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Role of the National Program Office

OVERVIEW

Sound Partners has become a laboratory for a wide range of broadcaster and community collaborations. We ask broadcasters and partners to draw on their combined strengths to produce innovative programming and outreach activities designed to inspire and invigorate their communities. By blending their distinct voices and resources, and inviting new ideas and audiences into the mix, partnerships elevate the level of dialogue to confront and solve the health care problems facing their communities.

Since its inception in 1997, the program has funded 104 experiments that engage broadcasters and communities in problem solving around health care issues. With this grant round, partnerships and funding extend to commercial broadcasters and print media, educators, community and governmental agencies, hospitals and clinics as well as to public radio and television.

Even as Sound Partners offers the opportunity for public broadcasters to refine how they explore and deliver content, the new choices present challenges on a number of levels:

  • How do stations become more “interactive” while maintaining journalistic boundaries?
  • How do stations develop new reporting and collaborative skills?
  • How do grantees know what events, materials or efforts will yield worthwhile results from the community?
  • How can stations learn from or track the progress of other Sound Partners grantees?
  • What other public broadcasting efforts in community-based collaboration can grantees draw on as resources?

The National Program Office is in place to help grantees answer some of these questions.

The two primary roles of the National Program Office are offering technical assistance, as these community and media collaborations unfold, and dissemination, which is tracking and reporting on grantees' efforts.

TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE

We encourage experimentation between broadcasters and community partners by providing a range of technical assistance. Two national conferences, quarterly conference calls, specifically tailored site visits, consultations and training are the primary ways we provide technical assistance.

Sound Partners offers grantees a variety of technical assistance and resources for two reasons. One, practicing community-centered journalism requires a range of skills new to many stations and community organizations. Two, our goal of fostering community-centered journalism grows out of the belief that broadcasters and communities can and should create their own ways to engage communities in problem solving.

Grantee stations are offered various kinds of technical assistance, including:

  • two national conferences
  • consultation or site visits about news production and outreach
  • online and print resources and best practices models for production and outreach, and
  • access to research and analysis of previous media coverage of health care issues.

National Conferences

To help build the framework for successful collaborations, Sound Partners requires grantees to participate in two national conferences. The first conference helps establish boundaries between community partners and the newsroom, focusing on the strengths that each partner brings to the collaboration.

The second “Lessons Learned” conference helps both grantees and the National Program Office chart the progress of collaborations, focusing on how to translate project successes into long-term results. Reconvening grantees late in the grant cycle also helps the National Program Office identify and document replicable models for national dissemination.

  • Attendance at both conferences is required of all broadcasters, community partners and media partners.
  • Stations are required to submit updated project summaries for inclusion in conference materials and on the Sound Partners website.
  • Stations and partners take an active role in designing the “Lessons Learned” conference, advising the National Program Office on content to be covered and serving as panelists and presenters.

Post-Conference Follow-up and Assessment

In the first quarter after the national conference, the National Program Office provide follow-up with each grant site individually. This includes:

  • Completion of a needs assessment tool: This tool, distributed at the national conference, helps the National Program Office understand and meet grantees' needs for technical assistance and provides the basis for discussion during a follow-up call.
  • Follow-up calls: during the two months following the first conference, program co-directors conduct follow-up conference calls with all grant sites. In addition to those who represented stations and partners at the conference, other key staff may wish to participate in these calls to learn more about Sound Partners or to address specific questions about grantees' plans or their participation in the program.

Tracking and Evaluation

Quarterly Reports: Grantees are required to submit brief quarterly reports summarizing the progress of community and broadcaster activities. The first quarterly report tracks amendments to grantees' original proposals,  based on changes that may result from the conference and the self-assessment process. Subsequent quarterly reports provide brief updates.

Final Reports: Each station is required to submit a final report within 30 days of completing its project. In addition to measurable and anecdotal results, reports include such collateral materials as print pieces, samples of programming, and any publicity the project generated.

Consultation, Training and Site Visits

Sound Partners recognizes that grantees have varying resources for and skills in outreach and production, and offers individualized consultation to meet each station's needs. Stations are encouraged to schedule site visits and consultations, especially during the six-month planning phase that precedes the launch of programming and outreach. Site visits provide a team-building opportunity for grantees by encouraging a broader participation of station and partner staff in their projects.

Additionally, site visits allow National Program Office staff to learn in more depth about the activities that stations and partners are undertaking. This in-depth knowledge of each project means that the National Program Office can more readily highlight the projects in nationally focused dissemination efforts.

Site visits offer grantees and key community stakeholders the opportunity for customized and focused consultation and training. Either National Program Office staff or outside consultants can be tapped for visits, depending on the required area of training. Typically, site visits include:

  • pre-site visit consultation calls,
  • one to two days of on-site consultation, and
  • follow-up phone consultation as needed.

Site visits can be provided on a number of subjects and customized to meet the needs of stations and partners.

General topics for site visits may include:

  • Project Management
  • Effective Partnerships
  • Outreach
  • Fundraising and Sustainability
  • Goal Setting
  • Events Management
  • Production and Programming
  • Evaluation
  • Promotion and Effective Communications
  • Social Marketing Fundamentals

Depending on each partnership's needs, there are a variety of other topics, such as:

  • staying focused on your project when other competing demands require your time;
  • planning activities and keeping to a timetable;
  • making sure that station and partner roles are clear;
  • working through any misunderstandings with partners;
  • utilizing community volunteers;
  • sustaining community efforts;
  • designing and implementing an effective publicity and media campaign;
  • capturing the attention of policymakers and opinion leaders;
  • ensuring that programming is compelling;
  • training youth to be reporters/producers; and
  • effective use of audio, video and the Internet.

