Like a solid business plan, a great road trip needs a few key elements to be truly successful: a reliable vehicle, good company and excitement about the destination.
And — of course — directions.
“It’s like having a great car to get there, but there are 1,000 miles between where we are and where we need to go,” said Shawn Turner, general manager of WKAR, the public media station at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan.
Turner and his team were among the 79 public media entities and 458 station personnel who took part in the 2022-23 Digital Transformation Program, administered by Poynter and funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
The program provides training and education designed to help public media organizations develop and optimize audience-first, multi-platform approaches to their organizational strategies, operations and culture.
“The Digital Transformation Program gave us that approach, that roadmap, that framework for getting to where we need to go,” Turner said.
Based on the success of the first DTP, the program is being extended to provide three more years of training to 150 more public media stations, as well as additional training for stations that have already been through the program.
DTP elevates its trainees through coaching, bi-weekly webinars and other resources provided to teams of public media stations, which consist of one station leader (like a general manager/CEO) and four to six other staffers.
Now that DTP is back for a second phase, Turner recently provided his testimonial in a webinar designed to explain the application process and answer questions for public media journalists who are looking to apply.
He said that participating in DTP changed the way his station operates, and continues to impact and influence the way that it approaches digital projects to this day.
“We had the right vision. We knew where we wanted to go. We also had an extremely talented team of people,” he said. “But I knew there was still a critical step missing, and that critical step was having the right approach.”
That’s when he analogized some parts of his work pre-DTP to traveling without a map.
“That is what the Digital Transformation Program gave us,” he said. “It gave us that approach, that roadmap, that framework for getting to where we need to go.”
Like all participating DTP stations, the WKAR team members had to choose a challenge to tackle during training. They landed on the launch of The Mid, an innovative newsletter that would address the concerns and news needs of 45- to 60-year-old viewers and listeners. After launch, The Mid quickly generated $2,500 in new sponsorship revenue and about $20,000 in new digital donations.
“So from our perspective, (The Mid was) a really great proof of concept and a success that we would not have had if we not if we’d not gone through the Digital Transformation Program,” Turner said.
The success of The Mid was not an outlier. Program organizers said that participating stations in the first phase generated more than $3.1 million in new digital revenue and acquired more than 10 million new digital audience users/subscribers.
Applications for the first two cohorts of the second phase of the Digital Transformation Program are due Sept. 6. The nine-month virtual Fundamentals track will be offered to 150 stations — 50 each year for three years — that have not yet participated in a previous Digital Transformation Program. Of the 50 stations that are selected for 2025, 25 teams will start in January, and another 25 in March.
The program provides a strategic framework for accepted participants.
“This program provides transformation on multiple dimensions,” said program co-lead Quentin Hope. “We offer a tested framework for station teams to make real tangible gains, which is the basis of the design of the program.”
To learn more you can:
- Visit the program’s home page.
- Read FAQs about the program’s Fundamentals track.
- Watch an explanatory webinar (use password 3Uzrf^%p)
- Apply for the Fundamentals track.
Stations and personnel who already participated in the first DTP or a similar program will be able to apply for the Advanced track, which will begin recruiting in January 2025.
“DTP helped me prepare to successfully make some critical changes and change the thinking here through leadership, style assessments, through executive coaching and — this is really important — lots of constructive dialogue with other GMs,” Turner said. “And I just can’t tell you how important that was to me as I worked through some of these changes.”
