Reach NC Voices Playbook

Reach NC Voices
Playbook
an initiative of

TABLE OF CONTENTS
REACH NC VOICES PLAYBOOK 2
How we work 3
What is EdNC and Reach NC Voices?
Keep people at the core.
Putting the public into public policy.
Stay nimble. Iterate.
Being nimble can lead to new bodies of work.
Meet people where they are.
Give and ask.
3
4
5
7
8
10
11
Volume I: Weekly Activities 12
Volume II: Chronic Absenteeism Project 20
Volume III: Community Events 23
Volume IV: Technology 30

HOW WE WORK
What is EdNC and Reach NC Voices?
EducationNC is the go-to, trusted source in North Carolina for independent news, research, data,
information, and analysis about the major trends, issues, and challenges bearing on education across the
birth to career continuum.
At EducationNC, we believe it is the job of research and media organizations to fulfill the information
needs of their audience and community. To do that, we must first create a process for the community to
inform us through ongoing conversation and relationship. Engagement should not just be a part of what
an organization does — it should be core to everything they do. We envision the tools, playbook, and
process as the hub-and-spoke model for community engagement work for EdNC.org and our
stakeholders.
Reach NC Voices was built with people at the core. Reach is our industry-leading initiative that builds
our tech tools to connect us to people and people to us. These tools allow us to discuss issues with
people in real time so we can better understand communities across our state by listening and listening
deeply.
The N.C. Center for Public Policy Research is our policy hub and our 40-year-old, nonpartisan think
tank studying the most important policy issues facing our state.
First Vote NC allows high school students to participate in online, simulated elections so they graduate
civic ready. It expands the opportunity for civic education statewide, building a more informed
electorate.
Reach NC Voices
North Carolina
Center for Public
Policy Research

HOW WE WORK
At EducationNC, we believe it is the job of research and media organizations to fulfill the information
needs of their audience and community. To do that, we must first create a process for the community to
inform us through ongoing conversation and relationship.
Engagement should not be part of what any organization does. It should be core to what they do.
Reach NC Voices was built with people at the core. We envision the tools, playbook, and process as the
hub-and-spoke model for community engagement work for EdNC.org and our stakeholders.
Merriam-Webster defines “hub-and-spoke” as being or relating to a system of routing air traffic in which
a major airport serves as a central point for coordinating flights to and from other airports. Similar to
this airport structure they describe, Reach NC Voices serves as the central point for coordinating our
engagement work, but the model can and should serve as a template for how others might do the same.
We believe this kind of hub-and-spoke model offers a template for other media and research
organizations across the country to better engage with their audiences.
The secret of Reach NC Voices is to keep people at the core. Real people and communities are our
measure of change and moment of impact. To understand them, we have to listen. Therefore, we have
made it our goal to be the best in the country at listening, and we have built the tools to support that
goal.
Keep people at the core.

HOW WE WORK
The mission of Reach NC Voices is to put the public back into public policy. Too often, policy is
disconnected from the communities who are impacted by the policy itself. From the beginning of EdNC,
we understood that education policy is often shaped by people who haven’t been in a classroom in
decades.
In 2014, EdNC launched with our Architecture of Participation at our core — an organizational belief
that we needed to make our primary offices the communities and schools we cover, publish first-person
perspectives from a variety of voices across the spectrum, and engage in two-way dialogue with people
on social media and our website. At the time, this commitment felt transformational, because we
understood trust and relationship building were critical to building an audience from scratch.
Our Architecture of Participation was built with our website as the hub with daily content designed to
maximize the user experience. Our front page was flexible, allowing us to change it day-to-day
depending on the content. For instance, we could spotlight a series at the top of the page as opposed to
running chronological content.
While our website is our hub, we knew we had to meet our readers where they want to receive
information. Even then the inbox was becoming the new homepage for many as they choose which
email newsletters they wanted to receive. We knew we had to leverage social media by targeting and
boosting content on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, driving readers to content. We leveraged
existing statewide networks with co-branded content and partnership distribution.
Putting the public into public policy.

