Twenty-five stations will start a Digital Transformation Program developed by CPB and the Poynter Institute Jan. 9 that features a greater emphasis on gathering and analyzing data than the program’s previous iteration.
Participants will focus on one goal during the nine-month program as they learn about leading with new strategies, managing digital products on multiple platforms and growing digital audiences and revenue. A separate cohort of 25 stations will start the program in March.
CPB has supported similar programs, including the first phase of the Digital Transformation Program and a one-year Digital Culture Accelerator program. The new phase is designed for stations that have not previously participated in such trainings.
“We’ve seen that a lot of stations have not yet really expanded their audiences or brought those digital audiences down the funnel to membership or revenue,” said Sitara Nieves, VP of teaching and organizational strategy at Poynter and a co-leader of the program. “So we really want there to be a path to sustainability, which is both audience and revenue.”
One hundred additional stations will take part in the program in 2026 and 2027. Applications for 2026 will open in the summer. Applications for 25 stations to participate in a more advanced, six-month version of the Digital Transformation Program will also open sometime in January, according to Poynter.
Focus on analytics
The program starts with a general session involving five to seven members of each participating station, including the GM or CEO. Leaders then attend a three-day workshop about planning and implementing stationwide strategies and standards to tackle a specific challenge, Nieves said.
That challenge must focus on a digital project’s audience and revenue, such as increasing a podcast’s downloads by 50% or making a newsletter a primary platform for people who otherwise wouldn’t engage with other products or programs, according to Quentin Hope, co-leader of the program and executive director of High Plains Public Radio.
Throughout the nine months, a leader from each station will also attend monthly leadership workshops led by Nieves. Hope said the sessions will teach GMs how to foster collaboration and planning among teams.
“I think digital and cross-platform, by nature, requires a much more cross-functional approach,” Hope said. “Individuals from content to development to tech to reporters really need to work together with a unified goal of building audience.”
Hope said Nieves will teach leaders about marketing a product at the start of development. When developing a product, leaders should bring in members of their station’s marketing team early so they can have a say in how to design the product for the intended audience, according to Hope.
GMs should also incorporate audience and revenue measures into internal conversations, Nieves said. As part of the program, two station employees will participate in six analytics workshops and lead the creation of a dashboard to measure that audience. The goal, Hope said, is to track relevant metrics of the station across all of the station’s platforms.
“You can have hundreds of metrics, right?” he said. “But what’s the smaller set of core metrics that you really want to be able to track?”
Stations should use data to drive decisions because it helps them serve audiences effectively, Hope said.
“We fulfill the mission to the degree we’re reaching wider audiences and particularly the audiences we intend to serve, right?” Hope said. “They may be underserved. There may be important issues and things like that that you want to be able to get in front of that audience and engage that audience.”
Most participating stations have told Hope and Nieves that they don’t have an organization-wide dashboard for analytics, Hope said. Instead, they have different datasets that different people review as needed. Building a data dashboard centralizes that data.
Seer Interactive, a commercial marketing and data analytics firm, will lead the data workshops. Hope said Seer will “bring a fresh and outside view and perspective from leading-edge digital marketing efforts and digital analytics.”
An initial phase of the program in 2022–23 included 79 stations. Participants enjoyed the coaching and collaborative nature of the program, according to Beth Jacobs, CPB’s VP of digital strategy and innovation. But they had trouble tracking audience, sales and sponsorship data. So CPB and Poynter added data sessions to the new phase to help stations learn data skills and understand revenue sources.
The program also includes 16 general sessions, 12 coaching sessions and four sessions where employees from different stations check in with each other for support and accountability.
In the general sessions, five to seven station employees break the overarching challenge into smaller steps and develop strategies to tackle them one at a time, Hope said.
In the coaching sessions, stations will meet with consultants in groups of five. The consultants will answer questions, provide guidance and inform Hope and Nieves of stations’ progress so they may adjust the program as needed.
Knowing the audience
Nieves and Hope have been meeting with GMs and CEOs of participating stations to develop their nine-month challenges based on their goals and available resources.
