The Weekly Debrief, 30 March 2012

By Joy Loving, Station Products & Innovation 

Welcome to the Weekly PBS Interactive Station Products & Innovation Debrief, which is designed to give PBS stations a rundown of product updates and opportunities announced this week on our blog. 

PBS Interactive is excited to announce that four station scholarships to this year’s Annual Meeting have been donated by our business partners, Amazon and Three Pillar Global. We know that limited (or non-existent) travel budgets can make it difficult to attend the PBS Annual Meeting, so we’re pleased to be able to offer this all-expense paid opportunity.

This opportunity is exclusively available to station digital media professionals.  Anyone interested in a scholarship should complete the form located here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dHlidXgxb0RsaFpZeGEwdDJmWWtZb3c6MQ indicating why you should be considered for a Digital Future Scholarship. Submissions are due by 5pm ET on Friday, April 6 to pbsi_stationservices@pbs.org or through the above form submission. Winners will be notified no later than 5pm, Wednesday, April 11.

The Annual Meeting is being held on May 14 - 17, 2012 at the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel in Denver, CO. The PBS Interactive Digital Future Scholarship will cover registration, 3 nights at the Sheraton, and round trip airfare from within the continental US. Details about the meeting can be found here.

Our partners understand that it’s very important that station digital media professionals have opportunities to share their knowledge and participate in events like Annual Meeting.  Special thanks to Amazon and Three Pillar Global for their generous donations to make this scholarship fund possible. 

Save the Date: Prosper Roundtable Webinar: Three Station Representatives Talk about their plans for Prosper, Friday, April 13, 1:00-2:00 pm ET.  Anne Gleason (WTTW), Tim Eernisse (WGVU), and Shane Guiter (KLRU) will discuss, in roundtable format, plans for handling their station’s Prosper prospects and their accounting methods for monies received from the Prosper initiative.  

To register for the webinar go to: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/993304402.

If you would like to submit questions in advance of the webinar, please email pbsi_stationservices@pbs.org.    


This week members of the Station Advisory Council and PBS Interactive share their experiences from this year's IMA and SXSW:

• Teresa Peltier of WSKG lists the ways that mobile applications and devices can best be used, heeding advice from this year’s iMA Conference. Is your station looking for ways to use mobile technology to reach your audience? Follow the link for Mobile: First or Next Step? 
• Libby Peterek of KLRU shares what she discovered about the appropriate use of analytics. As Libby puts it, “There are so many factors…that it is difficult to know where to start.” Fortunately, there are many solutions! Read on to see what Libby discovered about analytics at the iMA Conference. 
• Incorporating mobile giving applications is becoming a necessity for many businesses, as David Dickinson of WPT discovered at this year’s iMA conference. See what David learned about the effectiveness and drawbacks of mobile giving in this week’s article by clicking on Mobile Giving Experimentation.
• Continuing our series of posts by iMA Conference attendees, Kristin Calhoun, Director of Station Products & Innovation reports on the “What's Your Digital Strategy Elevator Pitch?” session.  Follow the link below to learn more. 

Follow the links below to continue reading:

• Mobile: First Step or Next Step? There’s Something for Everyone
• iMA & SXSW Recap: Collecting, Sharing, and Using Analytics
• Mobile Giving Experimentation
• Pitch Me!  

As always, the SPI team appreciates all of your valuable comments and participation on our site this week and every week.

Pitch Me!

By Kristin Calhoun, Director of Station Products & Innovation

We’re all so needy.  We all want more resources, more time, more money, more buy-in.  And we’ve all had that moment, when you actually have the attention of someone who can give us something we need.  These moments don’t come very often, but when they do, are you ready with your pitch?

At this year’s iMA conference, Mike Reszler of Minnesota Public Radio, David Dickinson of Wisconsin Public Television and I facilitated a session titled, “What's Your Digital Strategy Elevator Pitch?”

Our goal was to give the participants real world examples and tangible experience into what it takes to develop and deliver a good pitch.

We kicked off with a look at some award winning pitches like this one –

Link:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_Dgsf4iiZg&feature=related

Embed Code:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/r_Dgsf4iiZg" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Note the time; she did that pitch in under a minute.

We then deconstructed her pitch, what were the core elements that made it successful?

1:  She identified a problem.  A problem that people on the street would have.  An audience facing problem, not an internal one.

2:  She explained her product and how her product solves the problem.

3:  She described the target audience for her product.

