[Chad Davis] 12:04:40 Hey everybody. We've done so much in the last year on AI and lots of different aspects of emerging community, but we really haven't talked a lot about. [Chad Davis] 12:04:48 Digital communities and organizing digital communities, and, um, if you are a regular attendee on these webinars, you know that a lot of times we look to. [Chad Davis] 12:04:58 Video game… the video game industry and video game companies as ways or as models for. [Chad Davis] 12:05:04 Managing the future of media. And one of the things that game companies do a lot of is managing their communities. So. [Chad Davis] 12:05:10 When this topic popped up, when Ethan and Francesca volunteered to do this, it was super exciting. [Chad Davis] 12:05:16 Um, and also because they use Discord, which is the platform that Nebraska Public Media Labs team uses. [Chad Davis] 12:05:23 To, uh, just… that's our water cooler. That's where we have our community. It's… it's, you know, most of you, or a lot of you, use Slack. Um, that's our Slack. [Chad Davis] 12:05:33 Um, and for us, it's a… it's way… it's much more of a blend of social media and work, and so there's a lot more personality that I think comes out there, so… Anyway, that's a long-winded endorsement of the topic today, so I'm gonna let Ethan, who you may remember from our, uh, one of our spring webinars, I think it was April, Ethan. [Chad Davis] 12:05:52 Um, and, uh, new to our PMI webinars, Francesca Fenzi. I'll let you both take it away with introductions. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:06:01 Uh, Francesca, do you mind if I sort of do a little, uh, top… Okay, cool, awesome. Okay, um, this actually might, um. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:06:04 Please go first. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:06:11 Connect a little bit with a lot of the stuff we're talking about more broadly about. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:06:16 Uh, where we are right now in terms of, you know. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:06:20 Not just funding environment, but uh… but… public media and the use and the role and what we can and should be doing going forward. And so, one of the things that. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:06:30 You might hear us. Talking about, or maybe the backdrop of what we're talking about, is that. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:06:38 This is… trying to build a digital community. Can be a… it should be, you know, it's sort of a critical. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:06:47 Piece for all of us as we're thinking about. Our representation in the digital space, but it's actually, uh… [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:06:55 It could be more… It could be something we all focus on more as we're… in a moment with, like, limited resources or reduced resources, because. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:07:05 There's… there are opportunities to, you know, a community is sort of fully formed. It's not just. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:07:12 Us delivering, broadcasting, telling people about things. It's the community itself creating the content and being part… being part of the creators. And so there's… there's a value that they… that the community itself provides that allow… can allow for all of us to think about this in an ongoing way. So, I just wanted to sort of flag that as we're thinking about. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:07:35 The moment. There's actually a backdrop to the moment that this actually connects with, it's worth. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:07:41 Worth, um, highlighting. Um, rewind 3 or 4 years ago. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:07:47 We were trying to think about, hey, everyone talks about the future state of what you provide as a media. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:07:57 Broadcast media legacy producer. And, um… KQED has a dual-license ETV and Radio. One of the things we provide is that we, um… [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:08:08 Have a daily call-in radio show. Um, 2 hours, called Forum. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:08:15 That, uh, is incredibly well-loved and trusted and appreciated by our community. It's, you know, sort of one of the tent post programs that we have. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:08:24 And… you know, when you're talking about what are the things you can do in this other digital representation environment. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:08:31 I think oftentimes people say podcasts, or time-shifted, or… and all those things are great and worth doing, and whatever. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:08:39 But we sort of figured that one of the things that Forum provides is actually that community, is that. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:08:45 A place for everyone to share what they're thinking and to be a part of the conversation, not just… and a time shift… time-shifted nature of, like. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:08:53 Taking this thing and putting it in podcasts or in on-demand form actually redu- or we… it's… I… we have struggled to try to figure out a way to do that. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:09:02 Um, and allow for it to be sort of community-focused and conversation-based. And so instead of going, hey, how do we time shift this thing, we said, let's steer into the community aspect of the thing, and try to maybe build a. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:09:16 Online representation of that, sort of, like, um, collaborative, trusted. Um, um, vibrant… space that a conversation show, a public affairs conversation show, like Forum provides. And so we sort of explored a lot of different things, whether, you know, the platforms, the extrapolation, the way to do it, and we. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:09:36 We hit upon, and we're actually, um, you know, given, um. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:09:40 Uh, grants from both CPB and Knight Foundation to do this was to build a. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:09:46 Discord, um, which, as Chad points out, is like, not only is that… is it, like, sort of. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:09:51 Kind of like Slack. It is actually, sort of. Connected very deeply with the, um, video game industry, and if any of you are. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:10:00 Subscribers of individual podcasts. Like, I am… I use this example all the time, Francesca's gonna roll her eyes, but I'm a huge college football fan, and I… I am a member… I am a listener and an audience member of several college football podcasts, and all of them. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:10:15 One of the basis of their revenue strategy is, hey, if you become a monthly sustainer. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:10:22 Stealing our business model, gosh darn it. Uh, you get access to this Discord that we've built. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:10:27 And, um, and it, you know, it's community, it's audience, and all those other things. And so we figured, let's try that out with forums. So then. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:10:35 Francesca came on board, formulated this with, um, one of our hosts, Alexis Madrigal, and really then. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:10:41 Brought it to, um, where we are today, which is… which is a significant evolution, really revolution, in terms of how we are. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:10:50 Interacting in this space, and so I'll let Francesca sort of walk you through that. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:10:55 That, um, that evolution. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:10:58 Thanks, Ethan. Um, so I guess, like, Ethan just did a wonderful job of setting up what. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:11:06 Incentivized us to pursue this project, and what we were trying to do with a digital community, but to kind of, like, really illustrate it, to give a sense of what these kinds of spaces really look like and their potential. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:11:17 I want you to take, like, a little bit of a mental time travel with me. Um, let's go back. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:11:22 To November 2024. It's election night, um, and for me. Uh, my night started with a cup of coffee, the newsroom is buzzing, people are getting ready for a night of election coverage. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:11:35 And I am sitting down in front of my computer, settling in for… 5 hours of talking to strangers on the internet, which may not be your dream scenario on election night. Um, but for me, it's really fun, and that's because I am, as Ethan mentioned, KQED's digital community producer. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:11:54 That's a new role that we created in 2023 with that grant support. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:11:58 When we decided to launch this experimental digital community on the chat app Discord. Um, I'm so thrilled to hear that Chad and others have used this as well, so, like, I know the nerds are in the room, um, good. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:12:11 But for those of you who are uninitiated, Discord is a chat platform that, as others have mentioned, was. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:12:17 Was often used by gamers for text and video conversations. We settled on this as a space for KQED's listeners for a few reasons. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:12:25 Um, partly because. It's a fun space, uh, I think many of us associate Slack with a workspace, so we wanted to. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:12:33 Think about this as a recreational community. Um, and… and then there are some audio and video functions that I'll get into later, but we wanted to use it to connect listeners of forums daily, call-in news show forum. And just to back up and give a little bit more context about what Forum is. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:12:48 Um, form's been on our airwaves for over 30 years. It's my personal favorite kind of community radio. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:12:56 Live, local, um, we have 300,000 listeners in the Bay Area, and we hear from so many of them. They call in to talk about everything from. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:13:05 The iconic Mission Burrito, um, to California's home insurance crisis. Like, we cover… every topic imaginable on this kind of. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:13:13 Public affairs talk show. However, um, we've… we've incorporated so many listener comments and calls throughout the years. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:13:23 But we have struggled a little bit, uh, up to this point to gather meaningful contributions from social media. Um, again, I'm speaking to, like, the period when we were developing this project in 2023. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:13:34 So, we saw an opportunity on Discord, um, because these are not the kinds of comments that we can really integrate into the thoughtful discussions that exist on Forum's airwaves. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:13:44 And we were looking for a way to bring. This conversation into a digital era, um, that still preserved that, like, thoughtful. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:13:53 Uh, I guess good faith engagement. So we saw an opportunity with Discord, um, and we decided to build this community to bring listeners, journalists, and the guest experts we're having on the show together online and put them into direct conversation with each other. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:14:08 So we created this Discord space. Um, and I do want to emphasize that that connectivity, uh, is what. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:14:15 Distinguishes a digital community from a social media account. So, online communities are collaborative spaces. They involve real human relationships. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:14:25 And, like, connections that endure over time. So, social media accounts you hopefully are building followers, maybe? Um, getting engagement to some degree. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:14:36 But digital communities, you're engaging with and building long-term relationships with the same users over and over. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:14:42 And just after a month of building KQEDs, to illustrate what that looks like, um, I was on a first-name basis with some of Forum's online fans. Um, we are seeing people who come back who are listeners of the show, or perhaps became excited about the show through our Discord community, and then come back over and over to engage with us as, um, producers and content. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:15:04 Uh, team members, and then also with each other. Um, that's another core element of this. It's another way for people to find. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:15:11 Others who share their tastes and share their enthusiasm for what we're making. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:15:17 We also… we spent a long portion of this project uncovering layers of the value of what digital communities can bring to public media. I think we had this idea that it was going to be a way to maybe improve our. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:15:29 Digital comments, maybe reach some younger listeners, but we actually found a different way to categorize online engagement, too, that I want to talk about just a little bit. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:15:39 So, first, there was our engagement data. Um, I know this isn't the easiest, uh, like, snapshot to totally understand, so I'll try to give a brief overview of it here, and if you want to ask more questions about, um, engagement and how we're measuring success on Discord, I'd be happy to talk about that in more detail. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:15:57 Um, so our, our Discord community now, um, which has grown a little bit beyond Forum. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:16:03 Is just over 2,500 people. So that is just a fraction of forum's listening audience. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:16:09 If you remember, we reached 300,000 Bay Area listeners, 2,500 people, um, in our forum list, uh. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:16:16 Discord community. But these people are super engaged. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:16:20 So we're getting an average, right, of 250 guaranteed interactions with the visitors of our Discord community every day. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:16:28 Um, those aren't people that we're just reaching with a single post, those are people who are day in and day out coming in and talking about specifically our programs. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:16:36 Um, those people are reading, they're reacting, replying to KQED content, interacting with staff. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:16:43 And we found that. Well, I think, I guess I just want to kind of point to this line that says benchmark for Discord. Discord does some of its own tracking on what it. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:16:54 It, uh, considers to be a highly engaged community, and sometimes we exceed those benchmarks, sometimes we don't. Um, but… I think that the most important thing to think about if you're considering a project like this is really just to measure against yourself, to measure against the way that you're already engaging with listeners. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:17:11 Um, you know, not to measure against some kind of other external metric of virality, and that is what we eventually started to do as well. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:17:19 So, for example, here are how some forum posts have performed, um, around the same time period. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:17:26 On Facebook, Twitter, and then, um, I have Instagram as well. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:17:30 And one of the things that I think really stands out here is, like, each platform, for those of you who've treaded into the engagement waters. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:17:37 They characterize the kinds of engagement differently, but on Facebook, they call engagements, uh, like, the number of people you've reached. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:17:46 Reactions might be something like likes, or another emoji, and then comments are the actual. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:17:52 Like, discussion posts that people put in reaction. You can see here that, I don't know, hopefully you can see without glasses, but uh… Twitter also does the same thing, right? Like, engagements, 60%. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:18:05 60 might be the number of people you've reached total. So I just want to compare that back to what we are talking about here with our Discord community. We've reached. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:18:12 Baseline, 250 people every day, and of those, this is the number of people who are… the percentage of the people we've reached who are posting something, posting a comment, really engaging with it. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:18:24 These are our much higher than what we were previously reaching on these other social media accounts. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:18:31 I also want to talk a little bit about. Quality, um, because it's not all just about the numbers. Uh, we noticed a huge boost in the quality of comments. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:18:40 Coming through Discord for our shows as well. So community members were writing not just a single sentence or comment, but paragraphs, really sharing personal stories and experiences. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:18:51 Asking smart, respectful questions of the guests. Of one another, reacting to and supporting one another, interacting across, like, this story sharing, all those emojis that you see at the bottom here are from other listeners who are responding to this person's. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:19:07 Post. Um. And then more importantly, people were starting to show genuine ownership over our shared digital community as well. So suggesting improvements for how our channels are organized. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:19:18 Proposing new forum show topics and guest ideas. These are our superfans, right? Like, these are the people who. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:19:24 Listen to Forum every day, so when they have a great topic, uh, or a listener, or a guest that they think would be so interesting, they're often really useful suggestions. Not everyone's a winner, but, like, they're things that people actually really understand the tone and the use of our show, because they listen so often. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:19:39 So we're getting, like, useful contributions in that way. Um. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:19:46 Of course, it's not all smooth sailing. Spaces like this, because of the depth and the long-term relationships that I talked about, they also do require moderation. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:19:57 And that means that they require journalists to rethink the way that we're communicating online. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:20:04 I have community. Producer in my title, I am sure that's not the case for many of you, or for many stations, and in addition to that being a part of my title, I'm also a producer of the show, of Forum itself. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:20:16 Um, so we're always splitting our time. We're never, like, able to just fully dedicate ourselves to just outreach, but it is really important to carve out that space and find a way to make it feel authentic and aligned with the work. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:20:28 And the mission that we already have. Um, for a long time, I think that the conventional wisdom has been to not feed the trolls online, and to avoid the toxicity of unmoderated comment sections. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:20:40 In spaces like Reddit, Discord, other chat rooms. I guess my… what I hope you all are taking from this, and what I'd love to discuss more with you today, is, uh, to just kind of. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:20:52 Rethink our relationship to that, because many of us have maybe not… have been trained not to reveal our personalities online. We want to be perceived as objective, we want to flight. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:21:01 Fly above, kind of, some of these criticisms and not get. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:21:05 Bogged down in chat room debates and discussions, but there is a reward for slogging into these. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:21:11 The internet swamp, per se, and conversing with people. It pays off in terms of audience trust when we do it in a way that feels aligned with the work that we're already doing. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:21:20 Um, to illustrate. How we saw that pan out. We asked our digital community, we gave them 3 surveys at 3-month intervals all throughout the first year of this project. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:21:33 And in those surveys. Respondents revealed that 96% of them had high-level trust… of trust in the behavior and content shared by KQED staff in our Discord. So those were posts being made by our moderators. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:21:46 By the host of Forum, by other KQED staff members. They had a huge level of trust. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:21:52 And really interestingly, 91% said that they extended their high… that high level of trust to. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:21:58 Their peers and other people who they'd interacted with in KQED's digital community just because. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:22:04 This was a space that we were hosting and extending, kind of, our umbrella of, um, trustworthiness, too. So we're seeing a positive ripple effect just by hosting online spaces like this by nature of the. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:22:18 Institutional trust that we have. Um, we also learned some things about. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:22:23 How many people were coming to us as existing KQED supporters, and how many people were more likely. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:22:29 To support, uh, which was really encouraging to us, too, as we talk about these potential. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:22:34 Um, new… as we're all… scrambling to figure out new funding models and new ways of garnering and, like, holding onto. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:22:43 Listener support. So to bring it back to election night 2024, the reason I wanted you to go back in time with me to that one specific moment was because, uh, on the night of the election, we ran a 5-hour livestream of KQD's coverage. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:22:59 Including these casual virtual chats with reporters in between their filing deadlines. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:23:04 Um, so this was a really shining moment for our Discord. We were in live conversation with the audience as the election results were coming in, not just on the national level. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:23:13 But also on, uh, the state and regional level, uh, these propositions that really are meaningful to our direct listenership. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:23:22 And this moment was… felt really successful in, uh, some of the comments that you're seeing here. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:23:28 It felt like it had grown beyond Forum and was something that the rest of our KQED newsroom could really make use of. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:23:34 So after this, we expanded KQED's Discord community to encompass some other shows and podcasts. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:23:39 We held meetup events, we did history tours, we did trivia nights in the real world, we tried to see, like, where that. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:23:48 Perfect blend of real life and virtual life overlap. Uh, we made some mistakes, some things worked, some things didn't. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:23:57 Um, but we… Ultimately learned that while moderating spaces like this. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:24:03 Do take some troubleshooting. We did not nail it on the first or the… third or fourth try, we were able to develop some workflows and policies for engaging with people in a space like this, and ended up co-writing a set of behavior guidelines with our public community members. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:24:19 Who have then gone on to back up our moderation efforts and enforce their own community norms that everyone has kind of agreed to. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:24:27 Which I think is really… That's what community is, right? It's like that… this thing that has genuine shared ownership. Um, and we learned that that is something that's true of building spaces in this digital environment as well. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:24:41 Um… just to give an illustration of some of the things that we attempted with our, uh, with our engagement, we had lots of fun things. We did some streaming of. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:24:52 Events here at KQED. We did some online-only things that felt like easier ways for people to participate from home on their own time. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:25:00 Um, and I guess I would just say, I think my… to reiterate, I think my biggest piece of advice is to rethink how you're engaging with people online, um, really embrace listeners as peers. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:25:12 And also, don't be afraid to post more of, I think, your personality and your jokes, your fun facts. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:25:18 The conversation you're having with your colleagues at lunch that, um, is so interesting and funny. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:25:22 I… even the editorial discussion you had about whether or not you're covering something, um, the way that you want to, or the way that you think is most representational for the community. Being vulnerable with the public is a part of what builds that trust. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:25:36 Um, and I know it feels very high stakes in this moment, the consequences of. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:25:43 Making a mistake feel more dire than ever, but I think that if we don't try. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:25:48 We will not learn how to, um… grow and be better about connecting with our digital community. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:25:57 Listeners, either. Um. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:25:59 Can I… Francesca, can I… can you go back to the previous page for a half second? [Francesca Fenzi] 12:26:03 Yes, absolutely. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:26:04 Um, the other… the other thing that… oh, no, no, the one forward. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:26:09 Um, that one, yes. Um, the other thing I would note is that, and Francesca was talking about, this is… as… as healthy as it is, it is also an experimentation and a little bit of a petri dish in terms of us. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:26:10 One forward, but… [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:26:24 Exploring many things at KQD, and you'll see in the left. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:26:28 Bottom left corner, that's a video of a live event we do that, uh, Francesca mentioned that we… that, um. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:26:37 Discord, because it's a sort of game, it is used sometimes by gamers. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:26:43 It's fully, um, built out with, you know, video and audio, um, streaming capabilities. I mean, there are… there are different ways to describe it, but that's what it does. And sort of early on, one of the things we tested is if you live feed forum into the space, is there a conversation that can create… be created there that you're listening… that you're, like, listening to the audio there, and… Chatting around it, that never really became the thing, but it was an experiment we tried. And the other thing is that we now use it to… we have used it. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:27:14 To livestream live events, video, and then have people sort of, like, ride along. We did a movie watch. We watched… what movie did we watch? [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:27:21 Francesca? The share… the Cher… the Cher movie, um… [Francesca Fenzi] 12:27:23 What movie did we watch? Moonstruck, uh, I… [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:27:28 Moonstruck! I would say that didn't actually go… that was a learning opportunity. It didn't become like, oh, we're gonna do a bunch more of these. But it created… there's a video capability that for. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:27:29 Yeah. Yeah, we did a live watch-loss. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:27:40 For public broadcasters, um, uh, can… can be. That can… that we have used and could be used for more experimentation. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:27:50 And I wanted to note, um, I see, Whitney, that you had a question about the number of people, um, I had a statistic saying that 65% of the survey respondents were more willing to become supporters because of our Discord. Um, we actually built our Discord community as public access. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:28:07 First, partly because of what Ethan was just describing of this being a grand experiment. We wanted to see what was working and what wasn't, in terms of getting people engaged in the community before. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:28:17 Um, before. Asking them, perhaps, to assign a dollar amount to it. Uh, podcasters and some of these other private, um. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:28:26 Models, uh, certainly do it differently. Like, there may be a free tiered access and then a subscriber tiered access. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:28:32 We're still experimenting with where that sweet spot is, but, um. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:28:36 The benefits that we have built have been almost exclusively in this realm of, like, show production and value add to our content, as opposed to, like, monetary at this point. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:28:46 Yeah, and I would… that was one of the reasons we were interested in it, was that, like I said, there are podcasters and others who use it as this, like, tiered membership. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:28:56 We have not explored that, but I think as all of us grapple with what is the… what is the right. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:29:03 Um, business revenue model going forward, that is very much a thing we would be thinking about, and I would encourage. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:29:10 Anyone doing a similar thing to also think about, because there is real… I mean, as Chad mentioned, that there is this sort of, like. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:29:18 Tool set of, like, podcasters who give people access to Discord by giving their Patreon. That's… that is… that is our business model in a different form, so if we can… there feels like there's a lot of… [Francesca Fenzi] 12:29:35 I want to take this opportunity to open it up to some more questions. I know I kind of skimmed through some of the things we've tried. Would love to talk about any of those in more detail. I also, um, just wanted to point out that we have this guide, so we built a digital. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:29:49 Resource, uh, of how to create a digital community for your newsroom. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:29:53 The lessons in there, we did… obviously, we built ours in Discord, and so our, um, some of the advice in there is Discord-specific, but we tried to write it in a way that applies across many different platforms. There are other… ways to do this. You can use Substack, you can use Patreon, you can use… [Francesca Fenzi] 12:30:10 Um, some combination of outreach to your existing Reddit communities, um, there are many ways to do this with a different resource model. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:30:17 Um, so we tried to just share the most trans… Uh, information and lessons that we'd gathered. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:30:24 Um, I'll stop sharing my screen for now, because it looks like Amber's also posted the resource guide. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:30:30 But please feel free to hop in with any questions. [Chad Davis] 12:30:34 Actually, while we're doing this, I was wondering if you could, um, maybe. [Chad Davis] 12:30:37 Leave the screen up, go back to that sort of, um, the stats page, so people could kind of look at. [Chad Davis] 12:30:43 Some of the statistics on how you were measuring success, just, I thought that was an interesting one, and it went by a little fast for… for me, so… Um, why not… why not let people linger… linger on that one, so… [Francesca Fenzi] 12:30:51 Yes. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:30:53 Well, while you're doing that, Francesca, I also could… I'll also mention, like. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:30:57 Uh, Brian talks about you can use roles to make tiered levels in Discord. One of the other things that we are now doing is, in our Discord, um, we've now stepped back in moderating it ourselves as much, and have, like. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:31:09 Uh, you know, encourage the community to take on some of those roles, and this, like, connects back to, like. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:31:15 What membership puzzle research and a lot of other research from, like, the last 10… [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:31:24 Our members or our audience to do to build membership, and sort of. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:31:28 Playing a role as a moderator in a Discord, or playing, you know, participating in a Discord in this such and such a way is, like, an additional. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:31:36 Besides, hey, there's this community we would love for that. To be the way that we encourage you to monetarily become members, there is opportunities here to explore, sort of, other levels of membership. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:31:48 Because it does require community. It requires people to step up in different sorts of roles. [Chad Davis] 12:31:55 Do you guys do asks? Do you do asks on, uh, Discord? [Francesca Fenzi] 12:31:55 Yeah, and actually… [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:32:01 Uh, yeah, uh… [Francesca Fenzi] 12:32:02 Like, ask me anything type events, like AMAs, things like that. [Chad Davis] 12:32:04 Uh, no, like, requests to become a member, membership ask. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:32:06 Membership. We have tried tying… experimental tried during pledge drives. To, uh, do asks and, like, and track it. It has not been… [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:32:17 We haven't… we haven't solved the revenue puzzle doing that. Um, but the thing that is interesting… [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:32:26 Is not even the ones where we're tying it to, sort of, like, a broader. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:32:32 Org-wide pledge drive. When we… we've… the things that are most exciting for us are when. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:32:38 A particularly strong day of content, or actually a strong. Day of conversation. We off… we will get the posts, like, I have unprompted become a member today, or upped my membership today, because this. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:32:52 Shows me the value of what you're doing. And so we haven't figured out how to harness that, Chad. Like, that's actually where, like, there are people, unprompted, talking about the value of this, and we're still exploring how… [Chad Davis] 12:33:07 Got it. Uh… [Francesca Fenzi] 12:33:08 Yeah, I, um… just to build off of that, uh, we've done a few different things to… [Francesca Fenzi] 12:33:16 Uh… capture… some… some data around that pipeline, like the number of people who are saying that they're gonna support us and they want to give in our Discord community, and then how will that translates to actual donations. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:33:28 We were… it's harder… it turned out to be logistically harder for us to capture a clear number because of the way that we run our pledge. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:33:37 Um, drives, uh, at KQED, because we're… pledging on so many different platforms, and these are, of course, our community of super users, so they're people who are listening to the online stream, they're listening to the shows, they're listening to the podcast recordings, they're doing all this stuff. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:33:52 So it was a little hard to capture whether they, like, saw it on Discord, and that's what made them give. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:33:57 Um, unless they volunteer, like Ethan has said, information which does happen on our Discord quite often, um, like, just love this conversation, I want you to know I gave $100 to KQED today. Um, obviously, that's not the norm for everybody, but that is a thing that people volunteer and post. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:34:15 And so, is what is more effective in terms of doing pledge and asks on a digital space like this. At first, we tried copying some of the same techniques and models. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:34:26 That we use for our on-air pledge drives, um, like recorded, uh, recorded spots and, uh, pre-written, um, asks from staff members about what it is that they value about. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:34:37 Kqed and the work that they're doing. And I think what we learned was that the most effective way to get people, um, to respond to those, whether we're able to assign them monetary value or not, like the response in terms of emoji reactions and. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:34:52 Back and forth, like, comments of support. Was to make it feel more digitally native. Uh, like, just coming in and saying, hey guys. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:35:01 Um, today's show was so… great, here's a fun behind-the-scenes moment from me as a producer, um, as you probably know, we're in a pledge drive. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:35:11 At other places, the work… the… you supporting us really does help us keep this work going. Um, hits different than somebody, like. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:35:17 Posting a pre-recorded video that feels less personal. Um, so I think that's what we learned, too, is just, like, to use the language and the behavioral norms of these digital spaces where you're actually reaching people. [Chad Davis] 12:35:29 Super smart. Yeah, do you want to tackle them, or do you want me to tee them up? [Francesca Fenzi] 12:35:31 I saw that there's some comments in the chat, so, um… [Francesca Fenzi] 12:35:37 Let's see, I think I've got… I'll do my best to read and talk at the same time. Um, so, Zach, you were asking… how often we found ourselves seeding the Discord community with conversation versus, like, how often it's happening among community members organically. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:35:53 Um, I would say that this… is for any new project, it's a bell curve, um, for sure. Like, we had a lot of staff energy seeding the conversation. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:36:04 Uh, at the beginning, and at a certain point, we kind of crested into this. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:36:10 Plateau where there were enough community members who were the extroverts, um, and folks who were willing to post and generate conversation themselves, that they started to find each other and connect with one another, and then that kind of snowballs into more. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:36:24 Commentary for everybody else. Um, you know, maybe it would be helpful, I know we're staring at this particular metric, but I wanted to maybe, like. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:36:32 Talk a little bit more about. Um, understanding, kind of, our engagement stuff, because… [Francesca Fenzi] 12:36:40 A lot of this was new for me. I am not a marketing person, I had to learn a ton from our engagement colleagues. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:36:46 Uh, love is journalism, and that's what brought me to this work. Um, and so I kind of learned how to think about the way that, like, what good. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:36:56 Engagement and conversation in a digital community looks like, and I wanted to share some of that for those of you who also maybe are less familiar. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:37:04 Um… So I don't know if that quite answered your question yet, Zach, but I, um, have another slideshow resource. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:37:14 Oh, can I… let me… the one sort of… one thing that occurred to me when you were talking about that, Francesca, is that. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:37:19 Um. I think maybe… maybe this is more of a hope than anything else. The hope was that organic stuff. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:37:27 Would be talking about cute dogs and other fun things, which sometimes it was, and creating spaces that people could share. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:37:38 Their pets and other things was great. But, you know, the organic… maybe as often as not was actually the hard stuff that was, you know, I was like, why aren't you covering X? [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:37:50 Or… or… It was, it was, it was questions like that. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:37:57 That were, like, then would then go into organic discussions that were oftentimes actually needed more moderation because they were… they would challenge sort of community norms and community trust and that sort of stuff. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:38:09 Um, so we've had to. Navigate… there's a lot to be said about that, but we had to navigate through that as we were… as sort of, like, creating political discussions spaces or other spaces that people want to have that discussion. Ended up being. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:38:23 Um, one of the places that we would have to navigate through. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:38:28 Um, this is a… kind of a visualization, and it looks like maybe the formatting's a little wonky. Um, I wasn't planning to share this slide, so you all are getting a little… a first draft version. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:38:38 Um, but I did want to point out that one of the things that's helpful to think about, uh, in terms of whether your community activity is successful, because. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:38:46 I like to think of this, and I wrote this in our guide, I use the metaphor of hosting a party. Like, your role is to make people feel welcome in a digital community, not necessarily to keep them perpetually engaged in conversation, just to make them feel safe enough to start those conversations with each other, and to realize that they have points of connection with other people. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:39:04 Um, inside digital communities, this is a… framework that's been around since the early era of the internet, where there's this idea that 90%. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:39:15 Of the people who are in any digital community, in any kind of online space. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:39:20 Are passive participants. They're reading your comments, they're consuming. The conversations of others, and they're getting value out of that, or they wouldn't be there. Um, but they may not be offering their own content to help. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:39:33 Fuel the community itself. Um, you have then… and these numbers have changed a little bit. You'll see different things cited, that's why I've got a range here, but 9-15% are the people who are actually posting things, actually offering some. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:39:46 Active participation, and then the people who are driving the vast majority of conversation is a much smaller fraction, that 1% to 5% in. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:39:55 You might think of this as, like, the influencers of your community. So these are the people who are the most chatty, who are gonna do some tone setting. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:40:02 And I think in the early days, what we did is we put a lot of staff effort into cultivating and building relationships. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:40:08 With that 1% to 5% of chatty role models for this space, so that they would then. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:40:14 Through their orbit, entice more of the active participants to join in. And then, like. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:40:21 Honestly, you gotta be kind of chill with the idea that maybe 90% of the people there aren't going to talk to you, that's not the way that they prefer to engage online. I'd encourage you to think about how you like to engage online. Are you the person who's always replying in comments? [Francesca Fenzi] 12:40:34 If not, then, like, I think it's humbling to remember that, like, that's… Probably pretty normal for many people, but we still, uh, like, for example, my fandom. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:40:43 Stuff, uh, Ethan shared his, so I'll be vulnerable as well. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:40:46 I love the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. I love pouring over, uh, chats. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:40:52 About watch parties. I love getting into the multiple. Fractious Reddit groups. There are multiple ones, depending on which characters you like the best, or which, like, um… [Francesca Fenzi] 12:41:01 So I feel like what I get out of those is not so much necessarily talking to others, but, like, being able to consume how other people are talking about this thing that I really like. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:41:10 And that is a reason that people are coming to us. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:41:12 As well. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:41:13 I think that that's, like, I mean, Kurtz mentioned in the chat, Francesca, you're saying, but I just, like, want to, like, double the… I think we were trying to report back… when we would report back to funders, or just internally about how healthy this space was. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:41:27 There was this push to be like, this many people are interacting. Like, the drive was to get massive engagement in that way, and I think that what we learned was that's healthy and good, you want that. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:41:39 But that is not… the healthy, engaged space is not just. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:41:43 100 people yelling at each other. There are a lot of people. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:41:47 Getting massive value, and we are providing value to them as a community by allowing them to just consume and listen that way. And I think. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:41:57 I found myself early on trying to be like, why aren't more of the… why aren't… why are there so many passive listeners? And it's like, that's actually how Forum as a show works, like. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:42:07 Maybe we need to embrace that more in spaces like this. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:42:10 Um, Kathleen, I saw that you had a question about developing our moderation guidelines. Um, this is that link, the playbook link, um, that we shared, and we have a whole section on here that talks about. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:42:23 How to, um, design and how we came up with our moderation guidelines. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:42:29 Uh, we shamelessly, um, stole from all the brilliant things that other people are already doing to build these frameworks. Like, we have… people have done great work already to figure out how to cut through some of the toxicity of unmoderated online spaces, so start by. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:42:45 Looking to the models that you think already work well. Um, and I'll just kind of skim through these, but the collaborative process, the part that I think was really wonderful, was, um, we created a system for workshopping and adjusting those guidelines. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:43:01 So, once a rule, uh. This will… this will happen in our space, even… even still to this day, where people get into some kind of. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:43:11 Because we allow politics discussions in our space, um, which I think many people will say is an optional and not necessarily desirable choice. But we found it to be… we just felt that it was disingenuous to say this is a politics-free zone when we're a show that talks about public affairs and often political, um, policy and, like, cultural developments in our listenership. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:43:18 Now, maybe we shouldn't do that! [Francesca Fenzi] 12:43:34 So, one of the ways that we… design more guardrails for people to converse about these things, was to agree to some rules of engagement, rather than rules of content. So, um, not to say you can't use these. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:43:49 Words you can't mention the… [Francesca Fenzi] 12:43:54 It's not aligned with our ethics either, but we want to make sure that this is a space that feels safe, um, and so we created some behavioral guidelines around, like, how to. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:44:04 Engage. I thought that a very simple, basic way to start was like, hey, just don't be a jerk, right? Like, that's baseline one, don't be a jerk. But it turns out, over time, um, that's not, like, a really clear directive to a lot of people, the behavior of what makes you a jerk or not is really subjective. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:44:19 So we have fleshed out, um, more articulation around what. Specifically, we mean about what feels like non-jerk behavior, um, and that was something that I really built in collaboration with our, uh, community members as people. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:44:34 Flagged behavior that wasn't working for them, and, like, helped me come up with language that felt more… Um, accurate. And now we have a method where, uh, if our rules are going to be adjusted, we ask the community members if they have a suggestion, like, they want to say they want to change a rule. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:44:48 Uh, they'll propose it, we ask for at least, like, 3 thumbs up from other people who share this desire. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:44:54 Um, and then we will, uh, the staff moderators will. Make a, um… ask for more information and, like, kind of, like, dive into what the motive is for changing this rule, and if it's needed, or just adopt it if it feels like a healthy one that many community members are behind. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:45:11 Um, I can take Christina's question. She is… and Francesca, we both can address it, but, uh, Christina, you asked, did you have a target demographic when starting on Discord? Did you see any interesting trends with that? And did Discord's audience seem to align with. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:45:25 Forms pre-existing one, or is this more a fraction of peeps? Uh, that's a great question, because we did… we sort of… We erroneously. We're like, uh, Discord. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:45:37 The demographic of Discord is much younger, and we're gonna… this is gonna be where we're gonna get our younger audience, gonna be this other audience that we're gonna be exposing to for them. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:45:48 Well, one, that's actually not how Discord works, right? It's not like you log into. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:45:53 The broad… the breadth of Discord, and then it's, like, it funnels you to this thing. It's like… it ends up being a, this is a thing that exists, go to it. Um, but then also the audience in our Discord. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:46:08 Mapped much closer to our existing audience than we had, um, initially. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:46:14 I don't think that's, uh, failing necessarily, but it's definitely like a, okay, how do we, um, serve. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:46:23 That… that audience specifically, um, in different ways. It is different than the broadcast audience, but not in this, like, fundamental, oh, they're all young. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:46:30 Gamer… gamers that are… that are coming to it. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:46:35 Yeah, these are some of… we did a side-by-side comparison to a broadcast audience survey, um, that we did in 2018, and then some of the demographics surveys surveys that we did in, um, our Discord community. