Irene produced
record flooding in 2011, Vermonters used the platform to organize community response and to connect towns
in need with volunteer help. Across the world, in Indonesia, palm oil farmers use FrontlineSMS—a 2011 News
Challenge winner that uses mobile technology to share and disseminate community information—to organize
collective efforts to challenge encroachments on their rights by big palm oil corporations.
Knight Foundation hired evaluation firm Arabella Advisors to explore the innovations and impact of these winners.
Arabella reviewed grant materials, analyzed Web metrics and social media data, surveyed the winners, and
interviewed both winners and key informants in the field. Through that research Knight discerned lessons about
what contributes to a successful media innovation. These include:
• Measure success based on how funding improves the field, not just on the adoption or impact of
individual projects: Innovators and their sponsors often view wide-scale adoption and sustainable organizations
as critical measures of success, but these are not always the best barometers. Building the capacity of innovators as
leaders in their fields and strengthening their networks of supporters and collaborators can be just as important.
• Target users with “a need you can feel”: Projects that have scaled based their innovation on a core audience
and proven need. However, a large number of projects faltered because they developed a tool without first
identifying target users. Unless a media innovation addresses a proven need, news organizations often cannot
spend money and time on projects or invest in the technical capacity to take full advantage of new tools.
KNC
AT A
GLANCE
5YEARS
27MILLION
DOLLARS IN
FUNDING
76PROJECTS
SERVED
Knight News Challenge Findings Report 4
6. • Be open to the idea that your project may appeal to a different audience than you imagined: Some projects designed to help
the media analyze and visualize data struggled to find journalists and news organizations that would pay for the products. Instead, the
products have gained traction among clients in other industries. Small budgets in journalism and a lack of technical understanding
among journalists can inhibit adoption.
• Spend the time to get the user interface right: An intuitive user interface is vital for attracting and retaining users. But a simple
interface can mask a high degree of planning and technical complexity. Innovators should not underestimate the time and expense
behind developing such deceptively simple interfaces.
• Provide substantial support to grantees beyond money, such as creating a cohort of peers and providing access to influential
networks: News Challenge winners expressed a desire for support that comes from access to advisers who operate within the
foundation’s network and a desire to share their experiences with other winners through in-person convenings that encourage the
development of new connections.
• Anticipate resistance to innovation and the disruption it will cause, and plan around it: Innovations frequently shake up their
fields and meet with entrenched institutional resistance. Successful innovators anticipate such resistance and plan accordingly.
• Identify the elements of a project that require full-time staff and those that can be entrusted to volunteers—and invest
resources accordingly: An active community of users and evangelists can perform certain functions that are critical for the
development of a media innovation. Other functions can only be performed by dedicated, compensated, full-time staff. Innovators
should identify who can accomplish which elements early in their project, and invest accordingly.
• Recognize the benefits and challenges of open source code: The News Challenge requires winners to use open source code and
to publicly release it. This approach encourages iteration and improvement, but the benefits may be to the wider community instead of
the challenge winner, who may bear the cost of development.
The Knight News Challenge has evolved significantly since its inception. Knight continues to review the challenge and learn from
the winners to help news and information industries navigate the disruption in traditional strategies and uncover new models of
sustainability.
In the pages that follow we provide additional detail on these lessons, ideas and insights—as well as on the progress of each of the
winners of the Knight News Challenge from 2010 and 2011.
Knight News Challenge Findings Report 5
7. 2011 Knight News Challenge winners
Project Grantee Innovation Current Status Grant
Awesome
Foundation
News Taskforce
The Institute on Higher
Awesome Studies Inc.