HOW WE WORK
Reach NC Voices represents 2.0 of our Architecture of Participation. It was designed to engage people
in a dialogue through texting, online surveys, Facebook groups, niche communities such as NextDoor or
Reddit, and more. Further, it is intended to take our storytelling, research, and engagement directly into
communities, reaching people who would otherwise never join our conversations due to a lack of Wi-Fi,
broadband internet, or a mistrust of media.
Reach NC Voices was built with the following core tenets:
We are now in the process of redesigning our website to put our engagement work at the core of the
web design as we look to build version 3.0 of our architecture.
We are building towards a platform to allow us to be one of the best organizations in the world at
listening. The following tenets spring from and are connected to our core mission of putting the public in
public policy. As we work to get the public’s pulse on an array of issues and look for trends in responses,
we focus on the following.
Move beyond social media. We must move away from
dependence on social media algorithms which are curated from
afar by multinational technology companies. Such companies
often have profit motives with disastrous impacts on our traffic.
Build relationships. Through practicing radical hospitality,
remembering that our work is based on dialogue, and investing
in tech solutions which allow both to scale, we believe we can
build deeper relationships.
Take the online off and offline on. Our work cannot exist only
online.
Meet people where they are (read: their phones). If email
is the new homepage or frontpage, we must invest more time
and energy there, but we also want to go deeper and more
intimate which led us to implementing robust two-way texting
technology.

HOW WE WORK
Our technology team has adapted an agile process from the beginning with user testing built into our
work from day one.
We built a centralized dashboard to make it easier on our journalists and researchers to manage
relationships and view trends.
We built our own texting solution to tighten the integration between all of our technology.
As our email bills with third-party providers rose, we built an email solution into our existing Reach
platform.
We have a small staff, so we built an event playbook and a model that communities can adapt which is
now happening monthly in one rural community.
We remain in touch with user needs — both of our staff and our readers.
Through a nimble design process, we also have unexpected discoveries. We built texting and email
solutions to meet both our needs and the needs of our users - but we also discovered it allowed us to
better manage each conversation and our relationship with each person.
Stay nimble. Iterate.

HOW WE WORK
We have been part of the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative throughout 2018, which has helped us
focus on tracking analytics and measuring engagement. We have a data scientist on staff, a decision that
has helped us become and remain data-informed and focused on audience needs.
As we built our own communication systems, layered against our engagement dashboard and the
preliminary building of a CRM, we began to stitch together the pieces to identify loyalty measures.
To identify and measure loyalty, we needed to be able to view each user holistically. For us, this means
tracking them across survey participation, email engagement, and website behavior.
Our engagement dashboard allows us to do this. To gauge loyalty, we can the weight each user behavior
based on our organizational values and assign users a loyalty score. We can then set our standard
for loyalty and aim to increase the members in this group . Over time, we can adjust our newsroom
decisions to increase loyalty among our users.
We can dive deep into survey, email, and article performance to find trends in our work and create
higher value content. Being able to make informed decisions and see immediate results in our user base
keeps us actively aware and pushing towards loyalty growth. We are also able to continuously monitor
our grant goals to make sure our adjustments are keeping, and hopefully increasing, our pace towards
fulfilling those goals.
Being nimble can lead to new bodies of work.

HOW WE WORK
Ultimately, the dashboard creates a tangible score and goal for stickiness and loyalty and allows for
constant monitoring and awareness in our decision making process.

HOW WE WORK
When we are holding a conversation or fielding a survey, we know different people interact with us in
their own way. The way they choose to interact can be impacted by the availability of wi-fi or cell service,
the type of device they use, and other variables rooted in location and equity.
Our technology supports texting, live events, and online surveying to collect the same answers and
engage in conversation. Our process includes paper surveys because not everyone is comfortable with
tech and not everywhere has internet or cell connectivity.
When we want to gain strong insights from a community, we travel door-to-door to introduce ourselves
and ask people to engage in a conversation while we fill out a paper survey.
Moving forward, we must continue to build technology solutions that place the needs of people at the
forefront.
Meet people where they are.

