Two New Reports Help You Assess The Impact of Your Media

[Source: Center for Social Media, May 10, 2010]

Throughout the spring, the Center for Social Media (CSM) and The Media Consortium (TMC) drew together dozens of leading public interest media makers, funders and researchers in Chicago, New York, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, DC, and Boston for a series of Impact Summits. These convenings—which asked attendees to describe how they measure reach, relevance, engagement, inclusion and influence in their work—informed a new analysis co-published by CSM and TMC: Investing In Impact: Media Summits Reveal Pressing Needs, Tools for Evaluating Public Interest Media.

Investing in Impact, outlines the major arguments for impact assessment, synthesizes the five top impact evaluation needs, and proposes five new tools that would help public interest media makers to track their work. You may download the analysis (it short enough so can read it in 20 minutes or less!) and share it with your colleagues and peers.  

Spreading the Zing

The same impact categories—reach, relevance, engagement, inclusion and influence—were also used to evaluate the impact of eight innovative, multiplatform radio projects designed to demonstrate how “public radio” can be transformed to “public media.”  The resulting report, Spreading the Zing: Reimagining Public Media Through the Makers Quest 2.0, co-produced by CSM and the Association of Independents in Radio (AIR), offers a framework for assessing public media projects, five recommendations for redefining evaluation practices within the public media field, and key lessons learned by the MQ2 producers.

Spreading the Zing hones in on a particular project—Mapping Main Street—to demonstrate the dynamic capacity of participatory public media 2.0 projects. Teachers, artists and other news producers were not only moved to document their own Main Streets, but adopted the project to generate conversations and learning in their own communities. “The ability of this project to serve as a catalyst relies on its ability to move users to individual and collective action, ” notes the report, “rather than to serve as static, 'loyal' listeners.”