A vehicle for issuing micro-grants to support
innovative local journalism and civic media
projects
Active $244,000
Document
Cloud Reader
Annotations
Investigative Reporters and
Editors (IRE)
A new DocumentCloud feature designed to
engage readers by allowing them to add notes
and comments to original source documents
Active $320,000
FrontlineSMS Social Impact Lab Foundation
(formerly The Kiwanja
Foundation)
A platform that enables journalists to more
effectively use text messaging to inform and
engage rural communities
Active $250,000
iWitness Adaptive Path A Web-based tool for aggregating and cross-
referencing news events with user-generated
content
Closed $360,000
NextDrop NextDrop An interactive voice response and text message-
based service that notifies residents of Hubli-
Dharwad, India, when their water is available
Active $375,000
OpenBlock
Rural
University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill
A standard process and structure for scraping
public records that allows rural newspapers
to gather, format and publish municipal data
through the OpenBlock platform
Closed $275,000
Overview The Associated Press An open source tool that can make patterns
within large document sets visible, helping
journalists find stories in large amounts of data
Active $475,000
PANDA Investigative Reporters and
Editors (IRE)
A set of open source, Web-based tools that make
it easier for journalists to clean and analyze data
Active $150,000
Knight News Challenge Findings Report 6
8. Poderopedia Miguel Paz A crowdsourced database that visualizes
relationships among the political, civic and
business elite in Chile
Active $200,000
The Public
Laboratory
The Public Laboratory for
Open Technology and
Science
An online community and set of toolkits that
enables citizens to gather environmental data
about their communities
Active $500,000
ScraperWiki ScraperWiki New journalist-specific features within an existing
tool to collect, store and publish data from across
the Web
Active $280,000
Spending
Stories
Open Knowledge Foundation A tool for contextualizing government spending
data and improving fiscal literacy among
journalists and the public
Active $250,000
The State
Decoded
The Miller Center Foundation A digital platform for parsing and displaying state
codes, making laws readable and accessible to
the average citizen
Active $165,000
StoriesFrom The Tiziano Project A storytelling platform for combining user-
generated content with professional sources
Closed $200,000
SwiftRiver Ushahidi An open source platform that helps identify
trends and verify user-generated content
emerging from mobile phones and social media
Active $250,000
Zeega Media and Place Productions A platform to empower citizens and local news
organizations to create multimedia stories about
their communities
Active $420,000
Total $4,714,000
Project Grantee Innovation Current Status Grant
Knight News Challenge Findings Report 7
9. 2010 Knight News Challenge winners
Project Grantee Innovation Current
Status
Grant
Basetrack November Eleven An online journal and social media resource cen-
ter providing continuous coverage of the entire
deployment of a U.S. Marine battalion to southern
Afghanistan
Active
$202,000
CityTracking Stamen Design LLC A Web service and open-source tools to display
public data in easy-to-understand, highly visual
ways
Active
$412,000
Front Porch
Forum
Front Porch Forum Inc. A network of online neighborhood forums in Ver-
mont that allow users to read and share posts with
their neighbors
Active
$220,000
Game-O-Matic Georgia Tech Research Corp. A free, easy-to-use tool that allows journalists to
build cartoon arcade games based on their news
content
Active
$378,000
LocalWiki WikiSpot An easy-to-use, open-source “wiki” platform tai-
lored to the needs of local communities Active
$360,500
NowSpots Windy Citizen Open-source software allowing “real-time” ad-
vertising that can be updated at any time by local
businesses using social media
Active
$257,500
OpenCourt Trustees of Boston University A pilot project to demonstrate how digital tech-
nology can increase public access to the courts Active
$250,000
Knight News Challenge Findings Report 8
10. PRX Story Ex-
change
PRX Inc. A crowd-funding platform that allows local public
radio stations, producers and listeners to find and
help fund stories
Closed
$75,000
SeedSpeak Arizona State University An application with mobile, Web and widget
components that provides citizens an easy way to
suggest community improvements to local lead-
ers, volunteer groups and each other
Active
$93,600
SocMap Society Technologies Foun-
dation
A map-based social network where users can
browse news and engage in civic action through
an online local community map
Active
$265,000
Stroome Stroome An online video editing community which allows
users to upload content and collaboratively edit Active
$230,000
TileMill Development Seed A suite of open-source tools that local media can
use to make custoim, embeddable hyperlocal
maps
Active $76,960
Total $2,820,560
Project Grantee Innovation Current Status Grant
Knight News Challenge Findings Report 9
11. Lessons Learned
T
he winners of the 2010 and 2011
Knight News Challenges encompass
a diverse range of approaches,
audiences, geographies, goals and
technologies. However, the progress and
challenges the winners faced illustrate
common lessons which may apply to other
innovators who seek to improve the ways
communities produce, disseminate and
consume news and information.
Knight News Challenge Findings Report 10
12. Measure success based on how funding improves the field,
not just on the adoption or impact of individual projects.
The best barometer of success isn’t the outcome of individual projects but the effects
projects may have on their sectors or industries. Funders should focus on building
the capacity of innovators as leaders in their fields or strengthening their network of
supporters and collaborators for long-term impact—regardless of the sustainability of
particular projects.
