Winter holidays present ample engagement opportunities for newsrooms.
Let’s explore some of those opportunities in a contest.
For the next week or so, I’m going to collect nominations from Digital First newsrooms, explaining your engagement projects. Sometime after I gather all the nominations, I’ll post them here and voting will begin. The winning newsroom (or two) will receive a Priority Mail box stuffed with candy.
Your engagement project needs to be something that’s conducted at least in part between Veterans Day and New Year’s Day. It doesn’t have to be tied to a holiday, but obviously holidays present lots of opportunities:
- Did you engage around Thanksgiving, asking people what they’re thankful for or for recipes (or something else)?
- Did you engage around Black Friday and/or Cyber Monday?
- Did you try some kind of Hanukkah engagement?
- Are you running a Christmas engagement project (recipes, memories, video renditions of Christmas carols, holiday lights map and/or contest …)?
- Are you doing some year-end or New Year’s engagement (best resolution, community voting on biggest local stories of the year, best local entertainment event, etc.)?
- Are you doing engagement around Kwanzaa?
- Are you engaging around holiday travel (inviting people to submit pictures of them reading your newspaper in fun destination settings or to submit other travel photos, people whining about travel delays, as I do occasionally, etc.)?
- Are you helping needy people in the community through a drive such as collecting donations of winter coats or canned goods?
- Is your engagement built around winter weather, rather than a holiday (snowman photos, community map tracking where the plows have been, winter weather memories)?
- Is your engagement built around a local sports team (basketball starting, football team headed for a bowl game)?
- Is your engagement not geared to the season but just happening now (maybe tied to people’s efforts to register for Obamacare or lied to a local issue or event)?
- Something I haven’t thought of?
Deadline for entries will be Monday morning, Dec. 16 23. Your entry should include a description of the project, including how the public participates. How are you using social media, your website or app(s), your newspaper to promote the project or for people to participate? Include a link (or more). Send a photo or video that’s part of the project (or a link to it). Are you offering a prize, and if so, is it offered by an advertiser or from the newsroom budget (or someone’s closet)? Is there an advertiser tie-in or another way that the project generates revenue? Are you running the project in a partnership with any community organizations or with your blog network? Do you have metrics showing engagement, participation, viewing, social media engagement or traffic from your project?
You can email me your entry, but I prefer entering by posting in the comments here.
If your project is New Year’s-focused, let me know whether you would feel at a disadvantage if the voting happens before Christmas. If a few projects would prefer voting in 2014, I’ll delay the voting until then. Otherwise, we’ll vote the week of Dec. 16, so I can send out candy to arrive in the winning newsrooms Christmas week. Update: We do have a New Year’s-focused entry, so voting will start Jan. 2, and I’ve extended the deadline for entries for a week.
If you’d like to participate and don’t have any ideas (that whining-travel-tweets idea was pretty lame, I admit), see last year’s Valentine contest or the Valentine, spring and fall engagement contests this year and see if you can adapt one of those ideas to this season (with enough improvements to land the candy).
Hi Steve,
At The Times Herald in Norristown we’re doing two separate winter-themed community engagement projects:
Our first project is a snowman decorating contest by our staff. Each department in our building has received a snowman and the final project is due Dec. 12. On that day, I’ll be taking a picture of each snowman and will post them into an album on Facebook. Our readers get to vote for their favorite snowman by “liking” the picture of it. The “voting” will be open for a week, and then we’ll be announcing our winner at our annual holiday party on Dec. 19 and the department that wins gets a pizza party! We did this last year with a gingerbread house decorating contest and got great feedback from readers — you can see it here: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151190064443645.467450.52255693644&type=3. The winning house received 135 likes!
Our second project is asking our readers for photos of their decorated home for Christmas. We’ll be asking for photos on Facebook and will put submitted photos into an album on Facebook where readers will be able to “like” their favorite decorated home. Then Christmas week, we’ll be putting the photos with the most “likes” in our print product. We’re going to begin asking for submissions today, so look for an album over on our Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/TimesHeraldPA.
