Having good audience engagement is important. If your audience is consuming what you are producing, that shows interest. If they are not showing interest, you need to look at what you are doing and adjust so they do. Below are some examples of how I keep audience and staff engagement high so I can properly represent my community.

The biggest part of my job working with the WEB is tracking what gets us views and what is not as popular. The things that are getting us the most views are what I want to create more of so I take full advantage of SNO's analytic feature to track what stories are getting us the most views. I also track what times people are more likely to be on the website so we can post more during those boom periods.

From time to time in our newspaper, we do special competitions where a select number of people can win a reward if they complete a specific task. The stickers on the cover to the left were winnable if people were one of the first 25 people to complete the crossword we had in the paper. Last year, we also hid a golden egg somewhere in the school, and the person who found it won a free yearbook. Fun, little interactive activities like that help keep our community engaged with our work and helps to get more eyes on our content.

Our program does not receive funds from our district so we are forced to fundraise to purchase equipment for the journalism room. Everyone must raise $100 for our program through things like selling cookie dough, buying ads, or most commonly selling ads. We offer ads for our newspaper and our website and I oversee the purchasing of WEB ads. Our website costs money to keep running every year so the WEB ads help tremendously to cover that fee. I also worked with my advisor to add a feature on our website where people can directly donate to the program. My main goal this year with advertisements and fundraising has been to make it an easier process for everyone involved so everyone can reach their $100 quota more easily.

Trying to motivate editors from all five staffs to join in a collaborative effort to get all of our SNO badges was a tedious job at first. I needed a fun way that I could celebrate earning the badges so everyone stayed motivated and I thought of a creative and unique idea. 

 Each of our five staffs has a staff mascot that represents them. In my program, we like to have fun and do out-of-the-box things so I thought, what if I took each of those mascots and put them on a poster that said Best of SNO?  I teamed up with an illustrator on my staff and she made the drawing for me. For each badge we earned, I revealed a little bit more of the poster to everyone. I've been slowly revealing bits of it every time we earn a badge and so far, it is keeping people's attention. Sometimes what motivates people on staff is not what you would expect.