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As 2008 comes to a close, we think it's important to take a quick look back and reflect on what we accomplished. Over the last 12 months, we introduced many new resources and opportunities for you to connect with each other. This December News Blast is an overview of what is new and different. Think of it as a headline-review of ways you can get the most out of the NCO.
For us, 2008 has been a year of reorientation, moving from an organization largely focused on program outreach to one focused on the broader mind-set of community engagement. We took the mission of community engagement to heart and changed some of our practices. For example, we consciously thought about ways to actively engage you, to provide you with resources on multiple platforms and to open the door as wide as possible for you to engage with each other.
The year was full. As you'll see, the resources now at your fingertips are plentiful.
Tools to know about and use:
The Community Engagement Spectrum is designed to help you think about how your station is currently connecting to community–on-air, online and in-person. Use it to find what best describes your station and think about what is true and what isn't. If you want to explore this process even deeper, NCO is creating a tool to assess where you are right now and how you can take steps to strengthen your work.
PlanIT! - 2.0: We listened to you and made this online planning tool easier to use, better for planning, and directly connected to the engagement pipeline. PlanIT! 2.0 has become the standard grants application used by the majority of national producers.
From "Think & Strategize" to "Communicating Impact," each of the five steps of the Community Engagement Process is reflected in our Web site navigation and includes a wealth of resources.
New ways to connect:
Getting together in person is valuable, but it isn't the only way to share good ideas and best practices. Hundreds of public broadcasters are now using our Peer-to-Peer Dialogues, shaped around signature issues of health, diversity & inclusion, the environment and financial issues.
Introduced to accompany the Peer-to-Peer Dialogues, the Community Engagement Forums give participants a way to continue the conversation online and share documents with each other.
Audio calls continue to bring professionals together. One call in particular is worth reviewing. Last July, NCO encouraged open discussion in an audio call and online forum about moving from outreach to community engagement. The dialogue was thoughtful and resulted in stations posting current outreach and community engagement position descriptions to the online forum.
New ways to work and improve:
We surveyed more than 300 public broadcasting station Web sites to discover how stations engage audiences online. Download our Social Media Report to see what we learned. The results may motivate you to make changes to your station's site; they persuaded us to revise our site.
We realized our Web site needed a clear and direct way to solicit feedback. Now you can Tell Us What You Think by clicking in the lower right corner of the homepage. We hope you will click it often.
New tools on the NCO site:
We added Delicious and Twitter to give you a snapshot of how public broadcasters can use social media to engage others, and
Community Mapping, a different method of "seeing" your community. The process creates a visual display of local assets, networks and opportunities that your station will want to consider.
We take pride in these new resources and encourage you to use them-and us-as fully as possible. Community engagement is in the DNA of public broadcasting. It truly is ours to own. More than ever, our communities need us as trusted media sources. More than ever, communities need organizations that can help connect them to the burning issues of our time, to increasingly-needed resources, and to each other. And now, more than ever, we at NCO are here with the tools to help you do it.
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