Which Outreach Method Was Most Effective?
After nearly a year since beginning the outreach project, the team members analyzed their findings. In total, they were able to gather 313 questions through outreach to target geographies (out of a total of 976 questions gathered during the project period). They found that the most productive and efficient method was face-to-face events at libraries, which produced 159 questions. Face-to-face outreach independent of any partner produced 137 questions, though required a larger investment of time and resources traveling from location to location. The Facebook marketing campaign generated 1,920 clicks on the ads, but only fourteen of these people submitted questions. Question boxes left with partner institutions only generated three questions. This was attributed to a lack of sustained promotion of the project by partner organizations’ on-site staff.
From this pool of questions, during the project period, three stories were produced and broadcast as Curious City stories, with a fourth in the planning stages. All of these were selected by the editor and did not go through a voting round. Curious City has a relatively long production cycle as some questions are produced more than a year after they’ve been received. They may be fed into a voting round or selected later based on available staffing, seasonal logistics, or other editorial considerations. For this reason, it is possible that other questions generated by the outreach may be produced at a later time.
Critically, Curious City’s team concluded that the outreach project did “move the needle closer to geographic parity.”10 It found that the percentage of questions coming from previously underrepresented zones grew at a faster rate than WBEZ’s core audience. While the rate of growth of questions from core audiences was twenty percent, the rate for Chicago’s West Side was seventy-eight percent and fifty-three percent for Chicago’s South Side. The suburbs also grew faster than the core audience. Only Northwest Indiana lacked substantial growth.