Can You Trust Lyme Disease Tests?

Testing a new strategy for NECIR’s audience growth, engagement, and outreach

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.

To Bring People In, Reach Out

PAST:

PRESENT:

National Media Hits

Regional Hits

Top Digital CoveragePosts that preview our story or interview our reporter,

but send people to us for the full investigation.

Top Digital CoveragePosts that preview our story or interview our reporter,

but send people to us for the full investigation.

Social Share ImagePBS Instagram – June 18th

We gave our digital partners an image to use as social content

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.

Chat CoverageWebMD Homepage – June 18th

Chat CoverageHuffington Post – June 18th

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

Twitter BuzzTop 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.

Influential Tweets

Influential Tweets

Text Drives Readers AwayOur stories needed a facelift

Old Layout

Visuals Draw Them In

http://bit.ly/T44sOU

Click here to enter website.

We used Creatavist to keep them engaged

New Layout

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.

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