 For those of you who don't know, I'm Heather Hendershot, director of graduate studies and compared to media studies at MIT. So great to host this talk today with Jorge Caraballo, who is a journalist and a 2022 Harvard Nieman fellow. Before that he worked for four years as a growth editor at Radio Ambulante, the most popular documentary podcast in Spanish, and the only one in that language distributed by NPR. There he led online and offline engagement initiatives to grow the community around the podcast. He holds a master's degree in media innovation from Northeastern University. He's a Fulbright scholar and a Google News initiative fellow. And the title of his talk today is How to Use Audio Storytelling to Cultivate a Community and Keep It Engaged. So I will pass the floor over to Jorge now. Thank you. Thank you so much, Heather, Andrew, for inviting me. I'm very happy to be here. I will share my screen. I have a presentation. So, oh, let me go back because I have to share a sound too. Share a sound. Let's do it. OK. So no need to go deeper on this. This is me. This is my baby. I worked for years as the growth editor at Radio Ambulante. And yes, my mission was bringing more people into the podcast, more listeners, growing the audience that was like a main metric. But another metric of success was creating the environment so people would participate. People would use Radio Ambulante as a centerpiece for civic conversations and making the most impact out of our journalism. So I was constantly using the stories, which are episodes of 30 minutes, 45 minutes every week, to all over Latin America. So Radio Ambulante, a little bit of context is a podcast. It's like this American life in Spanish. That's how you can make an idea of what it is. And every week, every Tuesday, we present an episode. And that episode, my goal was to make it impactful as possible. And impactful by our standards was making it create conversations all around the continent. So that was my job. And what I want to do in this presentation is to show you some examples of how we did that, like what kind of engagement exercises we did and why. Just like a little bit making you see how we cooked the dish. And then some principles that I think can be replicated by anyone that is interested in using storytelling. And this could be, of course, documentary as we did, nonfiction. But also it could be fiction. And it doesn't matter necessarily that these are audio stories. To me, what I learned in Radio Ambulante is that just a good story can be used to bring the attention of the internet, of people on the internet and make it a platform to connect people among each other and to create a common purpose to get to know ourselves and to get to know others. So that's that I'm going to go step by step through those principles and then we can have a Q&A. So let's start with this. So what you saw there is a video, a raw video, an edited of a Radio Ambulante Zoom party. When the pandemic started and the spirit of our community was in the lowest level, we were like, we need to do something to remind ourselves that we are not alone, that this is not a podcast that is talking to individuals necessarily, but that this podcast is a platform of a community that is distributed all over a continent. In Latin America, in Europe, in the United States, there are around 90,000 people listening to this podcast every week. And we can do something to remind that if you listen to Radio Ambulante, you share some things, some features with other people who also listen to Radio Ambulante. And we can celebrate, even though this is a tough, tough moment in our life, we can celebrate that we are not alone. And let's just do a party. We assume, let's see what happens. And we did that. So what you saw was the first party and we did four of them and to each of them more than a thousand people attended. And they were, as you see here, they were turning their cameras on. They were showing their pets, their customs, their children. They were showing you their living room. They were showing you their life. And it's still, to me, impressive that people trust it so much, right? We are all aware of how the Internet is a place in which you need privacy because you don't know what are the intentions of those who you are interacting with. But in this community, in Radio Ambulante, this community, even though most of these people don't know each other at all and they're in very different backgrounds and countries and cultures, they share something. They're listeners of Radio Ambulante. And because of that, they trust each other. But this is not something that happened out of the blue. This is not something that was like a random idea. This was a conclusion. This was the consequence. This was a consequence of an effort of cultivating a community around storytelling. So there are other examples of these kind of interactions between strangers that listen to Radio Ambulante. This is a picture of a listening club. And we will talk about later, like strangers in their cities getting into a place where they listen to an episode and then have conversation, civic conversation. Or this, this is a picture of our team in 2018 when we did a live show in New York and Washington, DC. Or, yes, other examples that we're going to... I am going to describe how we have done it. Because I think that it's important that we remember that the internet is not only that corporative platform in which these big corporations are giving you some leverage to communicate with others, but the internet is also a network in which you can create trust. And to do that stories, I think, are one of the main things or one of the main channels to connect people in a way that they trust each other and create together. So I'm going to describe you how we did that, but I think that this can be translated to many different contexts, not only in podcasts, but in other ways, other creative ways, other creative languages. So I'm going to show you some examples of our engagement and you will be able to listen a little bit of the stories that I am going to tell you. By the way, disclosure, when I came to as an Iman fellow, I stopped working as a raviambulante. So this is a sample of what we did in the four years that I was there. So the first one is it's an exercise that we did when we published an episode called Albums and Negrantes or Migrants Album. And I'm going to show you, but you're going to listen a short clip and then I will give you more context about the story. So migration is a big theme in Latin America. And in the recent years, in the last five years, Venezuelan migration to other countries in the region, it's a big story. So what you just listened is Anamir. Anamir is a Venezuelan woman who migrated to Peru. And it was very hard for her to adapt to this new country, not only because she faced xenophobia, but also because of what she just said. Like everything changes so quickly and you're still so attached to your country that you need to be living in that unstable situation of, should I have roots in the new country? Should I root myself here? Or should I be prepared to move to another place? What do I do? Like, where do I belong? And one of the main characteristics of Radio Volante or one of the big groups inside the Radio Volante community is that of migrants. Many of Radio Volante listeners are people who have migrated from Latin American countries to the United States, to Europe, to other places in which they find new opportunities. So we knew that many listeners of Radio Volante shared kind of a similar story or had lived and experienced similar to that point of Anamir. So we tried to do something. We tried to tap into that collective knowledge and