HOW WE WORK
Our friends at Hearken and Groundsource reminded us during a recent convening that engagement
efforts must avoid being an “askhole.” Taking people’s feedback and doing nothing with it is a non-starter
for engagement efforts — or it should be. We adapted this through launching a Question of the Week
and the Reach Roundup newsletter that both work to ask questions and deliver high-quality information
and data to our users. More on those later.
We have also built a practice of frequent reader surveys, user interviews, and design sprints that shape
our work, content, and technology.
In addition, our technology team built data lookup tools to provide community members with localized
and personalized content, which we can use to prompt a conversation about the issue at hand. We
recently used this tool during our series on chronic absenteeism. Using our data lookup tool, our
audience could find the exact chronic absenteeism rate at any school or district across the state.
We strive to always share what people share with us with our broader audience, but we also work to go
back to those who directly participated in the conversation.
We plan to build both processes and tech which support going back to the segment of our community
who specifically participated in any given survey, conversation, or event. The continued development of
our dashboard and tools has laid the foundation for this work.
Ultimately, our hope is to always close the engagement loop which allows us to deepen relationships,
engender trust, and show individuals that their participation matters. We believe this is one of the
fundamental elements of our work.
Give and ask.

SECTION TITLE
The importance of habit formation
In March 2018, the Reach NC Voices community had grown to about 3,000 phone numbers and 4,000
emails. We asked this community questions here and there — when a hurricane was coming, when a
hot political issue was in the news — but we didn’t establish a pattern of communication with them.
We realized the potential for engaging with our audience more frequently and decided to ask them a
question each week.
We quickly paired this with the idea for a Reach Roundup, a weekly newsletter that would follow the
question of the week, feeding the results back to our users and completing the engagement cycle. Then,
we would use the Reach Roundup to launch our next question.
This habit formation allows our audience to adjust to a pattern of engagement with us, thereby
increasing their familiarity and trust in our platform. Beyond trust-building and audience-strengthening,
the pattern of a weekly question and newsletter increases the amount of responses we are collecting
each week. It also allows us to easily disseminate our content by basing the question of the week around
current projects we are working on.
Our hope is we will build the habit of engagement with our users so that as hot button issues come up,
we will be able to engage them in real time, and they will know their answer matters.
Volume I
Weekly Activities
• Habit formation is essential when building a community.
• Remember to orient around the needs of the users. Check in with your users and then check in
again through user testing to understand if you are meeting their needs.
• When you ask something of your users, always attempt to share with them what their fellow
community members thought as well.
Lessons

VOLUME I: WEEKLY ACTIVITIES
User feedback and iteration
The original layout for the Reach Roundup was designed based on what we thought users would
want. We included the results of the previous question of the week, pulled in a few quotes and a data
visualization, and then included curated articles and a short notes section at the bottom.

During our first round of user testing, we quickly heard critical feedback from our audience. They
wanted more data, more connections to their local communities, and a newsletter that delivered more
value to their daily lives.
With this feedback in hand, we set out to completely redesign the Reach Roundup. We scrapped the old
template and rebuilt it, carefully considering the value of each section and weaving in our users wishes
wherever possible. We also sent a demographic survey to our community to learn more about who they
are and where they live, allowing us to better craft content for them.

What we landed on is Reach Roundup 2.0. In this version, each weekly newsletter is centered around
one core policy theme — whatever the previous week’s question of the week asked about. Now, the
newsletter begins with a deep dive on that policy issue, offering our subscribers original content on the
issue. Then, we include a data viz and quotes that summarize the results of what people said on that
issue.

