15. Harnessing public engagement and support

Reader engagement is a crucial component of the tool, because:

Involving readers in the tracker's creation increases capacity.

• Tracking hundreds of changing real estate developments is an overwhelming task. By inviting readers to join the process (and making it easy for them to share their knowledge), it also eases workload and ensures more comprehensive coverage.

Reader participation helps strengthen the tracker, steer its future and clarify audience needs.

• The tracker is meant to be an evergreen app that you can adapt over time as you see how our audience interacts with it. This could be through proactive user research, but the tips also provide another layer of information about how the tracker is serving readers (and can surface coverage gaps).

Bringing people into the practice of journalism fosters trust and civic participation, while ensuring you are serving your community.

The development tracker template is predicated on the assumption that you have ongoing, robust engagement journalism practices and support for reader engagement in your newsroom. This might look like surveying, creating callouts around reporting topics, answering reader questions, relying on readers as sources or identifying reader needs to shape your coverage.

If you don’t have experience with engagement, see the list at the end of this section for resources that can help you understand how to go about engaging with your audience, how to bring it into your newsroom practices and how it will bring value to your outlet and your journalism.

While it would be possible to create a development tracker without engagement components – simply by removing the tip submission forms – we strongly urge you to prioritize this use for all the reasons above. If your audience is not used to engaging with your outlet or staff, it may take time and strategizing to get them to use the tips feature – but you can encourage this by trying some of the ideas below.

Be as clear as possible about how you are using information readers provide.

• Let readers know that you won’t share their tips publicly (or if you will, how you will use them), how you will use their contact information and whether you will follow up with them.
• Additionally, make it clear what role their information plays in the journalism process – i.e., that these tips will be vetted and edited by journalists.

Make it as easy as possible for readers to share their knowledge with you.

• The development tracker tip submission form is as simple as we knew how to make it, with the hopes that someone could send a quick submission from their phone when they’re walking by a development site.
• To make the submission process faster, easier and possibly more appealing for some users, we allow anonymous submissions.
• In many journalism callout situations, you’ll need user contact info to follow up, but in our case, we know tips will require independent verification no matter what, and tipsters aren’t typically sharing about their personal experiences.

Engagement shouldn’t be a one-way street.

• When readers reach out to you or share a tip, they’re doing a service that benefits you and the community – so they should be responded to and thanked accordingly.
• Those followup conversations can also lead to further knowledge sharing and participation.

Submitting tips is an investment of time and loyalty in your tracker and/or publication.

• Beyond being appreciative, you can learn a lot from, submitters, who are self-identifying as loyal users. They may be open to giving you more feedback about the app or participating in your outlet in other ways.

Tell your readers about the project early and often.

It’s not a traditional journalistic practice to talk about a project before you publish it. But we recommend sharing your plans while you are still building the tracker and encourage people who are interested to get in touch with you.

“Telling readers” might look like publishing articles to kick off the project or to update readers on your progress, sharing progress snapshots on social media, writing about it in a newsletter, surveying readers about what they want to see in the tracker, circulating a feedback form and more.

This can help build interest, foster buy-in and prime your audience to participate in the project.

People who follow up at early stages are great candidates for helping with the tracker – as early testers, as interviewees for user research and as tipsters.

Keep track of readers who participate at early stages (and later as tipsters or otherwise) so you can reach out to them directly and as a group. This could be through a spreadsheet, a table in your Airtable base, or tagging contacts (in an email service provider like Mailchimp or member database). You could use this list to share more detailed updates with people who are interested or make requests, like if you are trying to hire someone to help with research or coding.

Continue to promote the tracker and encourage engagement after it launches.

After the tracker is launched, you can and should repeatedly encourage readers to use it, share feedback and submit tips. Fortunately, you should now have a wealth of information in the tracker that makes sense to share with readers and can be the springboard for those calls to use the tracker.

You could feature a new real estate project from the tracker in a weekly newsletter or post; share quick updates with the number of total projects; spotlight all the projects in a particular neighborhood; write a tweet thread or article linking to all the newly added development projects each week or month; and include a recurring link to the tracker and callout in your reporting related to development. If you find story ideas from the tracker, you should include language in your reporting explaining that.

Tap your network of collaborators and partners to promote and use the tracker.

Make sure to share the tracker with your network (and explain how it works) and ask them for feedback and for their help sharing it with others. Including social share language never hurts. If you work with other newsrooms, you can offer it to them to use for their own reporting (with some guidelines about attribution and how to use the data).

Get a few more tips for working with partners to promote a journalism project to encourage reader engagement in ProPublica’s Collaborative Journalism Playbook. If you’re interested in working with another newsroom to build and maintain the tracker, that guide will also help you figure out workflows and project management for multiple teams, with techniques you can apply pretty easily to the development tracker.

Build new relationships with groups and individuals who may benefit from the tracker or have resources to contribute.

One of the exciting things about the development tracker is that it has the potential to reach audiences you were not previously serving. But connecting with new audiences takes intentional, individualized work.

If and when you’re ready to introduce the tracker and your outlet to your community, you can start by thinking about who has knowledge and resources that could improve the tracker, as well as groups who could benefit from the tracker.

That might be researchers or an initiative within a local university, organizations working on local demographics or civic data, neighborhood groups, development associations or other industry groups, activist and advocacy groups, groups interested in government transparency or civic education and plenty of others. The data sources you identify are also a good place to start.

When you reach out to those individuals, you should be able to give a quick spiel about how the tracker works and why they might be interested in it, but you should take the time as an opportunity to learn about their needs related to local real estate information rather than a pitch call. In other words, they’re doing you a favor, and you can’t assume they will be invested in the project.

• How to engage ethically and with your community’s needs front-and-center:

  • City Bureau’s “Community Engagement Guidelines”
  • Gather’s “Ethics of Engagement”
  • “The Ethics of Engaged Journalism,” by Michael R. Fancher

• The value of engagement:

  • “More than Eyeballs: How Journalism Can Benefit from Audience Engagement,” by Emily Goligoski
  • “Engaging for Trust: What News Organizations Can (and Should) Do Right Now,” by Eric Garcia McKinley

• How to involve readers in your reporting (and your outlet):

  • “Reinventing the Rolodex: Why You Should Ask Your Members What They Know,” by Ernst-Jan Pfauth
  • “‘This Is the Journalism’ and Other Insights from Networked Reporting,” by Melanie Sill
  • Krautreporter’s “The Engaged Journalism Playbook,” by Leon Fryszer

• Even more:

  • Gather’s “Engaging Your Communities for Better Journalism” guide (plus more resources and case studies)
  • Engaged Journalism Accelerator’s reading list, case studies, database and other resources
  • Journalist’s Toolbox’s audience engagement resources

The next section includes a checklist and a few more tips for launching your tracker to the public.