experience inside our community and asked them to give Anamir advice or give Anamir some words of recognition and awareness of what she was going through. So we tweeted this, like, as Anamir, our, like, this main character of today's episode, many of the people that listen to Radio Volante know what it means to be a migrant. So share a story, a short story about your experience establishing yourself in a new place. What was the hardest thing or the most exciting thing? And we used this hashtag. And this thing exploded. We started getting these kind of responses. More than 10 years ago, I haven't lived in Argentina where I was born. I lived in Puerto Rico and then I met a friendship there and disgraced. Now we live in Bogotá, where the sun kisses me and I am drowned by books that don't let me go. And here I understood that to be a migrant can also be a nationality. And then people started sharing pictures. We didn't ask them to share pictures. They started sharing pictures after first years of being migrants. Or this guy who had, like, 3,000 rude tweets, which was very unusual in our engagement strategy or engagement work. He said, I got four years ago here in Paris with 200 euros, no speaking French, not knowing anyone. I started working as a dishwasher. And a year ago, I brought my dad because my mother died. And today, I'm the chef of a bar. I speak French and I live with my dad in a bar. And he was using the hashtag. And this was very intimate stories of people who felt reflected in our story, but at the same time were proud of what came after that turbulent first time or first period as migrants. And then people were acknowledging that a podcast, like Cello, she's saying when a podcast generates that listeners make their universe bigger and multiply the stories. And this is what was going on. And this is what I think it's super, super valuable because Anna Mer's story became the first in a block of another stories. And what was happening here is that the listeners were making this story bigger. We're enlarging the story. We're making it more complex. And the paradigm of the first, the way we understand, we usually understand our role as storytellers is that we produce a story, we publish the story, and that's it, right? People can comment the story or can share the story. But what is happening here is that people are making the story grow with their own stories. The episode didn't end. The episode was not at this screen piece when we published it, the episode was open. And the continuation of the episode is this, is this. And I find it striking and beautiful to understand storytelling as an open-ended process, collaborative and participative, right? So this is what was going on with this story. This person is saying Guarra Ambulante and the stories in this hashtag have me crying, celebrating, laughing, thinking about my people. So that's just an example of how the character of a story, and this is a non-fiction story, is not alone because you as a listener, you are also a character of the podcast. And we're gonna talk more about that meta thing later. This is another example. It's called Milo Bardecian, my favorite place. And it was about a story. It was an exercise that we did for a ritual as I will start calling it. This was a ritual that we did when we published this story about a group of friends in San Jose, Costa Rica, the capital of Costa Rica. This is a group of college friends who started gathering at this very tiny, dark karaoke bar in downtown San Jose. This was a bar that almost only them attended. It was not the most popular bar. It was not at all in the list of touristic places in San Jose. It was like a kind of secret corner of the city that they collared with their identities, with their joyfulness. And they got to know the owner of the bar. And unfortunately, and this is a spoiler of the story, but unfortunately, the owner of the bar was this serious Chinese woman decided to close the plate. And with that decision, their life as a group like took a different direction. So we decided to focus on something that it was like an important line in the story, which was these places that become contents or become vessels of your identity and are not the most popular places in your city. But I think we all have that. We all, even though, even if we live in a city or in a rural area, we all have these kind of sanctuaries that are relevant to the expression of our identity, of our freedom. And we wanted to know what were those sanctuaries for our listeners? We have listeners, as I told you, everywhere in the world, mostly in the United States and South America and Central America, also in Europe. And we wanted to know what were those sanctuaries and not only to know that, but to see them and not only to see them, but to make them useful. So we asked people, what's your favorite city in the, what's your favorite place in the city you live? Not the most touristic one, but the one that you love the most. Mention it using this hashtag Milugar de Siempre and we're going to make a map of places that you cannot miss with your recommendations. And we did this. We got this, we got this kind of responses. So she's sharing a place in Mexico City in the biggest university there or this one in Sierra Leone in Fuitown or this one in Montreal. This is like a kind of small cafe. We got this, we got a lot of things. And then we were like, okay, let's make something with this. And we created a collaborative map. And this is a very simple thing. We created a collaborative Google map. So anyone, instead of sending tweets with pictures, could just create a ping in their city and share it with others. And the idea of this was to create like a touristic guide of Latin American secret places or more loved places by listeners. So as a raiambulante listener, if you go to Argentina, you will have some options or some places that are relevant to listeners in Argentina. If you go to Peru the same, if you go to Colombia, if you go to the US, then you will have some reference of what are those places that are important to other listeners of raiambulante and they are organized by categories. So there were restaurants for jazz clubs. There were these bookstores. There were also karaoke bars, a lot of stuff. And this is an idea that it's very like easy to replicate and you could spend a lot of time trying to develop a map or like the lines of code to create this in a fancy way. But we were like, let's use the things that people use that are simple to replicate and to make this exercise because we have found that we cannot ask, like we need to ask for things that are not very time demanding if we want this to be really participative and at the same time, it needs to be useful. The incentive for people to participate is that this will be useful for them and for others. If it's not like that, they don't engage. So engagement, like good practices, just use the platforms that people use and Google Docs is something that almost everyone uses. Other way of engaging with people and making stories live beyond the limits of an audio story or an episode is like this conversation process that we started using in social media. So this is a question that we asked in like five months after the pandemic started. This is September, 2020, after the worst of the quarantine, we asked people like, hey, for those of you that have little children at home, what was the most memorable game, exercise or project that you did with them during quarantine? So these were a lot of parents that had been stuck in their apartments or houses with children. And we wanted them to single out that memorable moment, the memorable thing that they did with their children because we had done an episode