For example, in developing The State Decoded, a 2011 winner, Waldo Jaquith hoped
to build upon work in Virginia to make state laws more readable and accessible to
citizens. The goal was to create a platform that could be adapted to state codes across
the country. In doing so, Jaquith became a leader in the open government field. His
success is attributable to several factors. An active community of users supports The
State Decoded, and the platform has been adapted for use in a number of states
and municipalities across the country. But Jaquith also set very clear goals for the
project, and most importantly, he stuck with his original timeline. He outlined a clear
beginning, middle and end for his involvement in The State Decoded, and eventually
handed off its development to the community of open government activists and
hackers. This has contributed to Jaquith’s leadership within that community. He
continues to use his prominence to advocate for greater governmental transparency.
As his involvement in The State Decoded was concluding, Jaquith launched—with
Knight Foundation support—the U.S. Open Data Institute, which replicates a British
effort to encourage governments and businesses to adopt open data standards as a
way to promote economic growth, innovation and social change, demonstrating his
ongoing leadership in the open government field.
Funders should
focus on building
the capacity
of innovators
as leaders in
their fields or
strengthening
their network of
supporters and
collaborators
for long-term
impact—
regardless of the
sustainability of
particular projects.
Knight News Challenge Findings Report 11
13. Investments in leadership sometimes pay off significantly even when products are not
particularly successful or widely adopted. Brian Boyer developed PANDA as a set of
Web-based tools that could serve as a newsroom’s data library. As conceived, PANDA
would help journalists import, search, share and work collaboratively with large public
data sets. Although PANDA has received praise for its technical sophistication and its
usability, newsrooms have not adopted it as widely as hoped. The underwhelming
adoption rate is partly attributable to the fact that Boyer and his project team were not
able to dedicate themselves full time to developing and marketing PANDA. However, as
he developed PANDA, Boyer’s stature in data journalism rose. Based on his work at The
Chicago Tribune—and, presently, in his role as news applications editor at NPR—Boyer
became a leader in the field, someone who could help bridge traditional journalism
with the more technically sophisticated aspects of data analysis and visualization. Today,
PANDA is no longer in active development, and by conventional measures, it failed
the test of sustainability. But the project strengthened Boyer’s position as a leader and
advocate in the field of data journalism—an outcome with potentially farther-reaching
implications than that of a single tool, even if the tool had been widely adopted.
Target users with “a need you can feel.”
Many News Challenge winners develop innovative tools or approaches that target
journalists, their employers and other media organizations, but selling innovations to
news organizations is extremely difficult because they may lack the money and time
to spend on innovative projects or the technical capacity to take full advantage of
new tools. The innovation may also be entering a market guarded by institutions that
may be resistant to change. Fundamentally, unless an innovation addresses a pressing
need, journalists and news organizations will not adopt it. In fact, innovators need to
Although
PANDA has
received praise
for its technical
sophistication
and its usability,
newsrooms have
not adopted
it as widely as
hoped. The
underwhelming
adoption rate is
partly attributable
to the fact that
Boyer and his
project team
were not able
to dedicate
themselves
full time to
developing
and marketing
PANDA.
Knight News Challenge Findings Report 12
14. anticipate resistance, and create development and marketing plans that address it. Innovators may
need to diversify their user bases beyond journalists and news organizations to promote wider
adoption and project sustainability.
In many cases, media organizations—especially in small or medium markets—lack not just the
need for innovative tools, but also the resources and capacity to support ambitious technology
development. One of the 2011 News Challenge winners, Zeega, aimed to build a platform that
enabled local news organizations to create multimedia stories about their own communities. By
developing an easy way to combine video clips, audio clips and images from a variety of sources,
Zeega would make it easier for news organizations to tell stories in different and compelling ways.
Initially, the project team provided consulting services to local media organizations to help them
produce customized multimedia experiences with the Zeega tool. But they quickly found that
providing custom consulting drained limited staff time and resources and detracted from their
ability to develop Zeega as a product that could have appeal to a general audience. The local news
organizations that Zeega had identified as its target users were not willing to pay for the tool. Zeega
ultimately changed both its product and its business model. Zeega’s leaders now view the target
audience as the wider tech-savvy population equipped with smartphones and tablets.
In other cases, a real need for a new tool might exist,
but the barriers to its adoption might simply outweigh
that need. This is especially true in data-driven
journalism. ScraperWiki, for example, a 2011 News
Challenge winner, received funding to adapt its tool
to help journalists collect, store and publish data from
across the Internet. But the project team found that
Knight News Challenge Findings Report 13
15. news organizations were either unwilling to pay for the tool or that the learning curve
was too steep. ScraperWiki has since developed a more user-friendly version of its tool,
but adoption rates among journalists remain below expectations, and ScraperWiki is
still dependent upon non-media corporate customers to support development costs.
