Every year since 2006, the Knight News Challenge has been investing in people who are testing new ideas for engaging citizens with news and information. A new Knight report explores the lessons learned from the 2010-11 News Challenge winners. Some of these projects encountered, and addressed, local challenges in ways that might prove instructive to similar efforts.

For its first few years, the KNC focused on projects aimed at information and engagement with a specific geographic focus: a town, city, state or region. (Disclosure: I was a co-winner of one of the first KNC grants, for the Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker project). In the 28 KNC winners from 2010-11 received a total of over $7.5 million in grant funding plus additional support. The current News Challenge, announced this week, focuses on leveraging libraries as a platform to build more knowledgeable communities.

As this program evolved, some Challenges began to look beyond strictly local projects, into broader areas such as technology and open government. Still, most winning KNC projects offer at least the potential to support local information and civic engagement efforts, or to guide local funders. For instance, the 2010-11 winners included:

• Awesome Foundation News Taskforce. A vehicle for issuing microgrants to support innovative local journalism and civic media projects.
• Frontline SMS. A platform that enables journalists to more effectively use text messaging to inform and engage rural communities.
• The Public Laboratory. An online community and set of toolkits that enables citizens to gather environmental data about their communities.
• The State Decoded. A digital platform for parsing and displaying state codes, making laws readable and accessible to the average citizen.

According to the report, the key takeaways from the 2010-11 KNC winners were:

• Measure success based on how funding improves the field, not just on the adoption or impact of individual projects.
• Target users with a clear, proven need.
• Be open to the idea that your project may appeal to a different audience than you imagined.
• Spend the time to get the user interface right.
• Provide substantial support to grantees beyond money, such as creating a cohort of peers and providing access to influential networks.
• Anticipate resistance to innovation and the disruption it will cause, and plan around it.
• Identify the elements of a project that require full-time staff and those that can be entrusted to volunteers -- and invest resources accordingly.
• Recognize the benefits and challenges of open source code.

Beyond that, here are three examples of winning projects adapting to local challenges in ways that might prove helpful to other local projects or local funders:

1. It takes the right mix of incentives to recruit and retain effective partners.

For instance, The Awesome Foundation establishes autonomous chapters of trustees in cities around the world to distribute monthly microgrants to compelling projects in their communities. In Detroit, they found it more challenging to retain trustees -- some of whom were less engaged from the start, and would tend to leave the organization once they realized how much effort they'd have to contribute. The Awesome Foundation is addressing this by making changes to how trustees are incentivized.

2. Crowdfunding can supplement revenues.

In its second year, The Public Laboratory failed to secure expected additional grant funding. According to the report: "Recognizing the need for greater attention to funding, Public Lab hired a director of development, and initiated Kickstarter campaigns to sell and distribute retail kits of its scientific tools. The Kickstarter campaigns proved effective for introducing the project to technologically interested experimenters and early adopters, and succeeded far beyond staff expectations, with the balloon mapping kit and spectrometer kit combined generating over $150,000 in sales in 2012."

It's unclear whether Public Lab sought to partner with local funders. But this anecdote indicates that perhaps local funders should keep an eye out for promising crowdfunding campaigns for local projects with information and engagement potential. It might be possible to offer matching funds, publicity or otherwise support those crowdfunding efforts.

3. Local news outlets may not make great targets as users or customers.

For instance, "One of the 2011 News Challenge winners, Zeega, aimed to build a platform that enabled local news organizations to create multimedia stories about their own communities. …Initially, the project team provided consulting services to local media organizations to help them produce customized multimedia experiences with the Zeega tool. But they quickly found that providing custom consulting drained limited staff time and resources and detracted from their ability to develop Zeega as a product that could have appeal to a general audience. The local news organizations that Zeega had identified as its target users were not willing to pay for the tool. Zeega ultimately changed both its product and its business model. Zeega's leaders now view the target audience as the wider tech-savvy population equipped with smartphones and tablets."

Similarly, the NowSpots project developed open-source software enabling "real-time advertising" that can be updated at any time by local businesses via social media. Initially their partners included several newspapers and media groups -- but they encountered challenges in educating the papers' sales staff about the product and how to sell NowSpot ads effectively. They also found it difficult to motivate news organizations' sales teams, since it was only one of approximately 30-50 advertising products those teams had to sell.

Consequently, "NowSpots pivoted from targeting news organizations to selling the tool to small businesses and start-ups. In early October 2012, NowSpots founder launched Perfect Audience, a Facebook and web retargeting platform that companies can use to target Facebook ad campaigns to people who visit the company's website, with the aim of helping them reach their ideal customer at scale."