about that. We had done an episode in which the characters had done that. So a lot of comments about that or this one was one year after the pandemic was declared and we asked people, what's the best thing that happened to you in a year full of bad news? And at the same time, like 200 comments. So we were trying to make conversations that were improbable and that were not just for the sake of having comments but of making people think about those, I wouldn't say positive things but things that are not usually in the mainstream narrative of this was a terrible year which was or this was like I only, I had no ideas of what to do with my children which is true. But at the same time, there were other stuff happening and we wanted to focus on that and to use the experience of the community to have that conversation happen. We also did extra episodes with the community and because of the community which is something that most newsrooms that newsrooms usually try to avoid because when you open the doors of your editorial newsroom to your audience, then they will start demanding or that's the fear of editors and journalists is that they will start demanding you to do what they want and interfering with your creative or editorial independence. But we were like, let's just not play that game anymore. Let's just actually listen. Like people are listening to us. Let's listen back. It's the minimum we can do. Like one of the rules of the internet is reciprocity. If this is a network, it needs to be reciprocal. So we asked people what kind of stories they wanted to listen to and they voted. Like there was a big pool of suggestions and pictures that people sent and they voted for the stories that other listeners sent that and then we prioritize and then we would pick the winners. So this is one of them. Like this is an episode that we did for a story about trans political in Argentina, the furlough girl that was declared trans in the country. And we did a story like that was story, the story of this girl who didn't identify with her with the sex that she was born when that sex as she was born. So we did a story of, okay, this is a story of a five year old girl and it's very emotional and we get to listen to the mother and to a country that is debating if should be like legally recognized or not. But the story ends with the girl which she's just seven years old. And we wanted to know what was the experience of those listeners in Raya Mulante who identify themselves as trans and are not kids anymore. What's their story? We want to see what will be the life of this girl in 10, 15 years. And to answer that question, we asked listeners in Raya Mulante that identify as trans and we did an extra episode. Or we did this one. And this one was suggested by the community. Like we want to know what's the story in Medellin which is my city, the city where I was born. What's the story in Medellin? With Marco tours because there is something happening in this city and this is like a listener sent this idea. There are people coming from all over the world to Medellin to visit the places where the public school had lived or the places where he had, where he put bombs. And I wonder why are they doing that? What's the city? How's the city dealing with that troubled past? So because I was there as a reporter, I did the story of Augusto Guad and I did one of these tours that took me to his stomach, to his thumb that took me to the place where he was in jail, to his building, like a building that he built, where he lived. And then I was able to talk to one of the guides of those tours to ask them, why are you doing this? Like, why are you glorifying this person who victimized so many people? And it's a very, I think, hour-old story to touch the identity of a city. And we did it thanks to listeners who suggested it and to other listeners who voted for it. Or we did this one in which we tell the story of Rayon Gulante. So this is a meta story. Like, this is the story of a podcast who makes stories. That makes stories, which is also, which became the most-listened episode in Rayon Gulante. We also have fun interactions in social media and like, for example, a question. Those who listen to podcasts when they were in public transportation or in their cars during the pandemic, when are you listening to podcasts right now? And there are like 660 responses. Like, this is like, podcasts are a medium that somehow demands routines. Like, you listen to your podcast usually when you're doing something that you constantly do, going out for a walk, going to commuting, washing your dishes, whatever. So now that the routines are so messed up because of the pandemic, like, when are you listening to them? Or another question is, how would you explain what a podcast is to your grandfather or grandmother without mentioning the words radio and internet? Because we're all the time constantly exploring how do people think about this medium? How do they relate with this medium? Which is essential if we want to be useful and deliver a message, we need to understand what does this mean to them? So this kind of question we did then or another one to grow and to expand the network. We ask people like, mention a friend that doesn't listen to podcasts and tell us a detail about that person. Her favorite movie, her Surya call sign, a secret, whatever you want to tell us. And then we will respond, we will reply with the ideal episode for them, of Rayon Boulangui. So they start listening to our podcast. So we were using data from the listeners and at the same time, we were referring, we will try to hook those referrals with a personalized recommendation. But our strategy, engagement strategy, was not limited only to the stories. We wanted also to create different new environments to listen to podcasts. So the first one and the one that I think I'm very proud of is listening clubs. We got this tweet in 2017, November, 2017. I arrived in Raya Boulangui August, 2017. So little less than two months before like two months before this podcast, before this tweet. And this is Diane Vélez, a visitor. I didn't know her. She says, Raya Boulangui is more than a podcast in our home, it's family. It's what Alex Mixtape and I discuss on Wednesdays. It's what my parents listen to while Dengue and Yajule Pottarapa, which means come and help us to cut the potatoes. And she has in parentheses, check out tablet next to cutting board. So they start cutting potatoes together and they're listening to an episode. And we were like, oh my God, people are listening to this together. This is not like one of the assumptions that we had four or five years ago is that podcasts are a very intimate, individualistic medium. Like you listen to your podcast in your headphones and that's something that it's speaking to your ear and to your ear only. And they started challenging that assumption. And we start getting more and more of these messages. Like Dan, we were seeing some colleagues at work in lunchtime listening to an episode. And we were like, okay, this is something that is happening. That's interesting. And then we were like, I'm like, we need to tap into this opportunity because maybe podcasts are not necessarily something that you should listen to alone. So we created listening clubs and I want you to watch this three minute video. Los clubes de escuchar son eventos en los que los oyentes de un podcast, en este caso radio ambulante, se encuentran en persona a escuchar una historia y después atender una conversación alrededor de ella. Hemos hecho veinte clubes en nueve ciudades y hemos visto como personas desconocidas terminan abriéndose, confiando y expresando puntos de visa diversos que enriquecen no solo la comprensión de