Be open to the idea that your project may appeal to a
different audience than you imagined.
In some cases, a project’s ultimate audience or user base can differ dramatically from
that for which it was originally conceived or designed. Several 2010 News Challenge
winners made significant changes to help their projects gain traction. While developing
their respective tools, the project teams behind Stroome and Game-O-Matic tried
to broaden their original audiences from journalists and editors to include citizen
journalists and casual users. CityTracking moved in an opposite direction: Finding that
journalists were too broad of an audience, it now focuses on serving the need of more
technically proficient developers.
Overview, a tool to help journalists visualize patterns within large sets of documents,
also faced a choice about whether to continue serving its intended audience or to
shift to a new model. However, the project leaders also had to weigh their own values
about what they hoped to achieve within their own innovation, even if those values
might steer them away from models that made more financial sense. From the outset,
Overview’s target audience was journalists, and its mission was to empower them to
tell stories that might otherwise remain hidden in large, inaccessible or disorganized
document sets. As the tool was being developed, Overview received an increasing
amount of interest from potential customers in finance, business consulting and the
While developing
their respective
tools, the project
teams behind
Stroome and Game-
O-Matic tried to
broaden their
original audiences
from journalists and
editors to include
citizen journalists
and casual users.
CityTracking moved
in an opposite
direction: Finding
that journalists
were too broad
of an audience, it
now focuses on
serving the need of
more technically
proficient
developers.
Knight News Challenge Findings Report 14
16. legal profession. Pursuing these clients, however, would have required a shift of
emphasis, a shift of resources, and a shift in organizational structure. The project
team considered reincorporating Overview as a for-profit venture, but they kept
coming back to the same conclusion: Although they might be able to develop a
for-profit venture to attract funding to finance additional development costs, this
would necessitate a shift away from their original target users—journalists. The
Overview team determined that they didn’t want to become “just another startup.”
They wanted to focus on their original social-driven mission and their original users.
Spend the time to get the user interface right.
User interface can play a major role in determining whether a media innovation is
actually adopted by its audience—an interface that’s fun to use or saves the user’s
time can make the difference between a tool that’s used and one that gathers dust.
Among the innovations developed by News Challenge winners, the most effective
interfaces frequently have been those that appear simple or straightforward. But
such user-facing simplicity is hard to build. The user interface of Front Porch Forum,
for example, was deliberately designed to be clean and straightforward, unadorned
with extraneous features. Although it is an online tool, Front Porch Forum’s end goal
is to strengthen the sense of offline community in Vermont towns and cities. The
project team has designed the site’s features and functionality around this social
formula by keeping the interface deliberately sparse. This allows users to get what
they need from the site and build their offline community, while discouraging them
from spending “all day in front of a computer.”
The project
team considered
reincorporating
Overview as a for-
profit venture, but
they kept coming
back to the same
conclusion:
Although they
might be able to
develop a for-
profit venture to
attract funding to
finance additional
development
costs, this would
necessitate a shift
away from their
original target
users—journalists.
Knight News Challenge Findings Report 15
17. If media innovators aspire for wide adoption of their tools, they cannot
overlook the development of an effective user interface; it’s often more
important than the features or functionality of the tool itself. Indeed,
according to Ian Bogost of Game-O-Matic, developing features and
functionality may represent 80 to 90 percent of the effort in developing
an innovative media tool. But that last 10 to 20 percent entails developing
usability and polish, and that’s often the hardest part of bringing a tool to
market. Given the fast pace of innovation in the media marketplace, News
Challenge winners may only have one opportunity to release their tool for
wide use.
Provide substantial support to grantees beyond
money, such as creating a cohort of peers and
providing access to influential networks.
Many 2011 News Challenge winners expressed a desire for a greater degree
of support in building strong and resilient project teams with the skills
necessary to develop and scale their innovations; in developing effective
marketing strategies to find new users; and in planning for sustainability
beyond the period of the News Challenge grant. While Knight may be
capable of providing some of this support, access to its networks of thought
leaders and advisers can be invaluable for grantees negotiating these issues.