While these projects are centered on Facebook, we’ll be promoting them through Twitter and on our website as well.
I’m anxious to see what other properties are doing for the community engagement projects. It’s the perfect time of year to do it!
Ashley
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We are doing several things for Christmas including getting a roundup of th best Christmas light displays in Lebanon County by asking people to submit addresses/intersections that we add to our map. http://www.ldnews.com/local/ci_24605367/map-best-christmas-light-displays-are-lebanon-valley … we also created a map of where you can get Xmas trees from farms or retailers http://www.ldnews.com/datacenter/ci_24513589/map-christmas-tree-farms-retailers-lebanon-valley and finally, we are partial sponsors of a Christmas charity, Operation Santa that Lebanon Daily News has done for about 31 years. I’m using RebelMouse to collect all the stories we run each day in the print edition. http://www.ldnews.com/local/ci_24612636/lebanons-operation-santa-set-kick-off-2013-drive … as a side note, we also asked people what they were thankful for on Facebook during Thanksgiving. We compiled the list into a slide show on Storify. http://www.ldnews.com/local/ci_24611360/what-are-you-thankful-readers-respond-facebook?IADID=Search-www.ldnews.com-www.ldnews.com
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We’ve had a couple good engagement efforts lately, including: memories of JFK’s assassination (we were inundated with emails, letters, online comments) that made for strong print and digital packages; and a holiday cookie contest, our first such endeavor, which attracted 15 entries and yielded a tasty feature story. Here’s the link for the cookie contest story, which ran this week: http://www.marinij.com/lifestyles/ci_24648883/sweet-tradition-winners-ijs-first-holiday-cookie-contest
We are launching again our successful #MarinLights Storify project. Last year we got a lot of engagement from folks who submitted photos of holiday lights and others who simply wanted to know where they could see some of the over-the-top houses decorated with colorful lights. You can see the beginning of our Storify project here — we’ll use it to do a feature or two in print as well: http://www.marinij.com/marinnews/ci_24655730/marinlights-holiday-spirit-shines-across-marin-county
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The Chambersburg Public Opinion is holding a Christmas cookie recipe contest, driven through Facebook and promo ads. http://on.fb.me/IzXTP1
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Holly Mahaffey are I conducting a Morning Sun New Year’s Baby contest. We’re in the beginning stages, but we’re gathering contestants; local families expecting a baby around the first of the year. First, we’ll write little bios about each family and share them with our audience. We’ll ask our audience to pick which family they think will have their baby first in the new year. Our plan is to run little engagement contests leading up to the first birth; who will have the longest labor, which baby will be last, tallest baby, etc. The baby born first will be crowned our New Year’s baby and we’ll write a feature about them. We are gathering a prize package for the winning family, and hope to have prizes for reader contests too.
We’re playing with the idea of making it like a Baby Bowl, but more like playoffs or a competition with more than two teams, and even creating odds of each family winning based on certain criteria. Or, treating it like a Morning Sun baby shower game. We’re still brainstorming, but can have a more solid plan and initial entries to link to soon.
I feel like our contest would do better if voting was held off until closer to the end of the year.
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In Torrington, I’m gathering up both staff and submitted photos (we’re asking people to submit houses they want to nominate here – http://newsroomcafe.wordpress.com/2013/12/10/help-us-map-torrington-holiday-light-displays/) of holiday lights in the city and mapping as many as we can on a Google map once the photos and addresses start to come in.
I’ve created a Media Center gallery (http://media.registercitizen.com/2013/12/12/photos-torrington-holiday-lights-2013/) to display all the photos, which I’ll highlight on our website, blog, social media and our mobile apps, and also plan on taking a few of the more elaborate displays to Facebook, perhaps by splitting the an image showing two houses and asking people to comment if they like the house more and like the post if they’d vote for the other.
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In Kingston, N.Y. We upgraded our yearly Holiday Lights tour.
