Marketing and Audience Engagement
As Editor-in-Chief, a large part of my role this year has been to manage The Standard's relationship with the community, ensuring our content is widely accessible and active in the High School. Our audience - students, faculty, parents - is at the heart of our mission and content, and as a journalist, I have worked to ensure we do our best as a publication to deeply engage them and keep their interests at the heart of my work, and the work of The Standard.
Distribution
At the release of every print paper, I send out a school-wide email to all High School students and faculty. This email not only informs our community of our paper's release and encourages engagement, but also establishes a channel of communication between the publication and our audience. Through sending these distribution emails, we offer a connection where people can send us feedback or questions on our official email, bringing us closer to our audience.
Analytics
At the end of the 2024-25 school year, in my first week of being EIC: Print, my co-EIC and I decided to send out a school-wide survey requesting feedback on the Standard. Our questions ranged from how the community engages with our publication, to what they engage with, spanning print, online and social media. We wanted to gain an understanding of how our audience engages with our content so the wants and needs of our community could guide any changes we were going to make to our publication over the next year.
From these surveys, we learned that most of our audience engagement comes from our print issues, of which we have five annually and two special editions. Our social media and online newsletter do not gain as much engagement as we previously believed, and many members of our community are not aware of some of our less visible online initiatives, which is an area we recognized we could improve.
Surveys
Community-wide surveys are a key line of engagement between our publication and the high school community. These surveys, and the data they yield, allow us to include the voices of students and faculty in our pieces. They also inform the community on some of the stories in progress at the moment, and provide an opportunity for individuals to request to be interviewed if they would like their voice to be included in a piece. These surveys are an integral to informing the community of what coverage is in progress, provide us feedback, engage with our work and easily access our platform to have their experiences and opinions shared.
Fostering relationships
A large part of our audience engagement comes from the personal relationships our publication has with our community. On our staff, we foster relationships with councils, clubs, and sports coaches so we can stay up to date on any events or relevant updates happening in our community worth coverage. We frequently collaborate with other councils in our school, such as the Social Justice Council, Presidents Council, Student Council or Sustainability Council, who help promote our work and increase our presence in the community.
Ampersand
After analyzing the analytics from our Community Feedback Survey, I noticed a desire in the community for increased culture, review, lifestyle and commentary content, as well as high engagement with our print issues and special editions. From here, I had the idea to create Ampersand, a new culture magazine centered around London and its ever-active cultural scene.
A primary purpose of Ampersand was to increase audience engagement. From our analytics and from personal observation, I noticed that much of our student engagement comes from our arts/culture section. This kind of content is often accessible and entertaining to the younger grades in the High School, and I noticed that it is also something our beginner reporters are often drawn to creating, as trends and culture are so deeply ingrained in their day-to-day life and interests. Through Ampersand, I wanted to balance out our longer, more serious and heavy reporting with lighter, accessible, and engaging content to stimulate and reach a side of our community that our content doesn't always cater to, through the format of print, which would allow for wide distribution and access for our audience, and visual experimentation for our staff.
Ampersand: Innovation Pacemaker Finalist
Embedded below is our submission for an NSPA Innovation Pacemaker, a presentation created by me and my deputy editor-in-chief, Rina. Compiling this presentation granted us a moment to consider the impact of Ampersand and reflect on the process that lead to its creation.
Ampersand and audience engagement
After the launch of Ampersand, we gained a number of responses from our community expressing compliments, encouragement and feedback for the publication. I personally reached out to these members of our community, both in person and by email, to express gratitude for their engagement and communication. It was so gratifying to walk around the High School and see students discussing the opinions shared in the magazine, increasing the visibility and presence of The Standard in the community. The approval matrix also drew significant attention, sparking conversations among peers.
After Ampersand's release, we had an increase in students, especially in grades 9 and 10, joining our publication’s staff through the Standard Club, which allows students to publish on our publication without taking our curricular classes. This increase in our staff size demonstrated the new publication's effectiveness in boosting audience engagement, especially among younger students.
Our school cafeteria served a recipe from our first edition of Ampersand to the entire K-12 school and publicized it on Instagram.
On the day of its distribution, students and faculty wrote us feedback including an inquiry on how to get engaged in the magazine, suggestions for improvement and compliments.