Deepening civic and mission-driven engagement

Triangle Blog Blog

Role: Co-creator, Editor

I co-created and now help lead a civics blog that fills information gaps in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, NC. The model is unique: We're an all volunteer organization and over 60 people have contributed pieces. We reach tens of thousands of people and fill information gaps in our local news ecosystem.

In the past two years, we've published over 800 stories covering everything from UNC to the school board to town council and pickleball. We do deep dives and create in whatever way makes the most sense - a chart, stickers, a parade, a timeline, a deep dive.

It's the best, most experimental, most civically-engaged group I've ever worked with, and just a joy to work on.

Our newsletter has a 70%+ open rate and our election coverage helped "drive record turnout."

You can read an interview with our initial board here.

18F

Role: Writer, editor

At 18F, part of our content strategy was to highlight users of our products in their own words. This not only helped with product adoption, but created a community of users to bounce off each other for support. Some examples:

We developed an analytics dashboard for .gov domains - within months, it had been adapted by local and state-level governments to publicly monitor their own web traffic. Here's an interview with users in two cities and one state. This was then developed into a blog post highlighting other reusable projects; when those were reused, we then highlighted those users. Nice feedback loops as users further engaged with civic tech infastructure.

Public media membership models

Role: Writer, researcher

I spent several months at Harvard University on a Visiting Nieman Fellowship, where I researched expanding the definition of public media membership beyond the traditional monetary model. By elevating non-financial forms of contributions that provide valuable support for local stations (e.g., digitizing an archive, coding a new app, volunteering at an event), my belief was that we could inculcate a sense of ownership and identity among listeners — allowing them to feel more connected to and invested in public media’s content, work, and mission.

I interviewed over 60 people for case studies, and wrote an extensive guide to what I learned. This was later used in the Membership Puzzle, and by stations around the country.

Here's a great writeup by Josh Stearns of the work.