4.  And she closed with – This is what you’ll get for your investment (and a catchy tag line).

Now, the fun part.  The participants broke into groups and in 20 minutes came up with their own pitches.  My FAV part of this was when one group said, ‘we’re not sharing our idea until everyone in this room signs a NDA!’  It was so cool to see the ideas and energy in the room as everyone came up with their pitches.  You can here the audio of the pitches here (sorry, no video).

Do you have examples of great elevator pitches?  Have you been a part of a successful pitch? Did you ever see a really bad pitch?  Do you like the show Shark Tank?  (I do!)  

 

We’d love to hear your stories..

Mobile Giving Experimentation

By David Dickinson, Online Manager at Wisconsin Public Television, Station Advisory Council Member

 

As Teresa mentioned, everyone was talking about mobile at iMA this year. I attended a session that provided a fascinating discussion on the challenges of mobile giving in the traditional public broadcasting membership model.

Why does mobile matter so much? Even here in Wisconsin, with large areas of our TV broadcast area not covered by 3G or fast broadband, mobile traffic accounts for 10% of our website audience. According to Nielsen, the top situational activity for tablets and smartphones is "second screening" while watching TV.

The gold standard transaction model held up in the iMA session was an app store purchase. You find an app you want, you press install and enter your password - that's pretty much it. Takes only seconds.

Apple has banned donation functionality in their app store. The Android market is less strict, and there's always PayPal, but an ideal solution would work across platforms and not be limited to PayPal users.

We've stripped down our Convio-powered mobile donation form to the bare minimum. We decided to ditch our clunky gift selection process - we believe in Google's recommendation to prioritize content for mobile and not attempt to provide full desktop functionality. Even so, our page still takes over two minutes to fill out. And there are always users who wish to remain anonymous or don't want to fill out a form on their phone.

The problem for public broadcasting is many stations rely on a relationship model for receiving and building gifts. We want enough information to be able to make our case for why membership matters, and hopefully increase mission awareness (and donations) over time.

Text-to-donate provides the immediacy that mobile users expect, but it has significant drawbacks for stations. Donations are limited to $5 or $10, can take months to come in, and don't provide the baseline of information needed to establish a relationship with the donor.

We want to test a text-to-pledge model that may offer the best of both worlds. It will provide users the ability to text a number with a pledge for any amount. We'll then contact them to fulfill payment and welcome them to become a member if they choose.

We'll funnel half our mobile donation traffic to our existing page, and half the traffic to a new page asking for a text-to-pledge. After a few months, it will be interesting to see the results. We'll be sure to share back anything we learn.

Have you tried text-to-give or text-to-pledge? Have you ever donated on your phone - what was the experience like? Feel free to post your experiences below.  

iMA & SXSW Recap: Collecting, Sharing, and Using Analytics

By Libby Peterek, Director of Web Services, KLRU  and Station Advisory Council Chair

 

In my experience, web analytics can be a bear of a project to wrap your head around. There are so many factors, filters, and qualifiers, none with much context, that it's difficult to know where to start. It's been a constant agenda topic at KLRU for some time now. We have several domains, Facebook, Twitter, video on COVE, Vimeo, and YouTube, and lots of people wanting to know where we stand...in addition to the regular updates and site launches of a station web team. I'm happy to report that some very good ideas and tests were shared in the "Advanced Analytics: Concrete Case Studies to Improve Your Digital Effectiveness" session at iMA and I know just where we'll start, Amy Sample's Custom Dashboard Templates. If you're interested in the entire session, you can listen to it on Soundcloud, along with the rest of the iMA sessions.

Amy Sample of PBS kicked off the session with a lot of great questions such as:

• What metrics should be focused on each month?
• What should we be reporting to our executives?
• How are key areas of our site used?

She also offered up the very reasonable advice to exclude local traffic from your Google Analytics setup, then jumped right into showing off some custom dashboards for management, social media, site search, and video. All are available on her Tumblr. You can also find her step by step guide for setting up Google Analytics in a previous SPI post. For us, these will be a great kick off to giving many key stakeholders in our station the information they want now. We can fine tune and build after seeing this first round to completion.

Phil Meyer of WTIU followed with his experience as an executive with analytics. How WTIU's analytics help to serve viewers better, establish priorities, and provide focus to your web efforts. 

Mobile: First Step or Next Step? There’s Something for Everyone

by Teresa Peltier, New Media & PR Specialist, WSKG

Even if you powered down your smartphone, an attendee at this year’s iMA Conference couldn’t get away from “mobile”. The conference kicked off with a robust session on the mobile audience, and mobile seemed to pop-up in every session thereafter. The general consensus: we know the audience is there, and it wants to watch, listen, read and meet us. And it wants us to meet it in the car, the house, the street, wherever life takes it and wherever the audience takes its phone.