We solicit entries from our community
http://www.dailyfreeman.com/lifestyle/20131127/tell-us-about-your-holiday-lights
… which we then put together into a drivable interactive map
https://www.google.com/maps/ms?msid=215190116978132472958.0004ed27c41dc949e1535&msa=0&ll=41.923163,-73.987513&spn=0.015486,0.03695&dg=feature
… and some of those houses on the route are touted and put into a Storify (we use #DFLights13 this year https://www.tout.com/hashtags/dflights13
We created a QR code to facilitate directions (and for ease of access on mobile devices and tablets AND print! http://www.scribd.com/doc/191330742/Daily-Freeman-Holiday-Lights-Tour-2013
…. Our photog then makes a gallery of nominations: http://media.dailyfreeman.com/2013/12/13/photos-daily-freeman-holiday-lights-tour-2013/
The story, which links to all this content, focuses on some of the homes that stand out.
Once published, we’re are going to use crowdmap to allow others who missed a chance to get in to add themselves to the tour.
And we put it all together in one page, because why not?
http://www.dailyfreeman.com/holiday-lights
We’ve got a couple more surprises, but why ruin the fun? You’re going to have to find out.
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Days before Thanksgiving, the Chico Enterprise-Record sought to engage readers struggling with last-minute holiday cooking questions by hosting an online chat with three Chico chefs. Dubbed “Thanksgiving 411,” the chat took place two days before the holiday feast and lasted one hour, with readers asking impromptu questions ranging from the best way to cook turkey to non-marshmallow yam recipes and healthy-but-delicious vegetable dishes.
We used Scribble Live to host the chat. Reporter Ashley Gebb moderated and posted recipes, while readers typed in their name (either real or pen names – creativity points for Gravy Train Conductor, whoever you are) and questions for the chefs to instantly answer.
In advance, we promoted the chat extensively in print (in both the food and news sections) and on our website, Facebook, Twitter and even Tout. A breaking news bar at the top of our homepage alerted readers to the chat for 30 minutes before it started and throughout its duration. We published a chat recap the following day with a weblink so readers could go back and read the discussion in its entirety.
The link is still available at http://live.chicoer.com/Event/Thanksgiving_411?Page=0
As for engagement, we had 30 submitted questions, 56 unique visitors, 96 page views, 32.86 average minutes on site and 3,155 engagement minutes – not too shabby for our first attempt. But, the most rewarding measure of success? Our chefs all had a blast and said they would love to participate again!
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Posting this response on behalf of The Denver Post’s Dan Schneider, who is busily working on a new marijuana website for us…
For the seventh year, The Denver Post is allowing readers to upload photos of their decorated homes to our interactive map (http://denverpost.com/holidaylights) where readers can zoom in on their area or take in the whole metro area. The printed map allows readers to see only the area they’ve zoomed in on and up to 10 listings with complete addresses in the visible area so they can determine a route to see the lights.
In addition, the map allows readers to look at past years’ listings to find areas that might be worth exploring.
Every week in December we choose a winner from among the submitted photos to focus on. Winners get a $25 gift card, and their photo is published in the Saturday Home section in print and online, with a short story about the history of their lighting displays (ex.: http://www.denverpost.com/homegarden/ci_24720824/holiday-lights-winner-westminster-man-does-it-love)
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At the Macomb Daily, we hopped aboard the manic Elf-on-the-Shelf train by asking readers to share their personal anecdotes and photos. We were gratified by how warmly they responded. Here’s our stosry: http://www.macombdaily.com/lifestyle/20131220/social-media-fuels-elf-on-the-shelf-mania
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Hi Steve,
The Saratogian and Troy Record are teaming up on this project.
In observance of our area’s First Night event, “Color Me First Night!” we’re asking readers how they “add more color to their winter blues” —
Participants can enter through Dec. 26 and share photos, videos, recipes, etc. of whatever helps get them through these grey winter days. We’ll share submissions online and in print and three winners will receive two First Night buttons (all-access admission).
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