Just as important to the News Challenge winners, however, was the
expertise of other winners. The 2011 winners reported that the opportunities
Indeed, according to
Ian Bogost of Game-
O-Matic, developing
features and functionality
may represent 80 to 90
percent of the effort in
developing an innovative
media tool. But that last
10 to 20 percent entails
developing usability
and polish, and that’s
often the hardest part
of bringing a tool to
market. Given the fast
pace of innovation in
the media marketplace,
News Challenge winners
may only have one
opportunity to release
their tool for wide use.
Knight News Challenge Findings Report 16
18. to interact directly with fellow News Challenge winners—such as events held in
Cambridge, Mass., Palo Alto, Calif., and Miami—proved to be extremely valuable,
especially sharing information with projects that were either in different stages
or had experienced similar challenges. Several winners expressed the desire
for additional opportunities to interact with, and learn from, their fellow News
Challenge winners. The opportunities that were most valuable were the in-
person events in which winners could build connections with one another, and
discover new connections with winners working in seemingly different arenas.
The value of these in-person convenings of News Challenge winners extends
beyond individual cohorts. The 2011 winners valued their interactions with
News Challenge winners from other years, and would have welcomed greater
opportunities to nurture those relationships. Winners said they were more likely
to seek support and advice from other winners via e-mail and other means if
they first met in person and developed some degree of familiarity.
Anticipate resistance to innovation and the disruption it
will cause; plan around it.
Whether it takes the form of a new product or tool to empower citizen journalists
or a new process to engage consumers of news and information, a media
innovation often enters a space that is already occupied by time-tested methods
and approaches, and one that often is guarded by institutions that may be
resistant to change. These institutions may not react kindly to new innovations
invading their space, because the innovation disrupts their normal course of
Several winners
expressed the
desire for additional
opportunities to
interact with, and
learn from, their fellow
News Challenge
winners. The
opportunities that
were most valuable
were the in-person
events in which
winners could build
connections with one
another, and discover
new connections with
winners working in
seemingly different
arenas.
Knight News Challenge Findings Report 17
19. operations. Innovators need to anticipate this resistance, and create development and
marketing plans that reckon with it.
The 2010 News Challenge winners were no strangers to resistance. OpenCourt, for
example, sought to change the way that citizens of Massachusetts were connected
to their judicial system by live-streaming court proceedings and trials in Quincy. But
this represented a fairly radical change in how the court system in Quincy interacted
with the media and with citizens at large, and OpenCourt faced numerous lawsuits
that attempted to prevent it from streaming trial footage. Ultimately, OpenCourt
prevailed on appeal to the Massachusetts Supreme Court, setting the precedent
that OpenCourt—or other innovators in Massachusetts—could install cameras in
courtrooms and broadcast their proceedings on the Internet. It succeeded in part
because John Davidow, the project director, anticipated the strong institutional
resistance he would face, prepared for it and had the support to persevere in the
...OpenCourt faced
numerous lawsuits that
attempted to prevent
it from streaming trial
footage.
Ultimately, OpenCourt
prevailed on appeal
to the Massachusetts
Supreme Court,
setting the precedent
that OpenCourt—
or other innovators
in Massachusetts—
could install cameras
in courtrooms and
broadcast their
proceedings on the
Internet.
Knight News Challenge Findings Report 18
20. face of litigation and delays. Perhaps most importantly, the project had the benefit of an
established home—Boston University—which paid for OpenCourt’s legal expenses as it
fended off resistance.
Basetrack represents another example of a News Challenge project that sought to shake
up institutional norms. In its effort to create an online, social media reporting network,
it embedded a team of reporters and photojournalists with the 1st Battalion, 8th Marine
Regiment during its deployment to Afghanistan. The military has strict rules governing
how journalists can embed with deployed units in combat zones, and it was no small
achievement that the project was able to embed with the Marine unit in the first place.
Only a few months after deployment, however, the Marines asked Basetrack to cease
its project, due principally to concerns that the project’s location-based reporting was
revealing sensitive information about the position of U.S. forces. If the Marines were
uncomfortable with the location data that Basetrack was providing, however, they could
have worked with the project to remove the potentially dangerous information. But
fundamentally, the military was extremely wary about unconventional efforts to report
news from the battlefields and there was a limit to how far Basetrack could push the
military’s standard practices regarding journalists.
Identify the elements of a project that require full-time staff
and those that can be entrusted to volunteers—and invest
resources accordingly.