Whether your station is looking to kickstart a new mobile project or reinvigorate an existing one, March 8th’s session, “Mobile: First Step or Next Step? There’s Something for Everyone” offered up great advice for meeting this mobile audience.

• Your station might be at the starting point – you want an app or mobile site, but you're struggling to determine what content it will feature or service it will provide. Look at your analytics. Libby Peterek of KLRU started by thinking about content and using KLRU's web analytics to tease out the most popular. Now, KLRU’s mobile site offers a simplified offering: a “what’s on now” listing, plus links to the schedule, donate page, location info and contact info. Also consider where your station can develop a distinctive edge. PRX’s Matt MacDonald encouraged attendees to think differently about station content, as well as design, layout and functionality to strive for true originality in a flooded mobile world. Do you know your target audience? Think up this group, and find them in your community. Ask what they would want, and build it for them.

• It’s one thing to say you want a mobile site or app, and another thing to create and maintain it. As with all digital strategy, consider your options. KQED hired an in-house mobile developer. St. Louis Public Radio turned to Listener Interactive for an out-of-house solution. A KCRW/PRX joint project committed extensive time and resources in-house and also involved pro-bono outsourcing to designers in the community. Have a frank conversation with all parties regarding your station’s budget and staff time and skills. With this info, you can decide whether to use internal staff, an external party or a hybrid.

• Is your station feverishly working to complete your mobile project? Embrace rolling launches. You don’t have to do it all at once. KQED’s Colleen Wilson described the station’s tiered strategy, starting with an optimized mobile pledge form. KQED delineates which pages are and are not mobile-friendly, ensuring an improved user experience.

• If you’re a station who has already launched a mobile site or app, you might think it’s looking a bit withered. The panelists agreed that many station strategies lean towards, “Let’s put something in place, and then change it later.” This is a starting point, and it’s important to see through the latter portion. Know your post-launch goals while you develop the mobile tool. Implement metrics to monitor your progress and/or setbacks, and use those to develop your subsequent plans. Ensure that the mobile product reaches the audience, and take steps to know how and why the audience is or is not using your product. KLRU recently launched a lovely new site for Austin City Limits using responsive design. St. Louis Public Radio keeps track of its app use and takes advantage of an easy RSS system to ensure a consistent flow of content. What is your station doing to keep your mobile strategy up-to-date?

No matter your progress in the mobile department, rest assured the audience will be there when you arrive. Not talking about mobile at your station? Whether you're referring to your mobile strategy or the uneasy feeling you get when your phone gets left at home, we can’t afford to be left behind.

The Weekly Debrief, 23 March 2012

By Joy Loving, Station Products & Innovation 

Welcome to the Weekly PBS Interactive Station Products & Innovation Debrief, which is designed to give PBS stations a rundown of product updates and opportunities announced this week on our blog. 

Join us for the Prosper Roundtable Webinar: Three Station Representatives Talk about their plans for Prosper, Friday, April 13, 1:00-2:00 pm ET.  Anne Gleason (WTTW), Tim Eernisse (WGVU), and Shane Guiter (KLRU) will discuss, in roundtable format, plans for handling their station’s Prosper prospects and their accounting methods for monies received from the Prosper initiative.  

To register for the webinar go to: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/993304402.

If you would like to submit questions in advance of the webinar, please email pbsi_stationservices@pbs.org.   

Station Remote Control (SRC) needs a new name, and we’d love your help creating it.  To learn more about how you can help choose a new name for SRC, follow the link below. 

If you use Twitter regularly, you have seen the popular usage of the hashtag (#). In this week's article, David Wilder of PBS Creative Services describes how using the hashtag to mark trending topics is an integral marketing tool for Twitter users.  

Even though a large number of people are keeping up with technological advances today, there are still many communities that do not have access to these innovations. PBS KIDS and the CPB are working to bring mobile applications to children in under-served communities across the nation. Learn how your local station can help reach out to these communities.

Earth Day is approaching. Do you know of any videos with tips about environmental preservation or related to Earth Day? If so, Anais Cayo, New Media Content Editor, would like to hear from you! Email her your suggestions at amcayo@pbs.org. 

Follow the links below to continue reading:

• Naming the New SRC
• “Hashing” It Out on Twitter
• Bridging the App Gap: PBS KIDS and CPB Bring Mobile Apps to Communities 

As always, the SPI team appreciates all of your valuable comments and participation on our site this week and every week.

