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Report: Station Outreach Focus Groups 2000 (Continued)  ON OUR OWN TERMS was singled out for praise, with every kind of support including 100 community partners, exemplary materials and multimedia elements "fed to us on a silver platter." One station that did not have an outreach staff person at the time of the campaign was able to undertake a successful community effort on the strength of the turnkey guides provided by Moyers's production company. In another location, a coalition of 56 community groups who worked on the outreach are now forming a new nonprofit organization to serve the region with end-of-life social service programs. An equal number of participants focused on the ITVS production DIGITAL DIVIDE for its sustained impact in their communities. Two stations used ITVS seed funding to attract major resources for community technology centers where they continue to provide follow-up educational programming. In another state, the community workshops in one rural location enabled unemployed lumbermen who had been displaced by changes in their industry to begin training in a new field. Other productions cited by stations included the civil engineering series BUILDING BIG, A WELL-FOUNDED FEAR, REGRET TO INFORM and the ITVS productions LA CIUDAD/THE CITY and HOMECOMING. Will a program's controversial nature affect your willingness to implement an outreach campaign? Outreach staff were uniformly willing—even enthusiastic—about taking on difficult subject matter in their community outreach. Comments included: "Outreach is naturally controversial." "Controversy is life." And, "If it's relevant, I don't care about controversy." That said, however, outreach staff often find themselves in conflict with the more conservative sensibilities of their development or programming staff, or are unable to secure underwriter support for an outreach campaign. In rare cases, an outreach staff person is able to find strategies to get a program on the air and an outreach campaign rolled out, but many are obliged to concentrate on issues and programs that do not raise red flags—or more importantly, arrive with guaranteed funding. A good example of both was ON OUR OWN TERMS, which had a national outreach budget of $2.5 million, and was unimpeachably universal in appeal. As one participant noted, "We all die." How do you decide which campaigns to undertake? Funding is the single most important factor determining whether a station can undertake an outreach campaign. This was mentioned by more than half of the participants, many of whom are provided with no expense budget and are responsible for raising up to $100,000 a year. While this was by no means the consensus, some said that they cannot undertake outreach at all in the absence of cash funding, at a minimum level of $5,000. Another station noted that they lost money on the ON OUR OWN TERMS outreach campaign due to extensive photocopying and mailing costs. There was also a discussion of how outreach can be looked upon as a way of bringing in money and building membership, not always as a financial drain to stations. A new priority in determining which programs will get outreach support was the availability of Web resources, with customizable elements to give the station local "ownership" of the site. (More discussion of Web resources appears below.) Finally, a key factor in prioritizing a show was the assurance of an established network of community partners, an infrastructure "that will take the show and run with it" with minimal station oversight. How is the web influencing outreach? Outreach staff are of two minds regarding new technologies. While all accept that "this is where the future is going, and we need to be there," they see both promise and limitations in its use in outreach. It is one more area demanding staff time that is already stretched thin, and it adds to, rather than replaces, snail-mail communications to partner organizations and audiences. One participant spoke for many when she said that she had a "million ideas for how to use the Web in outreach, but no time for implementation." Stations agree that the Web is an excellent resource for research, locating and keeping in touch with partners, and downloading tools and resources, but not necessarily as appropriate for reaching new or existing audiences. For stations working with rural audiences, the Web is a mixed blessing. It can make programming available to remote locations where there is no broadcast signal, but rural residents often have to pay long-distance charges to reach an Internet service provider (ISP) line. For stations doing outreach in underserved urban communities, the digital divide cuts off programming from the very audiences they are trying to serve. Providing materials to audiences and partners on the Web also has mixed results. Printed materials with complex color graphics are inappropriate for black-and-white photocopying, and many community organizations or audience members do not have the skills or software to download materials successfully, so station staff spend many hours at the photocopy machine to meet the demand. Outreach staff feel ambivalent about how the Web might isolate rather than connect, as "face to face contact is still irreplaceable." One participant was adamant that she didn't "want to drive people to our website, I want to drive them to community." Others observed that Web chats can provide opportunities for frank and open dialogue that often don't take place in public settings. Young people, who have been a particularly difficult audience for public television to reach, are more reachable through new technologies. |
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