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Texting for community engagement: Groundsource expands to public beta

by: Amy Gahran |

Listening to what people are saying, amplifying their voices, leveraging their insight and experience, and encouraging them to talk to each other are probably the most important (and most challenging) aspects of community engagement -- especially in low-income and otherwise marginalized communities. The creator of the engagement platform Groundsource has learned much about streamlining and supporting these key engagement activities.

"I've been working on this idea for more than a decade in some form, because I care deeply about community engagement," said Andrew Haeg, founder of Groundsource, who also played a lead role in creating the Public Insight Network platform for American Public Media. "We've been making deliberate, steady progress, and getting useful feedback."

Originally envisioned as a way to help journalists build a network of local sources, the vision of Groundsource has expanded to helping news and community-based organizations listen to and engage their entire community. Over the last year, the Groundsource team has been testing and piloting over a dozen implementations from New Orleans to Cape Town, from Macon to Nairobi, further honing the toolset and clarifying its value to organizations and communities.

Interactive text messaging (a channel that's generally overlooked in community engagement and publishing efforts) is central to how Groundsource works -- allowing organizations to collect input from community members, as well as offer effective community alerts and calls to action. As the lowest common denominator of cell phone communications, texting allows organizations to connect effectively with community segments that might otherwise be hard to reach.

In June, Groundsource is expanding to a public beta test -- an opportunity for community news and engagement venues, community organizations, and local funders to experiment with using this platform to augment their efforts.

How to get involved in the Groundsource beta: Text "hello" to 612-351-6630 (add a +1 outside the U.S.). You'll then be asked for some basic details, and will be contacted later by Groundsource with further information about the beta.

Groundsource offers considerable opportunity for creativity and flexibility. In New Orleans, the Listening Post (with support from the Knight Foundation) has been posing questions to the public via street signs that encourage people to text in responses, as well as through listening sculptures. They're using Groundsource to collect and make use of the responses.

Some of the Listening Post's public questions may sound frivolous: "What's for dinner? Why are you mad? What things do you love?" But this is an effective engagement technique -- make it fun, make it personal, and people are less likely to be wary and more likely to participate. Once people get into the local Groundsource network, it becomes easier to engage them on more substantive or controversial local matters.

"Currently the Listening Post has about 900 text subscribers," said Haeg. "They're using Groundsource to reach out to them about once per week. And that's because they found a low-threshold way to reach out to people who aren't usually involved in community conversation. You don't have to be a social media user, you don't have to know how to follow someone on Twitter or like something on Facebook. You just have to have a cell phone and know how to send a text message. You just have to type in a few words, or even just send an emoji or a photo. It's pretty easy and fun. But from there, you can expand the conversation to things like blight, violence, homelessness, the local economy. It's pretty powerful."

Meanwhile, the Alabama Media Group published open questions and a number to text in answers in the several print and digital daily news organizations they operate in that state. There, some of the topics were more weighty, such as gun control and overcrowded prisons. But a lighter Mother's Day request for "mom-isms" (things your mother says) proved especially popular.

Working with SciStarter (an organization that promotes and facilitates citizen science), the Groundsource team learned the value of offering texting-based engagement at events.

"You can stand up at an event and tell people, 'Before we get started, text hello to this number,'" said Haeg. "Let attendees know that this is a way they can submit feedback and ask questions before, during and after the events. A lot of people do that, and it helps sustain and build engagement after the event."

Currently, Haeg is working with the Center for Collaborative Journalism at Mercer University in Macon, Ga. (where he also teaches) to create a Listening Post for the Macon city government. The focus is to increase engagement with community members and civic organizations (such as Habitat for Humanity) to address blight.

In this project, the City Commisioner's office will use Groundsource to text out a link to their online newsletter. This is followed with another message, asking people what they think should be in the next newsletter, or if they have questions for the commissioner.

In Macon and other places, Groundsource is being used to conduct simple surveys. One value of the platform is that when people respond, you can use the platform to engage them in one-on-one conversations.

"The conversational aspect is a key advantage," said Haeg. "It's scalable even with hundreds of people in your network. While it makes sense to automate initial outbound communication, if all you can offer is one-size-fits-all communication, with no segmenting or personal interaction, that's not engaging."

Another newer feature of Groundsource is tool that allows a user to publish to a web page selected responses received, much like Storify allows you to curate, organize and publish social media posts. Or you can publish to the web the raw feed of contributions as they are received. The identities of contributors are not disclosed on the published web page, but the Groundsource back-end allows users to track contributors, to identify people who are most engaged, influential, or who offer more consistently thoughtful or useful content.

In this way, Groundsource could become a useful tool to create a networked beat -- the vision of NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen.

With the upcoming election season, Groundsource also could be applied to increase civic engagement around local elections. Haeg has entered in this year's Knight News Challenge-Elections a proposal called Civic Pulse, which would use Groundsource in this way.

Groundsource is free up to a certain volume of messaging, and beyond that it's priced in tiers that are strikingly affordable compared to Mobile Commons (another popular and more fully featured mobile publishing/engagement platform) or more conventional SMS vendors (commonly used for mobile marketing). Prices range from $100-$500/month, depending on texting volume, customization and extra services such as API support.

"We're able to keep it very affordable because our texting does not use shortcodes," said Haeg, referring to the special, and costly, five-digit phone numbers required to be used for mass outreach by SMS. "The personalization and interactivity of our system means that the telcos view us as doing mostly interpersonal communication, not mass communication. They look at the ratio of inbound to outbound messages, and other factors -- and we've learned a lot about how to handle messaging to meet the requirements to allow us to use conventional 'longcode' phone numbers, which are more affordable."

While Groundsource will be working with many more organizations in the public beta, they're focusing on community news/engagement projects, community organizations, and local governments. But Haeg is also open to discussing deploying Groundsource for community foundations and other local funders who might want to use it on behalf of their grantees.

"Once you're set up, you can designate groups of users -- so each grantee organization or project could be its own group. We don't have a per-user charge at this time," he said.

While Groundsource has been growing more slowly than many tech or media startups, Haeg says that the gradual approach to launching a platform (including long-term partnering with the Center for Collaborative Journalism) has been paying off. "We've been able to collect a lot of feedback and work closely with people to develop a much better product that fits with organizational workflows. We're not looking for a quick win, but taking our time to build a very useful and adaptable tool."

Amy Gahran

Amy Gahran is a journalist, editor, trainer, entrepreneur, strategist, and media consultant based in Boulder, Colorado. In addition to writing
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