Curious City’s Outreach Project

Editor Shawn Allee thought there might be a problem when he noticed Curious City was getting some of the same questions suggested multiple times. While it wasn’t a surprise that more than one person in the region was wondering if the recycling items put in Chicago’s blue bins really got recycled, he noticed that many questions seemed to be coming from the same neighborhoods. “I figured that we were probably going to be running into a problem where we’re kind of captured by our own audience in some way—if we’re working so closely with them,” he said. “I kept thinking, well, who are we not [working with]?”⁷

Figure 2. Distribution of Curious City questioners by Chicago Community Areas. Source: Courtesy of WBEZ’s Curious City⁸

To answer this question, starting in the summer of 2012 and running through February 2016 Allee mapped where question-askers in the city and larger region reported living on their online question forms. Unsurprisingly, areas considered WBEZ strongholds tended to have the largest share of questions. Fewer questions came from the city’s South and West Sides, largely home to African-American and Latino communities, or from many largely white suburbs. Given the station’s mission to cover the entire region, Curious City sought and received support from the McCormick Foundation⁹ to experiment with different strategies for soliciting more questions from a broader range of geographies.

Curious City commissioned an outreach producer to lead on the collection of questions from areas with a history of fewer question-askers. This was done using three primary methods. First, the producer would physically go to target areas and attempt to speak with residents face to face. Residents were approached in places such as parks and bus stops, and invited to ask a question about “Chicago, the region, or its people.”

The second strategy involved partnering with various community institutions, organizations, or businesses to solicit questions. With some partners, including several suburban libraries and a microbrewery cafe, Curious City would leave a box and a short paper form for residents to submit their question. Curious City also tried a hybrid model where it worked with partners, in this case library branches, to set up a table to talk to library visitors about the project and collect their questions. The series also attempted to establish links with some hyper-local and ethnic media outlets by offering them free Curious City content adapted for print as a way to publicize the project and show their readers how to participate.

The final strategy involved an online marketing campaign. Using both standard and carousel Facebook ads, the campaign targeted demographic “look-alikes” of WBEZ listeners within geographic areas with fewer question-askers. To ensure relevance to its geographic areas, Curious City created banners and landing pages for underrepresented portions of Chicago, suburbs, and Northwest Indiana. The pitch to solicit questions was tailored to include references to Northwest Indiana or the suburbs, in addition to Chicago. According to Curious City’s white paper for the McCormick Foundation, the Facebook campaign, which ran for three weeks, cost close to 4,500 dollars to buy ads reaching just under 200,000 users.

Over the course of the outreach project, I observed the outreach producer as he gathered questions in various areas, and I sat in on team meetings. I conducted six interviews with Curious City team members—staff and freelance reporters, producers, as well as the editor. I interviewed eleven residents whom the outreach producer approached in areas targeted by the campaign, as well as three representatives of community institutions participating in the project. To better understand how past participants from public radio stronghold areas thought about Curious City, I also interviewed five past question-askers from areas not targeted by the outreach campaign.