Innovation in Focus: Public Interactive's Public Action

For public broadcasting stations, "[c]ommunity engagement is part of [the] mission statement," notes Chad Johnson, web producer at Salt Lake City's KUER. Public Interactive's new online community engagement tool, Public Action, is "a strong online tool that is helping us to fulfill [that] mission," making it easier than ever for public broadcasting stations and producers to integrate participatory platforms on their own websites. Stations can use existing content as a basis for forming interactive communities that allow members to contribute their own original content and open dialogue on important issues that can inform future programming.

After only one year since the program's launch, 24 stations and programs - both local and national - are now using Public Action. For example, "Car Talk" used it to create online forums that allow community members to post and respond to audience questions and show content (through the Second Opinion forum, for instance), and also plans incorporate new features, like allowing community members to "record the scary sound their VW Golf is making and ask the guys what it is," says "Car Talk"'s "Senior Web Lackey" Doug Mayer, or to "hold a Dirtiest Car Interior Contest." Such shared content might even allow listeners to help one another diagnose their auto problems.

KUER's "RadioWest" talk show used Public Action for a discussion of author Paul Dickson's book on family vocabularies. Dickson invited the audience members to continue the discussion online by sharing their own family's invented words, which he responded to after the show. The conversation continued well over two months after the original airing of the segment.

Further testimonies from other groups like South Dakota Public Broadcasting reveal robust audience response: in addition to growing station participation, the Public Action program also boasts 26,000 registered users and approximately one million site visits. The Public Interactive team is also working on a set of Best Practices, analyzing and quantifying the results of the various community engagement approaches to help clients utilize their resources to the fullest.

As the role of audiences increasingly shifts from media consumer to media curator, tools like Public Action will play a pivotal role in fostering a robust public media environment that includes both quality content and open dialogue. "That is the future of public media," comments Keith Hopper, product manager at Public Interactive, "to harness the power of small town voices through collaborative station coverage, supported by the resources to offer an alternative to big, for-profit media."

Public Interactive, like the Center for Social Media, is part of a group of nonprofit organizations with a common goal: to push forward into the future of public media. In an initiative funded by the Ford Foundation, the group's work fosters experimentation to forge the public media structures and projects of tomorrow.