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Summary of Project Benefits
In addition to building the skills of the station’s reporters, the project strengthened both KNAU’s listener service and its community significance, created the opportunity to garner local financial support via grants and listener contributions and provided new insights into ways the entire station staff could work more closely as a team.
Stronger Station News Operation
- KNAU reporters learned new techniques and NPR best practices that strengthened both individual reporting skills and their capacity to work as a unit. All felt the project represented the most complex and demanding reporting they had ever done.
- The enduring nature of the series topic has provided KNAU reporters with an editorial “long tail” which can be tracked and followed for months and years to come.
- KNAU was honored by its peers with the 2008 PRPD Ace Award.
- While the series was produced first and foremost for a local audience, public radio’ listeners around the country hear a sample of "Poverty with a View" several features are reversioned for broadcast on Morning Edition.
Increased Listener Service/Community Significance
- The October, 2007 Town Meeting gave KNAU the opportunity to directly and meaningfully engage its audience in the early planning stage of the series. The more than 200 Flagstaff residents who turned out were eager to contribute ideas and story angles. Following the Town Meeting, the opportunity for them to have ongoing dialogue with the station was provided via the KNAU website.
- KNAU Spring Arbitron data indicate “Poverty with a View” produced significant audience growth for the station with a major jump in cume during the series week and a sizable increase in AQH.
- During and after the broadcasts, the station received many anecdotal reports of intense community discussion and debate prompted by series. Shortly after the series concluded, Flagstaff voters elected a new mayor and some cited the series as a contributing factor to that decision.
Strengthened Station Fundraising Capacity
- "Poverty with a View" attracted substantial local funding. In fact, KNAU raised significantly more local funding for the project than was contributed by NPR.
- The audience response to the series and heightened community profile will allow KNAU significant leverage in future fundraising appeals and membership drives. Not only did the series build listening, but it is a powerful example of exactly the kind of high quality in-depth news that public radio core listeners (and supporters) cite as their main reason for valuing (and giving to) public radio.
Whole Station Teamwork
- The project jump-started more holistic thinking about what had been seen as discrete station activities; particularly the connectivity between the news department, web development, promotion and public engagement strategies.
- Everyone at KNAU felt a sense of pride in being part of a project that produced such a high level of community service and engagement, and brought national attention and honor to their station. “Poverty with a View” would not have been possible without the full engagement of everyone in the station – management, news, programming and development, as well as the station’s community advisory board, the “Radio-Actives.”
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