Beth Daley, reporter and director of partnerships, describes NECIR's efforts to boost distribution through social engagement. Lightning Round presentation at INN@IRE Day 2014, Investigative Reporters & Editors conference, San Francisco, June 26.

1. Can You Trust Lyme Disease Tests?
Testing a new strategy for NECIR’s audience growth,
engagement, and outreach

2. Our Hypotheses
• Media outreach and digital partnerships can connect us with a
national audience – despite our regional name and without
giving away our full story.
• A live chat could help make the investigation into an event, pull in
a much larger audience, and incentivize partners to feature our
story – despite the fact that we’ve never hosted a live chat
before.
• Our stories could be presented in a dramatically more engaging
and visual form – despite our print background and small budget.
• The combination of these three tactics could break NECIR web
traffic records, develop key media relationships, and build our
online community for the future.

3. To Bring People In, Reach Out
PAST:
PRESENT:

4. National Media Hits

5. Regional Hits

6. Top Digital Coverage
Posts that preview our story or interview our reporter,
but send people to us for the full investigation.

7. Top Digital Coverage
Posts that preview our story or interview our reporter,
but send people to us for the full investigation.

8. Social Share Image
PBS Instagram – June 18th
We gave our digital partners an image to use as social content

9. Live Web Chat
The chat attracted
approximately 4,000 readers
who submitted over 200
questions to our experts.
Picture of the chat window to
explain to the audience how this
type of engagement works.

10. Chat Coverage
WebMD Homepage – June 18th

11. Chat Coverage
Huffington Post – June 18th

12. How’d We Do?
Web Analytics
Sun 6.15 – Wed 6.21
• 2nd highest traffic ever for a NECIR story
• 86% of viewers were new to our site
• Increase of ≈ 215% over an average NECIR story
Website Traffic

13. Twitter Buzz
Top Influencers
ACCOUNT FOLLOWERS
@PBS 1.9M
@WebMD 953K
@HealthyLiving 170K
@HuffPostScience 21.6K
@WGBH 17.5K
@hari 12.8K
@jbenton 12.8K
@WGBHNews 9.6K
@NextAvenue 7.0K
@WisWatch 3.7K
@brookborel 2.0K
@LymeAware 1.3K
@FightLyme 1.1K
The NECIR story was the top
trending subject on the
#LymeDisease hashtag for several
days.
Tweets about the story reached
over 1 million unique Twitter
accounts.

14. Influential Tweets

15. Influential Tweets

16. Text Drives Readers Away
Our stories needed a facelift
Old Layout

17. Visuals Draw Them In
http://bit.ly/T44sOU
Click here to enter website.
We used Creatavist to keep them engaged
New Layout 

18. What We Learned
• If you want an audience, you have to reach out.
• Chats and Q&As can turn an investigation into an event
– and transform a pitch into a partnership.
• By building relationships on every platform you can
create a buzz you couldn’t afford to buy.
• Text stories put people to sleep, beautiful visuals wake
them up.

19. What’s Next?
• The goal is not simply to attract an audience for one story, but to build a
community of NECIR supporters over time.
• Email sign up strategy
• Home page pop up box
• Facebook Sign Up Tab
• Text-to-sign up
• Promotional campaign ahead of an exclusive email follow up
• “be the first to see…”
• Regular newsletters
• Geo-targeted social media partnerships
• How to tell the story of NECIR’s impact, one investigation at a time.
• Institutional Stories: “Campus Sexual Assault" and “Rising Cost of
College”
• What was the impact?
• campaign to increase funding and raise interest