Ongoing Communication with Grantees

The National Program Office stays in touch with grantees throughout the grant cycle, primarily via weekly e-mail updates and quarterly conference calls. Grantees are encouraged to contact the National Program Office on an as-needed basis to share news of their program's progress or to seek advice or technical assistance.

Online Resources

The National Program Office utilizes e-mail as its primary means of distributing program updates and information about deadlines, quarterly reports, conference calls and conferences.

To help grantees stay current in each of the topic areas, Sound Partners publishes a weekly electronic newsletter and regularly updates its website to help direct grantees to news and materials in each of the five content areas. It provides links to additional funding opportunities, ideas for researching stories and producing collateral materials and tips on promoting programming, developing successful partnerships and managing projects.

Quarterly Conference Calls

Scheduled to take place two weeks after written quarterly reports are due, quarterly conference calls provide an opportunity for stations and partners to network with other grantees. Grantees can choose to participate in conference calls focused on their particular health topic, or they may choose to participate in calls focused on specific aspects of community collaboration, outreach or promotion, which are led by experts on those topics.

Access to Research and Analysis

Sound Partners unites the interests and expertise of two national foundations, one in communications, the other in health and health care, to provides grantees with access to an array of resources and networks. Both foundations maintain excellent websites with wide-reaching links to their grantees and programs. In addition, both foundations publish reports and research. Such publications will from time to time be sent to grantees.

The Benton Foundation is a longtime leader in articulating and demonstrating the benefits of public service communications. It provides access to online resources and publications that support community efforts via www.benton.org.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is the largest foundation dedicated to improving health and health care for all Americans, and www.rwjf.org provides access to current health care policy information and research.

DISSEMINATION

We track and report on the lessons learned and results of grantees' efforts on a number of levels. This website provides current information on other grantee projects and links to resources. Vibrations, the Sound Partners newsletter provides snapshots of grantee efforts and best practices. It is distributed to journalists, philanthropists and health and human service providers. Stations are encouraged to participate in the national dissemination process by publishing in trade journals and presenting at conferences around the country.

Over the past decades there have been many experiments in public broadcasting aimed at retooling television and radio to become interactive media capable of serving community needs. Public television was first positioned as “educational,” and its programming was envisioned as a tool for classroom use. In the 1980s and 1990s, CPB, NPR and PBS envisioned “outreach” as a way to add local value to national programming by providing a means for stations to connect communities to local resources. Commercial broadcasters and print media have also taken on experiments aimed at engaging communities in civic problem solving, coining terms such as “civic journalism” to describe these efforts. Now with Internet and broadband, the means available for communities to create and share content is expanding. In this new environment, Sound Partners has an essential role to play in documenting the various local models that may emerge from the interaction between broadcaster and community partner grantees.

There are both local and national components to Sound Partners dissemination efforts. To reap all of the benefits of local collaborations, grantees must be able to document what happened as a result of their partnerships. Likewise, the National Program Office strives to showcase what happened locally through national dissemination efforts so other public broadcasters and philanthropists can assimilate these lessons.

The National Program Office works to maintain visibility for grantees by functioning as a hub, passing along information about national resources and trends to local stations while promoting the successes of local stations nationally. Dissemination efforts include:

  • The Vibrations newsletter
  • Website and streaming audio/video links
  • Presentation at national conferences
  • Publication in national and local newspapers and journals

Vibrations

This semiannual publication is distributed to more than 8,000 philanthropic, public broadcasting and public health organizations around the country in order to help promote the efforts of Sound Partners grantees. Each station and community organization receives copies of the newsletter, which can be customized and distributed locally.

Vibrations commissions and publishes first-person essays and field reports from grantees on their projects. Grantees are encouraged to submit story ideas to the National Program Office.

Electronic Visibility

Sound Partners' strong online presence highlights the work of grantees both on the Web and via e-mail. The website provides a home page for each grantee, providing an overview of each partnership's project goals, links to  project websites, and streaming audio or video. Each week, the efforts of a partnership is highlighted on the Sound Partners home page.

“On the Air,” our website media room, houses excerpts from programs produced by grantees. Instructions for submitting material for “On the Air” can be found in the "About Us" section of this website.

Through a partnership with the Benton Foundation, grantees may also post audio stories on One World Radio net casts www.oneworld.net/radio. This site offers services and networking for broadcasters and civic organizations using radio for human rights, sustainable development and democracy.

Sound Partners Weekly, an e-newsletter, reaches 1,400 subscribers. In addition to current health and public media headlines and resource links, it publishes news about individual Sound Partners projects, including recent notable responses to programming or outreach, recognition, awards and funding opportunities.

Presentations at National Conferences

Both partners and broadcasters can take an active part in the dissemination process by presenting results of their efforts at national conferences related to their field of endeavor. On occasion, the National Program Office receives invitations to present at broadcaster or health-related conferences, or is asked to recommend grantees as presenters. The National Program Office has also co-presented with grantees at conferences offering both a national and local perspective on this program.

Publication in Journals

Several community partners have published articles on their media collaborations in trade or health-related journals. Please notify the National Program Office regarding such publications so that we can pass that information along via our various dissemination channels. Also, when contacted for stories regarding your local efforts, feel free to offer the National Program Office as an additional resource for background or an overview of the program.

Public Relations Technical Assistance

Broadcast organizations may not be accustomed to viewing their own community-based efforts as newsworthy, and are wary of the perception of self-promotion in publicizing their collaborations. To help partners and broadcasters frame their projects for other local and national media, Sound Partners works with a public relations firm that specializes in publicizing the efforts of health and human services organizations.