las historias sino también de su propio contexto. El concierto es que cada quien desarrolla aquello que ejercita, ¿cierto? Y lo que queremos nosotros es ejercitar desde lo libres. El acto de escuchar a otro y de conversar con otro a través de la conversación. Además de ese emocionante, ver cómo los conflictos de las historias resunan de manera única en cada comunidad y como en grupo, es mucho más fácil proponer soluciones. El día que la empresa simplemente desapareció, de un día para otro, sin avisarle a nadie, ni siquiera a los clientes, menos a los actores. La parte más importante de los clubes de escuchar el corazón de los clubes es la conversación que se tiene después de escuchar la historia. Y otro día estás en la calle y un día eres una estrella y el otro día ya no importa. Ahora en Radio Ambulante queremos que cualquier persona pueda replicar ese modelo que encuentre su comunidad y que aproveche las historias para tener conversaciones significativas sobre lo que le gusta, sobre su realidad, sobre sus identidades. Para eso liberamos todos los recursos, la metodología, la identidad gráfica, todo. Es un modelo abierto y gratuito para que cualquiera lo adapte y disfrute con otros. Escuchar podcast es una de las cosas más personales que hay, pero también puede hacer una actividad colectiva que fortalece nuestras comunidades y que nos ayuda a conocernos mejor. La escucha activa es una habilidad que hay que exigir y nos parece que no hay mejor manera de hacerlo juntos. So what happened when we opened this, this is the video that we published at the beginning. We had tested the idea, we did it in the cities where Radio Ambulante team members were and we moderated those conversations and we kind of calibrated the model and then we opened it up and we asked the listeners, you do it. Now this is for you. We will not be organized in clubs. It's not part of our, we don't have the capacity to do this. We did this for you to do it. So if you want to use it, here's everything and we published and we gave them everything as I said in the video and it was incredible and there have been more than 2,250 listening clubs organized by listeners in more than 50 cities around the world. This is a decentralized model. This is a model that each of those listening clubs have been organized, all the resources come from listeners and it's something that people feel responsible for, accountable to each other and friendships and things have started because of this. So more than 3,000 people across the world have gathered to listen to episodes together. This is one of the screen shot that screen shot of a map of 75 listening clubs that happened on a day when we watched our ninth season. Like listeners all over the world organized listening clubs to listen to the first episode of that season. The incentive was we're going to give you the episode, we're going to send you the episode before it's published to the world. If you connect with others in your community and listen to this together, we create a website and you can still access it listeningclubs.com in which you can connect with other listeners, which was the hardest thing because yes, yes, I am in Cambridge right now and I want to listen to an episode with other people but how do I know where are they? So listeners were able in this website to put the event and say, hey, I want to host this and other listeners could see, oh, there's someone in Cambridge who wants to do this and they can sign up. So it was easier to connect. And we started getting this kind of picture. So this is a listening club in Panama, strangers who connected through Rivalante and became friends. This is the same in Mexico City. Some people started expressing their FOMO and this is like someone like, hey, does someone adopt me in a club? I'm from Puerto Rico and I can join online when the pandemic started. This is an hybrid because when the pandemic started, some clubs kept going to cafes and it was safe to do it but other people joined online. And this is a picture of the New York listening club which has met nonstop, or at least until 2021, met nonstop since 2019 every week while we were in season. We also have done live shows in which listeners go to these places in which we tell live stories. And it is a way of connecting us directly with the audience and to remember that what connects us as a community is storytelling and listening and what best way to do it than telling stories live. So we did, we have done tours of that. And also another innovation or engagement strategy where there's some parties in which we invited people to celebrate in a hard moment in our lives and to remind ourselves that this is a community. This is not a group of individuals, a network of individuals, but a community. So we hired DJs, best DJs of Latin American music and this is what happened. Like people had fun, people once again expressed that or yes, indicated that Rai Omulante is not an organization for them. It's not an institution that's, that there's a distance between them and Rai Omulante but that they are Rai Omulante. And this is a proof of that. So this is just like some gifts of how these parties went which is super fun and it's so diverse. I remember in the first listening club that I organized I almost cried of the emotion. I guess like because it was incredible to see people together, strangers together being so formidable. And I remember when I did this first party, it was like, oh my God, I just can't believe how much trust these people have on us and how privileged we are to have connected this community. So a lot of tweets of celebration of the listening clubs. They say Rai Omulante is the biggest family and joyful family in Latin America or the host Rai Omulante Daniel says as usual the Rai Omulante party assumes life affirming. Yes, a lot of tweets just celebrating and somehow affirming our culture and the things that make us together. The last thing that I wanted to show us innovation is Lupa. We know that around 20% of Rai Omulante listeners are non-Spanish speakers who are learning Spanish. So we partner with a technology company and we created this Lupa. Lupa is an app that uses Rai Omulante stories to learn Spanish. So Spanish learners can at the same time discover Latin America through documentaries, audio documentaries and learn Spanish at the same time. So all of those things that I have just mentioned to you led to something that it's not the call. Like we didn't do it because of that, but at the same time it's a natural consequence and it's also necessary for these efforts to keep going and that is the Amulantes. The Amulantes is a membership program for Rai Omulante. So listeners can become members and can start donating in a regular basis to Rai Omulante and in exchange they get some perks. So they get the episodes before they're published, they get some stickers, they get some stuff. But basically it's not about what they get back, but they contribute to the community. So we started inviting people, we created like this campaign to make people join Rai Omulantes. And before we created this in 2019, this was the budget of Rai Omulante. So 60% of the budget came out of foundations, grants, 36% out of NPR, which distributes the podcast. It has an exclusive distribution agreement and it gives some money. In exchange of that agreement and 4% of donations of listeners, one a year after that, year and a half after that, this is how it changes. So members were giving 20% of the budget, a fifth. That's a huge thing. Like that's a huge revenue stream for an organization, a nonprofit organization because it means that those who the organization are serving feel responsible for the success of the organization. They're members, they're