It was 2012, and in conversations over country breakfasts at the iconic Big Ed’s restaurant in Raleigh, two of EdNC’s founders — Gerry Hancock and Ferrel Guillory — focused not on what their organization should look like or how much money they would need. They focused on the problem they wanted to solve:
North Carolina lacked a source of truth for all things public schools.
Simple, clear, and begging for a solution.
In the 10 years since those conversations led to the creation of EdNC, the startup news organization’s leadership has done a lot of other things right:
- They built a team whose talent was matched only by their commitment, then grew the organization to more than a dozen people, journalists and non-journalists alike.
- They became subject matter experts in all things education. Then, importantly, earned a reputation as trustworthy authorities on the topic.
- They put in the miles, traveling to all 100 counties of North Carolina and forming personal connections with thousands of stakeholders.
- They innovated on ways to build investment, build audiences, and build trust.
- They grew their annual budget to more than $2.5 million in 2023 and 2024.
- They adjusted the approach when required but never lost sight of their mission: To produce trustworthy news and information about education in North Carolina, to provide those engaged on the topic with a way to participate in the process, and to expand educational opportunities and improve academic outcomes for all students.
Blue Engine Collaborative is a team of experienced consultants, coaches, and advisors with wide-ranging expertise in the field of media and nonprofit sustainability, including organizational strategy, executive leadership, audience reach and community engagement, revenue growth and diversification, and digital product development.
The Collaborative conducted interviews for this case study in spring 2024. Here are the approaches and key takeaways the case study highlights.
1. Connect with and listen to the audience
Treat your audiences like real humans. Meet them. Talk to them. Listen to them. Let their wants and needs shape your work and your approach. Treat your team members like real humans, too. Show your subjects and audiences that you are flesh and blood. Talk about who you are, what drives you, why you want to tell their stories. Develop the expertise you need and become an authority on the topics in the minds of your audiences.
2. Develop an ‘architecture of participation’
Devise ways to bring these real humans who are your audiences into the conversation. Open the newsgathering process to them, and even your publishing platforms. Talk to your audiences as a daily part of doing business, not just once for a story or at an event, but in follow-up communication, audience surveys, and regular check-ins.
3. Engage deeply with funders
Don’t be afraid to show your funders the work you do. Part of your mission is to bridge the gap between the people and communities you cover and the people and institutions making decisions that affect those communities. Find ways to connect those groups — connect those people — and the impact will spread beyond your journalism.
4. Fail forward, fail fast
It’s impossible to know exactly when to pull the plug on a project that is not performing as expected. Sometimes small fixes can lead to big success. But having a fail fast mindset frees you to try things and move on when they don’t pan out, increasing your chances of producing more winners along the way.
5. Treat your people well… and play nice with others
We’re all in this together. Whether that’s the employees and leadership at a news organization or all of us, collectively, in the news industry as a whole. A team that is cared for, respected and bought in will outperform one that is overworked, overstressed, and kept on a need-to-know basis. A team that helps its fellow news organizations lifts itself by lifting the industry as a whole.
6. Share your script, and stick to it
As important as audience metrics are in today’s digital media environment, they do not tell the whole story. Finding ways to recognize and catalog the good that you do with your journalism pays dividends. It encourages your team. It helps prove your value to your funders, subscribers, or other supporters. It binds together your narrative, linking delivering on mission to developing your audience.
7. Identify and measure audience
If there were a silver bullet to build audience, everyone would be firing it. Sometimes audience development can be counterintuitive: When EdNC turned away from efforts to scale or ramp up editorial production and instead focused on high-quality, audience-directed content, they prospered at broadening their digital reach as well. Knowing who you are and then being rigorous and sophisticated in tracking the audience you seek can be a powerful one-two punch.
8. Be ideologically, religiously non-partisan
Unless your business model is to preach to the converted, you will likely gain the largest audience and have the greatest impact if people see you as an honest broker. This does not mean burying the truth or shading the facts. Marshaling the facts and reporting them without bias deepen your credibility and enable you to bring about needed change.
9. Be serious about the mission, but enjoy the ride
Be serious about the mission, but try not to take yourself to seriously. And by all means enjoy the ride, even if it’s long, uncertain, and on the bumpiest of roads.
Here is the full case study.