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:46:48 Uh, and like Ethan said, we didn't… discovered that it was, like, this wildly different, um, patchwork of people. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:46:56 I will also add that, like, I think that we have not experimented enough yet with how to do targeted outreach to reach some groups that we want to, um, further build out, but this was just kind of passive growth. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:47:09 Through, uh, sharing the space through our existing forum channels. Um, but what we did find was that we were reaching some aspects of our, um. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:47:19 Like, I guess, like, some of the communities that we were hoping to in a greater percentage. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:47:24 Then forums broadcast. So you'll see. Like much of public radio, our listenership of Forum is largely white. We're seeing a little bit more racial diversity in our Discord community, which we thought was interesting. In some core areas and, um, in others not. Like, for example. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:47:41 Latino listeners not really represented in our Discord community. I think that deserves some, like, additional exploration. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:47:48 Um, by age, we were capturing far… we got an older. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:47:53 Number of users on Discord than I was personally expecting. Look at this percentage of people. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:47:57 Who are over the age of 45, who are really enthused about using our Discord community. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:48:03 Um, but we also found that we were reaching this younger demographic that had previously been kind of. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:48:09 Condensed into a much smaller percentage of our broadcast listenership. And then, um, a little bit more, uh, gender balance and parity, um, in our Discord community, and you're… [Francesca Fenzi] 12:48:22 We changed some of the demographics language between these surveys, so it's not a one-to-one, but we're just seeing some slight movement in those demographics. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:48:32 I'll note, uh, one of the things that, uh, when we went to Discord early on. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:48:38 Was the barrier to entry to use it. Like, we had actually thought about. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:48:43 Um, would you do this in a Facebook group, right? Like, I think many of us were in Facebook groups, and besides that it's, like, you're subject to the algorithm, and you don't own the… it's like a, you know, it's like a different sort of mentality, um, the goal was to experiment and grow in this new space. That was, like, why we decided to. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:49:02 To go here, but I'll… I use this as an example. My mom, one of those 75-year-old audience members. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:49:09 Was a member of the La Mesa Gardening Group on Facebook, and the La Mesa Gardening Group, good for them, said. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:49:16 We're gonna go to, um, Discord, and she immediately dropped out. So the fact that… because she couldn't… she could not figure out Discord, because it is a bear… there's a barrier to entry. So I do think, uh, Francesca's note about how interesting it is that we did have a little bit older. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:49:31 Audience than you would think in this space, I think is a valuable note. Um, I'm gonna… David, I'm gonna take your note, which is that considering recent funding woes, it seems like KQED values this community, which is great. How do we get management to continue to buy in? [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:49:45 Well, one, eye management, so that helps. Um, two. I actually think this is what I was trying to say at the top. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:49:52 I think, and maybe this applies more for public. Radio, then public television, but I… but I imagine this is sort of a similar… [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:50:01 Question we are all grappling with. Um, as someone who worked closely in a number of different, um. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:50:09 Projects with small public media companies around California. Who had con… [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:50:17 Or… or about thereabouts. Who have been told for the last 10 years that they need to. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:50:25 Become this sort of, you know, news portal, news site for their area. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:50:29 And have been investing their resources in… their human resources in. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:50:34 Doing digital stories, doing… photos, trying to figure out a way to create that news site. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:50:40 I think the funding woes… My guess, this is just my guess, but my guess is gonna be, where do we put our limited resources? And they're gonna go, we have not figured out how to either grow an audience digitally, and even if they figured out an audience. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:50:55 They certainly have not figured out how to grow revenue. So if we have 5 people, and we are investing 2 of them in digital, and we have to make hard decisions. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:51:04 I think that there's gonna be a likelihood that they're gonna invest in their core, their tele… their broadcast, and they're gonna drop the investment in digital. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:51:12 And what this does is it allows for a representation of what you're trying to do as a community service provider. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:51:20 For that community that is… that requires… you want to have some touch. It's not just, like, spin up this Discord server and forget about it. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:51:29 But the investment by that staff is not, hey, we need to be… we need a homepage editor and a digital producer and a producer. Like, there is a… a way that this sort of investment in a digital community space. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:51:44 Could become that digital representation of your public media outlet in this period of limited resources. So I actually think the answer to that question, David, is actually this might be the option you choose. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:51:57 Given limited resources, um, because you're choosing this instead of building out a more fully featured. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:52:05 Um, resource-intensive. News site. That's just a theory I have as people are struggling with the new funding reality. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:52:15 I was showing some of these slides, um, to… I wanted to kind of come back to some of the engagement learnings in the context of that question. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:52:26 We… I'll be… frankly, a digital community like the exact one that we built, a Discord community that requires some, like, active moderation, even as we've built partnerships with the public to moderate for themselves. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:52:40 It is a little labor-intensive, so that is not necessarily the model that, um, has to be your model. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:52:45 But like Ethan was saying, I think using these spaces or finding scaled ways to do this for your newsroom, like, do you need to have, like, 10 different channels to talk about, like, many different things as forums, uh, as KQED's digital space has? [Francesca Fenzi] 12:53:00 No, maybe you just have one channel, and it's a place where you talk with your listeners once a week about something, um, that you're publishing. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:53:08 The idea… the thing that I wanted to point out, or what feels really exciting about this, as we're, um, investing in it to whatever degree we have the resources and the time to do now. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:53:20 Is that, um, you're building an audience that. Belongs to you, and that you have, like, a stickiness and a, um, way of contacting in the future. You could almost think of this more like a newsletter audience than a traditional social media following. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:53:34 Social media, uh, platforms, like… Twitter, Blue Sky, um, well, I guess maybe blue sky's a bad example, Twitter, Instagram, some of these platforms. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:53:43 Right? Facebook, they all have algorithms that change. I'm sure that many of us have experienced this ourselves, where the platform shifts, and then you… your engagement strategy has to shift with it. