WHYY

Challenge

As the Greater Philadelphia region’s leading public media organization, WHYY is responsible for providing top-notch TV and radio programming, connecting communities through events, and reporting critical news to its audience. Since first hitting the radio airwaves in 1954, WHYY has become a staple in most Delaware Valley households for the last half-century – and as audiences have grown to know and love WHYY, they’ve also sought out ways to meaningfully connect with the brand on social media.

WHYY came to Slice Communications looking for recommendations on how they could strategically structure their social media content and distribution in order to meet the needs of their audience while still achieving organizational goals.

Insight

We began by meeting with key stakeholders from the WHYY team in order to better understand how the organization was utilizing its 30+ social media properties. As a large and complex media operation, we needed to hear from all departments to truly understand the current social media strategy as a vehicle for audience feedback, but also as a distributor of news, programming, fundraising, and event content.

Together, we identified indirect competitors in the market, as well as peer organizations around the country. Slice performed an in-depth analysis of these companies’ social media channels, including one-on-one Zoom interviews with public media colleagues at stations across the nation. We supplemented this research with additional interviews from WHYY staff members. This approach allowed us to collect both qualitative and quantitative data that painted a fuller picture of opportunities and issues for social media in the PBS and NPR space.

With access to WHYY’s social and web analytics, Slice was also able to complete a full audit of their owned channels to identify meaningful trends. We uncovered significant evidence that backed up the findings of our competitive landscape analysis and interview sessions.

After weeks of research, we prepared a comprehensive deck of channel-by-channel recommendations that clearly identified the suggested changes, the reasoning behind said changes, and the tactical steps needed to achieve the ultimate goals. Before sharing with WHYY, the deck was reviewed by Slice’s Diversity Advisory Council. The Council contributed valuable insight on suggested voice and tone, inclusive creative campaigns that spoke to all communities within WHYY’s reach, and how to amplify and represent diverse voices through the existing social media channels.

Success

In a two-hour presentation, Slice shared high-level insights and recommendations with the WHYY team:

We began with a target persona analysis.
We outlined key findings from our situation analysis of both peer organizations and WHYY’s own channels, including data visualization of digital behavior changes quarter-over-quarter to better illustrate where we were seeing the greatest ROI in terms of social media-driven conversions.
Based on the above, Slice shared tactical recommendations for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube. This included data-based suggestions for frequency, content and format breakdowns, paid social strategy, and best practices per channel.
In order to show how the recommended tactics could be applied, we drafted several creative campaigns for consideration.
We included a toolkit outline to help engage employees in social media and leverage their own networks.
Relying heavily on peer interviews, Slice was able to make recommendations on ideal social media roles and structure within a public media organization.
Lastly, we outlined KPIs based on organizational goals and the recommendations listed above.

WHYY was pleased with the results and requested a follow-up executive summary for the C-Suite.

These types of projects require intense research and analysis, but the Slice Strategy Team relishes the opportunity to really dig in and leave no stone unturned. We see ourselves as a true partner in these projects, willing to help translate strategy to client-led execution as seamlessly as possible.