Audience Engagment at the Farmer's Market
In April of 2022, my team and I visited our city farmer's market. We set up a booth, complete with a banner and samples of our magazine, to advertise our magazine and engage a new audience outside of the school. We had many people come up to us and ask about student journalism at MSD. this was part of an audience engagement strategy that we devised to ask community members what they would like to see on our website and promote both our printed edition and online news site.
Marketing and Audience Engagement
At the end of my sophomore year, which was my first year on staff, the then-assistant-editor-in-chief had messaged me asking if I wanted to be the managing editor during my junior year. I did not even know what that meant, but I eagerly responded "Yes! It'd be an honor" before he had any time to explain. From there, I learned a multitude of important financial management, marketing and audience engagement skills that I continued to expand upon for the remainder of my time on staff.
Managing Financial Work
I have spent the past two years of my time on Eagle Eye News managing the financial aspect of running the publication. Each day, I spend significant portions of time organizing our managing binder where we keep receipts, project approvals and other paper work. In this photo, I am reviewing an advertising contract, writing a receipt for it, and adding the advertisement to our spreadsheet. I understand the business side of our publication just as much as I understand the content creation side.
Advertisement Management
This image depicts the spreadsheet that we use to keep rack of our advertisements, our main source of fundraising. Every time the Eagle Eye News sells an advertisement, I add it to this spreadsheet in order to adequately keep track of the funds we take in and compare the amount of money we raised to the cost of printing and the cost of hosting our website.
Selling Ads to Local Businesses
Several times a month, I spend a significant amount of time calling local businesses in order to sell advertisements to raise money to print our news magazine. I keep track of all of our advertisement sale sin our advertisement management binder. I often have to call businesses to follow up about payment and artwork.
Fundraising
Another way that we raise funds for Eagle Eye News is by hosting monthly concession stands at the middle school debate tournaments that are held in our school's cafeteria. For the past two years, I have managed these stands, from ensuring that we have enough staff to cover shifts, to keeping track of donations in our concession management binder, to buying items that we were not able to get donated, to managing the actual concession stands themselves. The images on the right display a shopping trip I went on to buy items to sell at the stands using Eagle Eye News funds. The images on the left is of me helping out at the stand by controlling the line.
Audience Engagement on Campus
During my senior year, I designed maps of the school to be hung around the campus. I included a QR code that links to all of Eagle Eye News' social media. They were hung around the school. My hope is that these signs will spread awareness about the school newspaper to our student body in order to help us engage our audience. These are examples of just four of the 40 maps created. I also created these posters to hang in classes across campus to raise student awareness of the Eagle Eye News.
Audience Engagement Online
In order to gauge our reach as a publication, I refer to the site analytics on Sno, our website host. As Editor-in-Chief, it is my job to ensure that our content reaches our audience. In order to boost engagement, we send staffers to study hall classes to survey students. This serves two purposes: to collect data for stories and to advertise Eagle Eye News to the student body. My hope is that students who answer the surveys seek to read our articles, as they have now been made aware of them.
Audience Engagement Online
In the summer of 2022, I created a channel banner and reformatted our YouTube channel in order to draw more attention to the video side of our publication. Before I graduate, I hope to get more staffers to create video packages in order to help promote Eagle Eye News online.
Audience Engagement in the Classroom
I designed these posters to be hung in classrooms prior to the 2022-2023 school year. They include the same QR code featured on the map signs. The goal of these is to promote our website and social medias to our on-campus audience.
Audience Engagement on Social Media
To engage students, I set up a series of polls on Twitter and Instagram as a way to gauge student opinions and their interest in our articles.