Many projects plan at the outset to rely upon a dedicated user community to refine
and promote an innovation, and upon vocal evangelists to drive wider adoption of their
tools. In many cases, user communities and evangelists can become indispensable (and
But
fundamentally,
the military
was extremely
wary about
unconventional
efforts to report
news from
the battlefields
and there was
a limit to how
far Basetrack
could push
the military’s
standard
practices
regarding
journalists.
Knight News Challenge Findings Report 19
21. inexpensive) cornerstones of a project, especially when a project is dependent upon
open source development. But without a core group of paid staff with the skills, the
time, and the incentive to devote themselves full time to a project, development of a
tool can suffer. Certain important elements of a project—such as product promotion
and content creation—can be outsourced in some cases to users, evangelists and
the open source community. But other critical elements—such as core software
development, business development and fundraising—should generally be entrusted
to dedicated, paid project staff.
When it comes to staff, passion alone is not sufficient—full-time commitment is
often necessary, along with the money to make that a reality. The Tiziano Project,
for example, won 2011 News Challenge funding to develop and refine its proprietary
storytelling platform into StoriesFrom, which would combine user-generatedstorytelling platform into StoriesFrom, which would combine user-generated
Certain important
elements of a
project—such
as product
promotion and
content creation—
can be outsourced
in some cases
to users,
evangelists and
the open source
community. But
other critical
elements—such
as core software
development,
business
development
and fundraising—
should generally
be entrusted to
dedicated, paid
project staff.
Knight News Challenge Findings Report 20
22. content with content from professional journalists to tell news stories in more
compelling ways. Relying on the strong reputation of its existing platform and on
the enthusiasm of the founders, the project team experienced initial success in
terms of developing partnerships and launched its platform ahead of schedule. But
it quickly faced challenges related to its staffing model. Prior to winning the News
Challenge, the Tiziano Project team consisted of highly motivated volunteers.
The team dedicated a portion of its News Challenge award to paying for a full-
time project manager and to providing part-time compensation for other team
members. But this ultimately proved to be a significant underinvestment. The
part-time team members lost the sense of commitment and excitement they had
possessed as pure volunteers, while not being compensated to a degree sufficient
to capture their full attention and energy. In addition, the team did not invest in staff
dedicated to fundraising or business development. They had assumed that once
the initial partnerships were forged, users would find StoriesFrom, use the platform
and organically raise the visibility of the platform. As it happened, without a full-time
staff member dedicated to business development and partnership management,
momentum behind the project quickly slowed. The initial enthusiasm that users
and partners expressed for the project faded as well, and without the investment in
full-time staff to carry the work forward, the project faltered.
Recognize the benefits and challenges
of open source code.
The requirement that News Challenge winners use open source code and
publicly release any code they create has definite advantages. It encourages
iteration and improvement, and it can magnify the impact of the winners’ work.
The team dedicated
a portion of its News
Challenge award to
paying for a full-time
project manager and
to providing part-
time compensation
for other team
members. But this
ultimately proved
to be a significant
underinvestment.
The part-time team
members lost the
sense of commitment
and excitement they
had possessed as pure
volunteers, while not
being compensated
to a degree sufficient
to capture their full
attention and energy.
Knight News Challenge Findings Report 21
23. DocumentCloud—which first won the News Challenge in 2009—produced
Backbone.js, an open source JavaScript library that has since become a
fundamental and widely used component for building Web-based applications,
and in the words of one key observer, has proven “sufficient to justify the
entire cost of the News Challenge.” But the open source requirement is not an
absolute good, especially for News Challenge projects that include the scaling
of an existing product or tool and that already have an established method
for code development and dissemination. Front Porch Forum, a 2010 winner,
represented such a case, with the project team reporting that the open source
requirement was a drain on valuable time and resources, and that it provided
little—if any—value to the project.
It is also important to consider where the benefits of open source accrue.
In some cases, the News Challenge winners themselves benefit from using
and sharing open source code. In other cases, it is the wider community of
developers that benefits most. It is entirely conceivable that the winner might
bear the cost of developing open source code, without receiving an equivalent
or offsetting benefit, which might accrue to someone else entirely. It is
important to consider such implications on a winner-by-winner basis, and to
be flexible with grant terms and conditions to create an arrangement that will
be most supportive of innovators’ efforts. The open source requirement could
also be improved and implemented in a way that grants more flexibility in the
types of open source licenses that winners can use.
It is also important
to consider where
the benefits of open
source accrue. In
some cases, the
News Challenge
winners themselves
benefit from using
and sharing open
source code. In
other cases, it is the
wider community
of developers that
benefits most.
Knight News Challenge Findings Report 22