invested in the success of Rai Omulante. So storytelling at the end can lead, like good storytelling and honest, authentic engagement can lead to you being able to keep doing what you love to do, to keep working on your mission in which that is what's happening to Rai Omulante. So that's what I wanted to show you of concrete examples. Now I will just go through 10 basic steps to build an engaged community. Like what did I learn? What did we learn as an engagement team after doing those things that you just saw, right? So let me just take 30 seconds of silence because I know I've been talking a lot. So let's just 30 seconds of just letting it in and I'll start, okay? Before thinking about doing an engagement strategy for anything you do, like you have avocas, you have a newsletter, you have a storytelling project, a hybrid storytelling project, you have a game, whatever you have. If you want to open it up and you want to invite people to participate, you need to ask yourself these questions first. First is why do you want to do it? What's the motivation? What are you expecting out of it? Do you want to do engagement because you want them to become members at the end or because you want to expand the stories with the knowledge that it's in the community because you want to have trigger conversations that are not happening. You need to understand what is your motivation and also if you have the capacity to maintain it over time because what happens, what usually happens is that companies or organizations start investing in engagement and they start doing this kind of prompts online and asking people to participate but then they're overwhelmed or they're busy with other stuff and they don't have resources or attention to their engagement efforts and people feel that they're used, that they're exploited, that their attention is just a resource that the organization or the individuals are misreading. So do you have the capacity to maintain it over time, to keep listening, to keep devoting attention to those who are speaking to you? How will you measure success is another important question and it's related to the first one, like will you rate it, will you measure success because you have more comments in your social media, more likes, more shares, more listeners or you will measure success because the conversations are super meaningful or because you've got to mobilize 10 people, 10 strangers to gather in a cafe and get to know each other. Like how will you measure success? That's important and it varies a lot. It depends on what's your focus. Are you willing to listen actively which is like the question, right? Because as I said, we know, each of us know when we are being listened. And as an engagement editor, I'm on social media as a human being, like I go to social media and it's very easy for me to see when a company or even a person has an influence or whatever, is asking questions just because they want to show or perform that they're popular and that they're relevant in their communities, not because they really care about what they're asking or and you know that because of the way they engage with those who respond, right? And also the last one is what communities are meaningful to you? And this is a question that I ask myself all the time as a citizen, as me, like what are those communities are meaningful to me and why? Like why is it so important to me to participate in this conversation around X or Y? Like why do I feel so invested in this or that community? Why am I so like, why do I feel so engaged in conversations around this or that topic? Because those communities that are meaningful to you will give you, will be your reference to the communities that you want to create, right? That you want to, that you want to connect. At the end, you don't create a community but you connect it. So the first principle is to define your mission. It's like, that's for like state one, it's like how, what's your value and how do you articulate that value in a narrative that connects with people? And I usually think about admissions as a narrative. Like there is an art, there must be a conflict, right? What's the main problem that you're talking? And after asking that, why are you invested there? Why are you interested in that? Why are you prepared to live in this scenario, this environment? And what's your plan? What makes your approach effective and unique? And who are your allies? So in Raimurant's mission, for example, is to bring greater understanding about Latin America using audio storytelling. That's it, right? And that's that bring greater understanding about Latin America and Latin Latinos in the US. It's something that it's easy to connect with because Latinos, we have Latinas, we have been so affected by stereotypes in outside Latin America and even inside Latin America that to bring greater understanding means that we're challenging those stereotypes and the way to challenge those stereotypes is telling stories that show complex characters that live ordinary lives, but they're complex, right? So that complexity, which is in every story of Raimurant, is kind of a symbol of what many Latinos and Latinas feel that we just need to, we want to be seen as three dimensional human beings and that's not usually happening in some environments. So when you see someone who has admission and has the skills and a good plan like Raimurant de dos, it's easier for listeners to connect to that and to see Raimurant de more, not only like one more podcast in your list, but someone who's helping you to advance that goal that it's the goal of that organization too. Embrace a network mindset. We're online all the time, right? We're digital beings now. So what are the communities that are already engaged in conversations around the issues you cover? You need to diagnose who are those people who are already interested in those issues and how does the network structure looks like? How are they connected? How many people? How they behave? Like how the information flows in those networks and then you need to engage with those networks. It's not about, this is me, I hold all the truth. I know everything, listen to me, but be humble and say, let's just collaborate. What are you doing? This is what I'm planning to do. How can we work together and adapt? And this is mostly in the journalism landscape, but journalism is no finished product. It's not something that it's already done when you publish it, but it's a process. And I think that to understand yourself as part of a process and not as a product, yeah, not as a production company, helps a lot to engage with people. So this is the mindset of the productivity factory and in which things are just unidirectional and in networks, it's like something that it's going on and it's flowing in many directions and it's connecting you with many, many more. It's not one too many, but many too many. Go to know, get to know those who share your purpose. So now that you have diagnosed where those who are already interested in what you're doing, like get to know them. Like, who are they? Who are your listeners? Listen to them. What are their question? What are they needs? Maybe a lot of you here know about design thinking or human centered design. And it's just that. It's like, who is the person who's listening to you? Why do they find you valuable? What are the stuff they need? And maybe can you serve them? So this is why we ended up doing Lupa, for example, that app for Spanish learners. We knew that they were listening to Ryan Blanti because they wanted to learn Spanish. So we made it easier. And at the same time, we made it profitable. Collaborate, let them know to welcome their helping hands. Like that's why we