“We’re very immersed in making sure the program really meets stations’ needs and that it’s effective,” Nieves said.
Hope said challenges use existing infrastructure and resources so stations can start immediately. Stations should develop a challenge with a defined audience, platform and goals, he said.
Those requirements speak to pursuing an audience-first model, according to Hope. Stations need to shift from creating products because the content may be interesting to report on to having a specific audience in mind from the start, he said.
The intent, he said, is that “by focusing on this one challenge, you learn processes, new ways of doing business and new ways of leading change that you can then just take to the next challenge. So it’s intended to be a replicable process.”
Being audience-first also means ending programs that haven’t built audiences. That can free up time and resources for programs with more potential, Hope said.
The specifics of which challenge to pursue come down to the programs and resources a station already has and where they want to improve, Nieves said. That includes enhancing existing data dashboards for stations that already have them in lieu of building new ones.
“We certainly don’t want them to abandon something that’s working really well,” Nieves said.
Stations’ goals
For Lakeshore Public Media in Merrillvillle, Ind., participating in the program is an opportunity to ensure people can access episodes of the station’s initiative exploring early childhood development, according to CEO Chuck Roberts.
Roberts said he hopes his staff will learn how to package and promote the content using existing resources. That will hopefully alleviate fears they have about the program’s workload, he said.
“There’s this stress level when you first bring this to the group and say, ‘OK, on top of everything else, we’re going to enroll in this DTP program through CPB to help us with our digital,’” he said. “People lose the color of their skin because they’re frightened. But we’ve looked at it as, we’re just taking what we’re already doing and it’s going to enhance our efforts and abilities. So we’re not starting something new. We’re just attacking something we’ve been doing from a new angle.”
Jacobs said CPB and Poynter adjusted the program schedule to make it less intense than the 2022–23 phase. She said she and Poynter understood that the track takes time and some stations are smaller with fewer resources. Jacobs said she hopes stations can expand their capacity for future projects and initiatives through the program.
“I think the biggest challenge that public media faces now really is that they don’t have necessarily the same amount of resources and capacity that a lot of publicly traded private entities or commercial media entities have,” Jacobs said. “So what we’re trying to do is really help those stations take advantage of a program like this, which maybe on their own using their own resources, they would not be able to afford.”
For LPM, the capacity the program provides for future use is vital, according to Roberts.
“We can continually post to Facebook and post things on YouTube, but unless we have the intentionality that this program is going to help us bring, it’s like shooting out a shotgun and hoping someone sees it,” Roberts said. “So this is going to help us fine-tune what we’re doing and be more vital and be more consistent with what we’re doing than if we just didn’t put any resources to it.”
In Watertown, N.Y., WPBS GM Mark Prasuhn has also struggled to digitize programs while staffers are already working on broadcast content and memberships. He said WPBS is participating in the program’s March cohort to learn strategies for curating digital content, gaining younger audience members and increasing revenue.
“This, I think, really should help us in terms of really learning some best practices and getting insights into how others are approaching these challenges,” Prasuhn said.
Although Prasuhn and other WPBS staffers don’t know the specific challenge they’ll work on throughout the nine months, they know the station needs to become more digital-first and audience-first, Prasuhn said.
Streamlining access to digital tools like video players and utilizing data is part of that transition, Prasuhn said, but he and his staff are “looking forward to getting that guidance” from the program.
“If we aren’t building and measuring and maintaining a significant digital audience, we won’t have a path to monetize it either,” Prasuhn said. “So we’ve got to do that first.”
In leading the digital transformation fundamentals track and advanced track, Nieves and Hope are looking to guide stations like LPM and WPBS into building that digital audience, Nieves said.
“We want to, as much as possible, help public media stations survive, thrive, become sustainable and truly become audience-serving institutions,” she said. “A lot of these stations are the only place for information and news in their communities and they serve a vital role, and we want to make sure that they have the tools and the skills that they need to really be able to serve their local communities and diversify their sources of revenue so that they can truly be sustainable for years to come.”