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:53:55 Um, part of the benefit of building commu- like, closed-system communities like this. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:54:00 Is that when you reach your audience members, when you bring them in, when they discover that this place is the place. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:54:07 For them, like, this is some metrics that show, like, how successfully are you reaching the people who really want to stick around? [Francesca Fenzi] 12:54:12 Um, once you feel like you are building the community of people who really want. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:54:17 To be here because they know and understand what you're doing. Um, then they're… part of this… this, uh, capsule that you can go back to, and engage with more thoroughly or less thoroughly over time. So in times when you don't have the bandwidth to invest in that community as much. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:54:33 Um, scale it back in times when you have the resources and the staff, uh, space and time and energy to engage more thoroughly. You know, like, scale it up, try some things to see if you can get results for that, like, additional investment. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:54:48 And find the place, um, that seems like it balances those results for you. I think this is sort of touching on another question that was in there. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:54:56 That you had, uh, about… Sorry, I'm forgetting who asked this, but, like, um, how we did our experimentation. Some of the early stuff was very organic, and it was not very organized, and as we got further along and we started to understand the value like this. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:55:11 We started to test, like, if we put energy into doing this specific kind of engagement, what happens? If we do, um, energy into this specific kind of engagement, like, what happens? And then we were culling the ones that felt like they were. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:55:24 More resource intensive than they were yielding, like, the results we wanted. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:55:29 I'll take two… you know, cognizant of time, I'll take two that are quick hitters, and you can reach out to Francesca or I after for any further. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:55:38 Conversation or questions or whatever. One was, uh, Jesse asks about, does it have any conscious overlap with membership? Because of funding cuts, uh, where you don't need to do much Discord fundraising as much. I… we mentioned this before, which is that we were viewing. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:55:51 We didn't make this a… it wasn't a strong goal, but figuring out what… what sort of revenue play against our Discord in the future is something that is front of mind now. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:56:02 Could you create… could a Discord access, or some level of Discord access, be part of some tiered membership package? Things like that. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:56:10 We have seen some, uh, membership, uh, both. Um, on our, uh, intentional, during pledge drives, we were pushing membership. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:56:19 And then, uh, organic people going, I became a member. We've seen a little bit of that, but there feels like there's a lot of potential there, just because that is the way other discords operate pretty normally. And then Tori asks about the. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:56:32 Have we given any talk about efforts to sign up for KQED newsletters or share their emails? If not, are you giving members any way to engage more deeply with KQED besides Forum? One of the things Francesca mentioned is that this did launch very specifically. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:56:46 4 forum at the very beginning, but then grew, we realized very quickly, maybe not very quickly, we realized over the course of doing this, that there was actually real value. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:56:55 Outside of Forum, and we changed it from the forum Discord to being the KQED Discord, which allowed, um, some of our properties that are newsletters, Political Breakdown. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:57:05 Um, podcasts, close all tabs to experiment and try to grow. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:57:10 They're similar, sort of, ver… their pocket within the KQED Discord, and we've seen successes. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:57:16 And challenges in all sorts of things. So there… now it is no longer just a forum Discord. The idea is it is a KQED one that is trying to create. [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:57:26 Communities, um, across KQD properties. Um, not just, um, not just perform. [Chad Davis] 12:57:33 Um, we… oh, go ahead, and then I'm gonna wrap… start wrapping this up. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:57:33 Um, and I guess… Oh, yeah, no, sorry. I just wanted to add on to that, because I think one of the most important things we learned bringing in other KQED properties, too, was to think about how a digital community works in conjunction with what you already have, in terms of ways that you reach. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:57:51 Your audience. So, Ethan mentioned close all tabs, that's a podcast that is fairly new in the KQED system. It's about internet culture. We thought, what a perfect fit for Discord. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:58:02 Listeners are already, um, internet-native listening to this podcast, it'll be a great, um, thing to experiment bringing into our space. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:58:08 I think one of the key things there is Discord is about… digital communities in general, I think, are about deepening. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:58:15 Your relationship with listeners, that act… finding that active participation. Um, you still need… other, um. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:58:25 Media forms to broaden your reach. So what we did with Close All Tabs is they have a social media presence, they have the podcast that they're already publishing. We put, um. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:58:35 Plugs to join our Discord community into all these places where they were already trying to go out and find new audience members. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:58:41 And then once they arrive into Discord right then, they have, like, the draw there, or the value, is that they have a higher tier of access to the people making that show. They have access to the host, Morgan, who posts a custom meme once a week that kind of previews the next week's podcast episode. Things like that are sort of like the way that we've thought about, um, the different purposes of these kinds of internet spaces. [Chad Davis] 12:59:08 Yeah, of course. Um, the one time I mute in the entire… Webinar's the time I decided to interject. Um… [Ethan Toven-Lindsey] 12:59:08 You're… you're muted, Chad. [Chad Davis] 12:59:18 There was a question back up in the chat we skipped over from Brian, um, asking if y'all had played at all… around at all with Twitch, or did you compare the two? Did you look at experimenting with Twitch at all in this? [Francesca Fenzi] 12:59:28 We haven't, um… Twitch does integrate with Discord, um, which is very exciting, and there's lots of room, I think, for further experimentation there. We, um, because we have, uh, internal structure already set up for live streaming, um. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:59:46 Events hosted at KQED onto YouTube through our AV booth. We ended up actually having the AV team, um, stream directly into Discord. [Francesca Fenzi] 12:59:55 Video, uh, webinar functions. But I think a much lower… like, again, a less resourced way to do that is, like. [Francesca Fenzi] 13:00:03 Is to find, uh, these, these platforms that talk to each other really easily, where you don't need a hole engineering team to, like, do a broadcast. [Chad Davis] 13:00:13 Very cool. Francesca, thank you. Ethan, thank you. Um… It was a, uh… Actually, backed hour, actually. We really blasted through that. Um, so I very much appreciate this. And again, as a… [Chad Davis] 13:00:25 As someone who's entire team uses Discord as our sort of office water cooler, it was fascinating to kind of hear it. [Chad Davis] 13:00:32 Used in a more professional. Capacity, so I would encourage everybody, you know. [Chad Davis] 13:00:36 Just try it out as, like, a Slack replacement, maybe. That's a great way to start to get to understand the features and… get to feel, uh, feel it from a more kind of native perspective. Um, so, uh, we're gonna wrap it up. Everyone, remember, NETA virtual conference this next week. We've got five sessions that are focused on innovation. [Chad Davis] 13:00:56 You can check those out, um, and, um, yeah, thank you, everybody. We'll see you in October, probably, on October 23rd. [Francesca Fenzi] 13:01:04 Thank you all, thanks so much.