ask people, you have great ideas. We cannot come up with new ideas every week alone. So let us know what kind of stories would you like us to tell and like just inviting them and making them know that you're open to that makes a huge difference. And finally, get data. You service, we did a survey every year. We called people, we did in person meetings with people understand, yes, like, how can we serve you better? Share your expertise. And this is what I was saying about being reciprocal online. Like give, give, give. Like this is to me, the spirit of the internet is share, share, share, because, and this is super hippie. I'm sorry, but I think when you share in a network, it comes back somehow, right? If you're actually part of a network. So like for three years, we were giving, giving, giving to the community. We were not asking for money only in specific occasions like giving Tuesday, like specific days, but we were mostly giving. And when we felt ready to install the membership program, immediately it started coming in. And I am aware, I'm aware that it's very hard to give three years, if you're not getting back, if you don't have all the revenue streams, we had the privilege of having the grants and NPR, but you get the concept. Like it's you're in a network, you have give, and you receive, you give and you receive. Respect people's attention because there's a lot of noise out there. And I think this is like, you know, this is a huge problem of the internet right now. We're saturated, saturated with information, our attention span is limited. So let's do things that stand out and that are valuable to people and that feel useful and meaningful and not let's just not to make more noise and recognize our blind spots. Luckily our blind spots because many times we are so narrow minded with the way we see the world and we forget that there are many things that we just don't know, that we don't do right and we should be humble and ask like, hey, how can I get better? So this is ways in which we share our expertise. We did a lot of workshops, like in which we taught others how to do a good interview for radio or in which we, you know, website we created Scuela Reimbrante which is free resources for those who want to produce stories or we create a newsletter in which we were recommending every week things that were inspiring us online, so other podcasts, music, videos, stories. So we were all the time just sharing, sharing, sharing. This one to me, it's super important and it's related to the first part of this talk in which you should develop rituals and routines because a, I think networks, and this is a quote from Giro Caldarelli, networks try to explain how a set of isolated elements are transformed through a pattern of interactions into groups and communities. And what are those interactions? What's the pattern of interactions that you can facilitate so a group is created, right? You have a network, maybe some people are interested in what you're interested but that doesn't mean that there is a group and the community is formed when those interactions become regular, become constant and they have a pattern, right? So gather meaningfully, be constant and make it unpredictable. And sometimes we feel that, yes, to talk to people or to get together, that's to ask me anything or just let's do a Twitter space and then you just get stuck in those kind of platforms and there's much, there are many more ways to get together and if you're not creative, people will just start seeing it as noise and repetitive so you need to create refreshing ways of gather meaningfully. There's a great book that it's called The Art of Gathering that I recommend if you're planning to learn more about this. So this is an example, we published a story about a girl who was kidnapped in Latin America and then we just asked people, but the story was about the family album of the family who were trying to find her in the story and then people started sending pictures of their own family albums, which was great. So it was a way to connect people around the issue that episode listening clubs is another way. This is a virtual listening club just like just expand the repertoire of rituals that you do to connect people. Set rules to preserve trust, which is essential if people don't trust those in the group, they won't participate. So you need to create a cut of conduct and moderate it. We did that for the listening clubs. We did that for every space online that we had to be a connector. It's not only that you connect with your listeners, but you connect listeners among each other and see your community as a team. So these are pictures of the listening clubs. These are like, these are not strangers to us. To us, these listeners are part of Rai Undulante and we see their collective expertise and knowledge as our knowledge. Choose the right platform. And this is key, try to own your channels because if you devote all your engagement work to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, once they change the rules, then you're screwed. So you need to own your channels. So have a mailing list, for example, or list of phone numbers that helps a lot, make it horizontal, like how can you connect with people not in a hierarchical way, but more like at the same level and explore. Sometimes it's great to do it online, but sometimes it's great just to do it offline. In Rai Undulante's case, we had our own channels. So this is the podcast feed. We publish our episodes and people, like this is something that we own. It's an RSS that we own or WhatsApp. In WhatsApp, we had a huge list of like 3,000, almost 4,000 listeners. And when WhatsApp didn't allow us to create, like broadcast lists, we took all those numbers and those numbers, phone numbers are ours. They're not of WhatsApp. So that gave us an ability to react against that change of rules, but we still use the app in the last year. We're still using the app in ways that we're useful. And this is a newsletter, which is also a list that you use. It's a media that you use, that you own, sorry. And finally, make it look unique, like the visuals and the style. They say a lot about who you are, even before people start reading you or listening to you. So these are illustrations for different episodes of Rai Undulante that are made by artists in the region and this is our original artwork that stands out in social media. We had a design team, yes, that made it look unique and that is very important if you really want to stand out. And finally, enjoy. Because I think that social engagement thing, it's about getting together in creative ways and joy is a big part of it. If it's boring, unfortunately, there are many boring instances in people's lives. So you just have to make it fun. And some useful frameworks. This is the membership guide of the membership puzzle project, which was a project of New York University and they studied how people become members, like how an individual that is just becoming aware of a brand then becomes a really huge engaged ambassador of the brand. So that is a useful framework that you could study. This is a book called Get Together, which is also like a guide book to understand different communities and how can you create or replicate that things that they found out there. And also this one, it's super, to me was very orienting. It's called the Community Campus, which divides the community building process into three sections that are divided in themes that are very, very useful too. So that's it from me. Thank you so much for listening and I would be happy to answer questions. And yeah, and just to talk, thank you. I will stop sharing. Thank you Jorge, we're all muted. So I think other people are