Bridging the App Gap: PBS KIDS and CPB Bring Mobile Apps to Communities

by Joy Loving, Station Products and Innovation

On March 8, 2012, PBS KIDS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) began distributing two free mobile learning applications for children as part of the Ready To Learn Initiative:  “All Aboard the Dinosaur Train!” for iPad and “Dinosaur Train Camera Catch!” for iPhone. These apps, inspired by Jim Henson’s Dinosaur Train, help develop math skills in children between the ages of 3 and 5. Stations are invited to work with partner organizations locally – such as Head Start centers, schools, libraries or community organizations – that have mobile/tablet devices and serve low-income populations. Once stations have recruited partners for the program,  they will be able to request free download codes for two new Dinosaur Train apps to be used at partner organizations and/or distributed by partner organizations to educators, parents and caregivers in low-income communities.

Debra Sanchez, Senior Vice President, Education and Children’s Content at CPB says, “This unique partnership with PBS and Head Start gives children a new way to engage with trusted public media content through mobile devices – one of the most popular technologies in their lives today.”

I can relate to the children who do not have access to the technologies that most take for granted.  As a child growing up in a rural area in the 1990s, my family was one of the last to get cable or the Internet, so analog television was as good as it got for many years! These were the days when TVs still had antennas on top of them inside the house AND outside in the back yard (or on the roof). The kind of antennas that one person stayed inside while the other went outside and adjusted it:

“Yes! Oh, wait, wait—turn it back to the left! I can almost see through the static!”

I vaguely remember watching Barney (yes, Barney), Mathica’s Math Shop (who else remembers that one?), and Captain Kangaroo (classic!). I even tried to paint with Bob Ross occasionally. While other kids in my neighborhood were able to watch shows whenever they wanted, I could only watch certain shows at designated times. I also had one of those fake kiddie computers with a few games on it, and my mother insisted on getting me those children’s encyclopedias with the pictures. Exciting.

Okay, this wasn’t the worst situation—it helped mold me into the bookworm that I am today and made me appreciate good educational tools.  However, the world is changing and keeping up with technology has become a necessity. I think that if the technologies that we have now were available to me as child, especially educational applications, it would have only increased my desire to learn.

Participating Stations 

To bridge this “app gap” in today’s society, PBS KIDS and CPB hope to reach children in communities who do not have readily made access to tablets, smartphones, or even computers. Many local PBS stations are participating in this campaign, including Iowa Public Television and Vegas PBS. These two stations are working hard to recruit other partners to help distribute the applications.

"As Iowa's largest classroom, Iowa Public Television knows the importance of using all available technologies to help children learn,” says Terry Rinehart, Director of Educational Services at IPTV. “The PBS KIDS App Distribution Project will assist us in our mission to help Iowa's youngest residents learn math and literacy skills by opening doors to new learning technologies previously out of reach for economically disadvantaged children."

Jessica Carroll, Literary Specialist for the Ready To Learn initiative for Vegas PBS shares that the station “will be conducting family literacy workshops this summer at various library sites in the community to demonstrate the [PBS KIDS Lab] Lab as part of the as part of the Las Vegas library district." Vegas PBS conducts family literacy workshops throughout the year at more than 80 Title I pre-k program sites. They will also be distributing this year’s apps to Acelero Head Start and the After-School All-Stars.

Other stations participating in the campaign are: WGBY (MA), Detroit Public Television (MI), Thirteen/WNET (NY), Eight, Arizona PBS (AZ), and Ideastream (OH).

Pictured: Children from Iowa Public Televsion (photo 1)  and Vegas PBS (photo 2) communities playing various educational PBS games.

About the Apps

“Dinosaur Train Camera Catch!” works by having kids move their iPhones around to take pictures of flying dinosaurs. The children must “catch” the dinosaurs according to designated patterns, improving recognition ability. For a demo of this app, go here.

“All Aboard the Dinosaur Train!” is a game in which children must seat dinosaurs on the train, matching them by size and shape, before the train takes off.  This game allows two players to play at once, a great way for children to play with a friend or parent. Use this link to see a demo of this app. 

                                   

PBS KIDS and CPB will continue distributing free applications codes to Head Start centers and low income communities nationwide through September 2012. “All Aboard the Dinosaur Train” and “Dinosaur Train Camera Catch!” are available to the general public through the iTunes/App store for the price of $1.99 each. Funding for the Ready To Learn Initiative is provided by the US Department of Education.

If you would like for your station to be a part of this program, please do one of the following:

1) Go to pbskids.org/giftcodes and register. Once you are registered, please complete the online form to request codes for your partner organizations.

2) Encourage your partners to request codes directly on pbskids.org/giftcodes. If you decide to have your partners request codes directly, please email a list of those organizations to Tracy Williams at tmwilliams@pbs.org.