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Surveys are a great way to involve the community in reporting. Members can share their perspectives, ask questions, and highlight specific aspects. The Bristol Cable regularly conducts surveys with their readers, which they call “Call-Outs.” For example, The Bristol Cable used a Call-Out on climate change to find out what really interests their members about the topic and who could contribute as an expert. Read here to see exactly how The Bristol Cable planned, conducted, and analyzed their Climate CrowdNewsroom:

What exactly is a CrowdNewsroom?

  • CrowdNewsrooms are online surveys focused on a specific topic or issue that the editorial team wants to work on. The Bristol Cable uses these surveys regularly to listen closely to their community.
  • The Bristol Cable designs CrowdNewsooms in different ways depending on what best fits their strategy. Open-ended questions provide real insights into the community’s thinking, while closed questions offer a good overview of how the community generally feels about a certain topic. Polls, in turn, are useful for weighting issues.
  • Shortly before the local elections in May, for example, members were able to shape their own agenda by highlighting the most important issues for Bristol’s politics.

How The Bristol Cable’s Climate CrowdNewsroom Worked

“Tell us more about the impacts of climate change in Bristol!” That’s what members of The Bristol Cable repeatedly asked for. No question — it’s an important topic, and the editorial team knew that. The difficulty was finding the right approach. That’s why the community was involved in planning the new thematic focus from the very beginning.

Lucas Batt, Membership Coordinator at The Bristol Cable, walked us through step by step how he and the team planned, ran, and analysed the CrowdNewsroom. Here’s an overview of the steps:

Develop a strategy: How can the community help with the climate-change topic?

Create and send the question set, survey, and email.

Analyse initial responses and collect feedback from participants.

Adjust and send again.

Analyse the responses.

Thank participants for taking part.

Developing a Strategy: How Can the Community Help with the Topic of Climate Change?

In the first step, the team defined what community engagement should actually achieve in this case and formulated a clear goal: “We want to bring together freelance journalists, environmental activists, Cable members, and readers who can help us jointly produce a series of articles.”

This led to the question of what members and other readers could contribute. The team collected the answers on a Google Jamboard:

The team also identified potential collaboration partners in advance — for example, freelance journalists who had already worked on environmental topics, and local climate-action organisations.

In the long term, the aim is to build an “infrastructure” to improve The Cable’s reporting on environmental issues more generally.

Lucas documented all goals and potential collaboration partners in an engagement strategy.

Creating the Questionnaire, Survey, and Email

Based on the engagement strategy, Lucas developed the questionnaire and distilled it into five questions:

What would you like to know about Bristol’s role in climate change — for example, how Bristol’s businesses contribute to it or how the city is fighting it? (open question)

What questions do you have about the impact climate change will have on Bristol? (open question)

Are there specific topics or problems we should report on in relation to climate change? (open question)

Are you an expert on climate change, or have you personally experienced the effects of climate change? (yes/no)

Would you like us to send you regular email updates on climate and environmental issues? (yes/no)

To create the survey, Lucas used the in-house survey tool within The Bristol Cable’s membership system. Google Forms or Typeform would have worked just as well in this case.

Lucas created the email announcing the CrowdNewsroom in Mailchimp. Here you can see the final version.

Before sending out the CrowdNewsroom, everything was checked one last time: Were there any errors? How does the email layout look? Does the survey work? And so on.

After that, the emails were sent via Mailchimp to two lists: members and non-members.

Analyze Initial Responses and Collect Feedback

Within the first 24 hours, the first responses started coming in, mainly from members. The same happened after a reminder about the CrowdNewsroom was included in The Bristol Cable’s weekly newsletter two days later.

The responses were then analysed along two categories:

Questions and ideas for reporting

Identification of experts

The team recorded the answers to each question in a table so they could be quickly scanned and used, and to identify potential experts.

At the same time, the team sent a feedback survey to particularly engaged Bristol Cable members: Did they see the Call-Out? Was the survey easy to understand? Was it difficult to answer? What could be improved?

Adjust and Send Again

The feedback made it clear: the survey was very well received. However, one problem was that most people simply hadn’t seen the Call-Out.

The team therefore drafted a new email and sent the Call-Out again, unchanged — but only to those who hadn’t responded yet.

Analyse Responses

In total, around 118 people responded to the Call-Out. Lucas compiled their answers in a large Google Doc, sorted them by theme, and highlighted notable points.

In the end, the document was about 30 pages long — too extensive for the editorial team to use effectively. Therefore, Lucas created a short version, summarising the main topics and most frequent questions on just two pages.

Lucas has provided us with the short version

Thank Participants

Shortly after the Call-Out, the editorial team sent an email to everyone to thank them for participating and to explain how the responses would be used.

Participants with expert knowledge or special stories are contacted separately, for example by email or phone.

The Result

Satisfaction level: high — The Bristol Cable is very satisfied with the outcome of the Call-Out, as they received many valuable responses and were able to identify experts.

118 people responded to the CrowdNewsroom and shared their questions about climate change in Bristol.

The editorial team now has an extensive collection (a total of 30 pages) of community questions, which they can use to initiate research and report on the climate topics that truly interest the community. One of the most common questions from the community, for example, was about when and how sea-level rise will affect the port city of Bristol.

The team now has contact with several experts who are well-versed in specific aspects of the topic and can assist with research. In their membership database, these individuals have been tagged for easy reference later. Other forms of participation are also possible: they could, for example, help with fact-checking before articles are published, take part in panel discussions, or engage in expert roundtables with others — all of which could enrich the reporting.

What We Learned

Good planning is everything: It’s important to carefully consider what the community can and should contribute. Being clear about this from the start saves a lot of time during analysis. Smaller teams, in particular, should think carefully about their goals and what they can realistically achieve to avoid overextending themselves.

The biggest effort is in the analysis: Most newsrooms don’t have a Membership Coordinator like Lucas at The Bristol Cable. He spent two full days reading, sorting, and summarising the responses. Therefore: ask only as many questions as you can realistically analyse, but make sure they are the right ones. Another option is to delegate the analysis — perhaps volunteers from the community or students looking to earn a bit could help.

Don’t be afraid of a second attempt: If, despite careful preparation, it turns out that the questions or the email approach weren’t quite right, it can make sense to revise everything and send it out again. The same applies if the Call-Out wasn’t widely noticed.

Quantity is secondary: Fewer than 5% of Bristol Cable members responded to the Climate Call-Out. The result is still valuable, as the editorial team now has several starting points for research and contacts with multiple experts.

It’s also about the process: Community members who didn’t participate in the Call-Out still know that the editorial team listens and that reporting is shaped by collaboration with the community. Part of the newsroom’s work now includes highlighting community involvement in articles.

Do you have any questions about this? Let us know. In our wiki, we gradually collect use cases like this one — and your questions. The wiki is a “living document” that we constantly update.

Do you have your own experiences or use cases we should include? Just send an email to tobias.hauswurz@beabee.io.