applauding, but maybe can only hear me. So yeah, let's open up to questions. We have 20 minutes or so for discussion. Who would like to kick us off? I think Tomas had his hand up there first. Great, thank you for a fantastic talk. And I was especially interested in the fact that you mentioned your revenue strategies and how you monetized and how you made the product sustainable, which I think is super interesting. And I was wondering, and I understand that this is kind of the most pressing problem for independent media. And I was wondering if you could share some advice you would give to other similar products or interesting monetizing their platform, their medium and make it sustainable. Yes, yes, I think that at the bottom line to me, but to someone with a hammer, everything is a nail. And to me that I'm thinking about communities, to me the bottom line is to have a community that actually, it's actually invested in what you do. So for example, I am part of a community in Colombia that is led by this woman who's publishing content about how can we be more friendly and loving with the earth? How can we be more conscious of what we're doing to the earth? And she has been publishing in a blog for like 10 years and like two years ago, she was like, hey, if I want to keep doing this, but I cannot do it without your support. So she created this Patreon and hundreds, maybe thousands of people are part of that community and allow her to do that. But they are so engaged because she has been constant, she has been generous, she's clever, she's insightful, she's what she publishes useful. It has changed our lives. It makes us feel part of something that is larger than ourselves. It connects like she is a reference of the change that we want to make. And when you become that, if you're in independent media, if your mission is very clear and what you're doing, it's really useful and you are effective inviting people to follow your work, to make it better. If you're listening to them and asking them, hey, what do you need and how can I help you? When you get to that point in which the community is large enough and it will eventually happen, then you can say, okay, this is what we have, we're here together, we're part of this, you are connected to each other because we are doing this work. If we want to keep doing this together, we need your support and your financial support. And it's completely okay to say that openly and people respond in ways that surprise you, like positive ways that surprise you. So my advice is that is like, give, be useful, listen back, serve to the needs of the people and make your purpose super clear so people feel that you are advancing a mission that is your mission and it's their mission too. Is it right? If I do a small follow-up question, yeah. All right, so thank you for that, Jorge. That seems truly interesting and it's true that once a community gets a certain size then it is there, you can find a slice that is willing to fund you, right? But I wonder if how do you like, if you've been giving your community free content for a while, why would they expect to pay you? Which is what I see a lot of content creators grapple with, right? Like how do you communicate to them that your work needs to be funded in a situation where so much content is available for free, right? So I recommend you to check and study if this is something that you're trying to do, go and read the membership guide and it's part of the membership puzzle project. It was their final project. So the membership puzzle project is still there but in a new way. But there's something called the membership guide that they produced last year. And they dissected a lot of organizations that have been in that exact situation. Like how do we do? How do we create membership? Like how can we make people support us? And they have a lot of cases which are super, super interesting. But I just want to highlight something that they say and one of the reasons why people become members is not because of the content but because of the community. Because if you connect a community and then people will feel that if you're not there, the community will not be there and they don't want that loss. They don't want to lose that community because the community is what it's giving a lot of value to their lives. So somehow if creating the community is at the same time creating the base for your sustainability because the community is what people value and they will pay to be part of that community. Great, thank you. So yes, and that's the membership guide Andrew that you put in the chat, thank you. Oh, good, yeah, I saw that question. Thank you, Andrew. Next we have Amber. Thank you Heather. Thank you Jorge for this amazing talk. I was especially interested in when you were talking about like making the story grow and storytelling as an open-ended process. But I was wondering how did you choose which specific like episodes or themes to use for your community engagement in social media because I'm assuming that not all episodes were, you know, like you continue using it, so yeah. Yes, definitely, there are some episodes like political episodes that are just like, no, there's not, there's not no human, it's harder to identify with. So the episodes that we use for this kind of exercises were those episodes in which you as, in which the universal experience of the character was easier to see and was easy to identify. So migration, for example, or your connection to a city your relationship with an object like a precious object in your family, things that you're like, oh yes, I get this, I get this, I get this. I had that, like I can translate that into my life super easily, but those episodes that were more focused on hyper-specific things of the reality of Latin America, they were harder to translate into this kind of engagement. But yes, like it's human experience and universal experience. Thank you. Thank you. I was wondering if you could, you talked about so many successful engagement strategies. Well, first I wanted to say, I'm super impressed by your optimism about the internet. And there's a moment where you actually said, the internet is for listening. And I was like, that's great, because of course, we've all had sort of the opposite experience and especially with Twitter, right? And things can go awry. And I was wondering if you could talk about some of your engagement strategies that maybe failed or were less strong and what you learned from that for going forward. Oh yes, many of them, many, many, many me. Like many of engagement prompts had several responses, five responses. And I think that one thing that we learned after many failures is that you cannot ask people to think a lot, like to reflect a lot before starting typing and starting thinking about their interaction or their intervention. So many questions felt like paper questions and people won't like stop their social media feed to write down homework. They just don't want that. They just want to have fun or they just want to go to a place in their mind which is not the place in their mind that they have to go to write down a thesis, right? So it needs to be closer to their heart. It needs to be in that sweet spot of emotionally, emotions and argument. And that is very hard to craft into a prompt. So many of the prompts were felt like very mental, very rational, and people just ignore that completely. So in many of the stories, in some of the stories, we asked people to give opinions that they were not interested in thinking about the complexity of the situation in their own lives. And because the prompt is difficult, very few responses happen and because very few responses happen, less people see it, and at the