ENGAGEMENT
Here you’ll find all the resources we’ve published or gathered together around getting your message out there. You’ll find information on SEO, social media, newsletters, graphic design, and more – plus some LINA discounts!
Impact tracking tools and training
LINA is inviting members to participate in free one-on-one workshops to set up your Impact Tracker dashboard.
Impact Architects has developed the Impact Tracker tool for LINA members to evaluate and demonstrate your impact within your local community.
The Impact Tracker helps collect quantitative and qualitative data that often gets missed, such as positive feedback from a reader, and displays this on a personalised dashboard.
Our Data and Insights Analyst Zahra Khalid will get your dashboard set up for you to start using right away.
REGISTER INTEREST:
For more information, enter your email below and we’ll be in touch with everything you need to know about setting up your Impact Tracker.
Audience surveys
Surveys are a great tool to stay informed on your audience’s preferences and behaviour.
Data and Insights Analyst Zahra Khalid unpacks best-practice techniques for getting the most out of your audience surveys in this blog article. Once you’re ready to build your survey, download the survey template below for a list of questions that you can use to get to know your audience better.
How to start a newsletter for news publishers
by Nell O’Shea Carre and Evie Dinkelmeyer In the context of an ever-changing digital and social media landscape, news publishers…
Know thy audience: Using surveys to understand your readers
By Data and Insights Analyst Zahra Khalid Local news organisations thrive on the connection they have with their community. With…
How a local newspaper covers junior soccer like it’s the Champions League
Maximising Engagement
Canva for Journalists
Setting up a subscription service
Understanding and using metadata
Journalists can no longer be seen simply as content creators, but increasingly must also be seen as community builders who can enable and catalyse reciprocal exchange in social media spaces in numerous ways: directly for their readers, indirectly among the broader community, and repeatedly over time in a sustained way.
Lewis, Seth C, Reciprocity as a key concept for social media and society, Social Media + Society, Vol 1, No 1. 2015
Wait up… Have you sorted out your social media policies yet?
This template is designed to be adapted as an internal document for news publishers, to set expectations across teams and contributors on the use of company social media forums and provide guidance for best practice measures to protect organisational reputation in social media spaces.
Members can adapt this template to provide guidance to people interacting (primarily via comments) in online community spaces curated by LINA members.
Design & Engagement Directory
Canva
The gold standard in browser-based design, Canva is frequently updated its suite of design tools. Take advantage of our free Canva Pro accounts under Member Offers, and tinker with the various templates made for LINA newsrooms.
LINA has partnered with Canva to make your business and news content look professional and inviting. Firstly, LINA members can access to a 12 month Canva Pro subscription. Visit: www.canva.com/redeem and type in this code (case sensitive): LINAXCANVA
Templates courtesy of the Canva design team
Access template designs for a Media Kit, and Facebook and Instagram posts, stories, covers, and quote cards. Just click on an image below to load the template in your Canva account, and adapt it as you like! The templates were designed by Canva specifically for LINA news publishers to adapt to suit your news content. Drop in your own images, branding, tags and links to highlight local news stories.
Quote Card - Facebook
Image Post - Facebook
Statistics Post - Facebook
Quote Card - Instagram
Image Post - Instagram
Statistics Post - Instagram
Quote Card Instagram Story 9:16
Instagram Story 9:16
Mobile Video Post 9:16
Statistics Instagram Story 9:16
Media Kit Presentation
Facebook Cover A
Facebook Cover B
Canva for Journalists
For more information on using Canva tools for journalists, view their 6 x 10 minute video series here.
Adobe Creative Cloud
A professional suite of Adobe design tools for those who want more complex options. Try InDesign for print layout, Spark for content creation, and Photoshop or Lightroom for editing images.
Mailchimp
A popular choice, Mailchimp offers an intuitive UI and handy integrations with other software.
MailPoet
MailPoet plugs straight into WordPress and allows you to use your media library.
Newsletter Glue
Newsletter Glue is a WordPress plugin designed to streamline your newsletter process. It scoops up your blog post stories and creates blocks with headings, sub-text and images, meaning you can spend about 15 minutes tweaking your newsletter content, rather than four hours uploading images and moving around headers. It features an email template builder, options to publish newsletters to specific lists, segments or tags, subscriber forms and post embed blocks. It also keeps an archive of your newsletters within WordPress. They also have 30-day money-back guarantee if it’s not working for you.
Lesley Sim showed us through Newsletter Glue and offered a generous discount for members: $30USD per month.
Check out the video to see how Newsletter Glue works and see it in action for The Manly Observer.
Canva has provided free 12-month Canva Pro subscriptions for all LINA members, so don’t forget to redeem yours with the code (case sensitive): LINAXCANVA
The Canva team also designed a set of templates to make it easier for LINA members to create social media and media kit assets. This video shows how to tailor those designs for your own use, how to schedule social media directly from Canva, best practice for using Canva across teams, and a broader conversation about how Canva is using its resources to power newsrooms around the world.
Shop-Talk Recordings
This week we were very grateful to be joined by Dannielle Maguire from the Audience Team at ABC News Digital to discuss SEO and how it can be our friend, not our foe.
News Product Thinking, lead by Corinne Podger, an independent consultant and journalism trainer. Corinne has 30-years experience in the journalism sector, as a reporter, trainer, consultant, and university lecturer. She is a qualified trainer for the BBC and Reuters and an accredited trainer for the Solutions Journalism Network. Corinne works closely with newsrooms on digital innovation, and for the past 3 years has focused in building revenue awareness and opportunities into her training programs.
In this session, Corinne provides an introduction to ‘product thinking’ for journalists, and in particular how we view our content, our audiences and our services in relation to potential revenue streams. What can be monetised effectively and how might those actions impact our audience base? How do we reframe our audiences as customers and our content as product from a business perspective?
Download the presentation slides here
We heard from some industry specialists about different methods of distribution. Members had presentations on apps from Tony O’Regan at iAppNetwork and Mike Hughes at Dius/Flutter, and we also learned about Post News from Andrew Zalk.