end it's just worried in the feed. So that's something that we learned about how to craft prompts. And how can you be creative and meaningful at the same time? At the beginning of the pandemic, we did an exercise where there was relatively frivolous, it was, yes, it was stupid. It could be seen as stupid, but it worked. And it was like we started asking people when we were locked down all around the world, we wanted to understand how were they perceiving the world. So we focus on a sense every week, a different sense every week. So we started asking people, show us what you're seeing, send us a picture of what you're seeing in the first window at your right hand, and then hundreds of things. Then send us, I don't remember which sent, like all of the senses, but every sense had a different prompt, and it worked. And what happened, what we were trying to do is to understand the community as a body, as a single body, with thousands of eyes, each listener was an eye, each listener was like a nose, a flavor. What was the last thing that you read in this pandemic, or before the pandemic started, something like that. So we were thinking about the community as a huge system, as a huge body, and I say this, this was a successful case, but I say this because what you want is to go to the senses, go to the sensual before of the mind. Of course some topics are good to think about and to be rational and to have some conversations. It's very hard to have that. But when you go to what you're feeling and when you touch that in people, people immediately start participating. So the sweet spot between the sensual and the rational, it's something that we learned after many failures. Thank you. Do we have any other questions? I mean, I have one more. Oh, Andrew, yes. Yeah, thank you so much for this. It's been wonderful. You really got me thinking about reminding me of an experience that I had when you talked about the listening groups. So this was several years ago I taught a podcast in class and one of the things I was worried about was the selections that I had for listening were students going to engage with them. So during MIT's January period where you can teach whatever class that you want, I invited people to come listen to the things I was going to use in the semester long class. And that was the first time I'd been in a room with people sitting around a table and a speaker in the center all listening to the same thing at the same time. And I realized that, gosh, like 99% of the time that we're consuming media, whether it's in a movie theater, at a concert hall, televisions in our own house, everything, we're sitting staring at the same thing in the same direction, as opposed to those rooms where you're listening to something and you're sitting around, you're watching each other react to the same things and sort of getting a read of each other's faces. I guess my question was you guys also did that over Zoom. Is that right? Yes. Did people have the same experience doing those groups over Zoom, like media through a computer screen as they did when they were listening in person together? I think yes, but it's harder and of course there are many things that you cannot read in a screen because when you're in a room, in a round table, as you say, watching each other, you can feel the energy of the room. You can feel the attention of the room. You can feel the tension. You can feel what's flowing. You become like a single entity and when someone is anxious, when someone is feeling nervous because he's speaking up about something that it's hard to process, there are many things that you read in the body. In Zoom, it's easier, I think, just to be a little bit distant, but overall the quality of the conversation, I think, was very good in Zoom. It was less emotional, but it was good. It was insightful, it was diverse, it gave no ideas. One of the things that sometimes we did listen in clubs for stories before publishing them to see if there were things that were not clear, that could be improved, and that was great in person or in Zoom. That worked either way, but I think that when you get in a room with strangers, like in Zoom, the listening clubs were 100, 300 people. Instead, in a room, there were 12, 15 people. There's more vulnerability there. It's more fragile. That's something that you can advocate. I think we will. We've got one last question I want to take from the attendees who aren't in the panelist side of it. This is from Aguinaldo Mello, who asks, how do you see podcasts serving as a medium to enable storytelling, and how do you think we can promote a similar kind of storytelling on other mediums? This is a question of the medium or the message. That's the question. I think the podcast has had, they have its own thing. It's very, we can go here into what makes podcasts different from radio. I think that it's mostly the same, but there's a huge difference, which is that you know who's listening to you, and because you know who's listening to you, there's a reciprocal relationship, and there is a connection that you cannot have on radio. Of course, in radio, you knew that there were groups of people listening to you. You could know who are your average listener, or they could send you things, letters, whatever. But in podcasts, it's a digital medium. You have data on who's listening to you, where when the attention is dropping, you have many data points that inform you about who's on the other side, and at the same time, they can just write you. They can give you reviews, they send you emails. That ability to know who's on the other side gives you, if you're paying attention, or shapes if you're paying attention, the way you talk to that person. I think that good podcasts feel so close to you because they know who you are, because they're seeing you, almost in real time. Data is so fresh that they know who's there, and they know how to talk to you, and you feel that the podcasts you love are talking to you. Not to people similar to you, but to you. And I cannot emphasize that enough. So I think that this is about the medium, of course, that enables the storytelling feel so close. But I think that I think it's possible to replicate that, or that that would be translated to other medium, digital mediums, right? But I don't know if that's the case in the other mediums. So if as a journalist that has experimented in magazines, in video documentaries, in radio, and podcasts, the one in which I see higher engagement, much higher engagement is in podcasts. That is really interesting. I'm really glad that we got into some issues about medium specificity at the end there. That's great. I think that Wade Roush, who's in our attendee pool, might summarize things the best for us to close out. He said, fantastic session. So inspirational for those of us working to build community and podcasting. Congrats, Jorge, and enjoy the rest of your year at Harvard. So I would echo that. Thank you so much. And I'm just going to say one more thing. Just put in a little plug for next week's colloquium series. We have Hillary Shoot speaking from Northeastern, and she's going to be talking about mouse. And I'll just add that, you know, we arranged this maybe almost two months ago. She said her project was about the, you know, continuing relevance of mouse. And she was sort of asking like, you still feel like it's relevant. And I was like, oh, absolutely. And of course this was before the recent crisis and controversy around mouse in Tennessee. So it's going to be a terrific, terrific talk. So I will see all the grad students there. And I hope to see many of our other attendees there as well. Thank you again, Jorge, and good night to everyone. Thank you so much. Bye bye.