This is only the beginning of user testing and iteration. Six weeks into Reach Roundup 2.0, we surveyed
our audience again, asking the same questions as the first time to see if their responses have changed,
and we will continue to user test moving forward.
Following that, a new section — Five Facts — offers statewide and local data points related to the issue.
Then, we choose two articles to aggregate in the newsletter, focusing these around the same theme and
trying to make them local and state-relevant when possible. Finally, we end with a list of where our team
has traveled that week accompanied by a photo of the week to increase awareness about our statewide
presence.
• Our community members wanted context and data along with survey results.
• Do not be afraid to change things up based off of user feedback. A continuous engagement with
our users allow us the opportunity to shift our strategies to match their needs.
Lessons

SMS Office Hours
Each Thursday, we push out our question of the week to our Reach NC Voices community via text
message. We have developed technology that allows us to text individual users back in real time,
allowing highly personal back-and-forth conversations to take place.
With this ability, we decided to open up our question of the week to the general public beyond just our
existing list. To do so, we advertised “Reach NC Voices Office Hours” for two hours on Thursdays. We
advertised a short code that people could text in to answer the question of the week and promised we
would respond to them in real time.
Our responses vary based on the user’s comment. In some cases, we push people to further explain
their opinions by asking follow-up questions. In other cases, we send them a piece of our content that
relates to the topic at hand, or ask them to share their story with us by writing an article. These two way-
conversations are key to making our audience feel heard and connected.
Case Study

• Chatbots work for some. To date, they have not worked for us. Office hours have worked for us
so far because community members knew someone was on the other end of the line texting them
back in real time.
• Office hour-like projects can serve as an effective way to meet information needs in real time.
• Asking follow up questions in real time allows actual conversations to unfold which leads to more
context, nuance, and richer content.
Lessons

SECTION TITLE
While we use the tools of Reach NC Voices to get quick pulses on a range of policy topics, we can also
leverage these tools for longform research on an issue. In the summer of 2018, we did just that with the
issue of chronic absenteeism — or when a student misses more than 15 days of the school year.
We wanted to analyze this issue through as many lens as possible — including students, parents,
teachers, and the broader public. While we all have our own assumptions about why students miss
school, we used this project to test and challenge those assumptions. When asked, “Why do students
miss school in your community?” we wanted to figure out if students and teachers would give the same
answer. We also wanted to see if responses would differ when this question was asked statewide versus
within a single county.
To do this, we chose to dive deep on chronic absenteeism in one community: Edgecombe County. We
chose Edgecombe County because we already had deep relationships within education, faith, and civic
organizations that we could leverage to gain a deeper understanding of absenteeism.
Edgecombe County is a rural county located about an hour’s drive east of Raleigh. With a declining
population, a median income of $32,298, and one of every four residents living in poverty, we knew
we would miss important perspectives if our survey lived online and we gathered responses solely
through email and social media. So, we designed a multi-step process to gain a deeper understanding of
why students were missing school in Edgecombe County.
We started by creating a statewide survey on chronic absenteeism, which we then used as the basis
for an Edgecombe County chronic absenteeism survey. We pushed out the survey online through
our website and social media, posted it on Edgecombe County Facebook pages, and bought an ad
placement on a local media’s homepage.
Volume II
Chronic Absenteeism Project

VOLUME II: CHRONIC ABSENTEEISM PROJECT
In April and May, we hosted two focus group dinners in Edgecombe County at a local recreation center.
Participants took the survey and discussed barriers and opportunities around attendance in their
communities. Importantly, students in Edgecombe County attended both dinners and shared their
perspective, which often differed from what adults shared.

VOLUME II: CHRONIC ABSENTEEISM PROJECT
After the focus group dinners, our team did one last push to try to hear from as many different people
as possible. In July, we sent five EdNC staff to Edgecombe County, where we teamed up with educators
from a high school and middle school in the county. Each group canvassed a different neighborhood,
knocking on doors and talking to residents about chronic absenteeism. We used the survey as the basis
but did not limit the conversation to just asking the survey questions. Through conversations with
students, our own assumptions about why students were missing school were challenged, and we also
talked with older residents who told us why they had missed school as children.
We wrapped up our work by publishing a series on chronic absenteeism in September where we
looked at the statewide approach to chronic absenteeism, the latest federal data, the results of our
statewide survey, and the results from our work in Edgecombe. Moving forward, we are working to
develop a community playbook to share with other networks and organizations on how to bring multiple
stakeholders to the table using both technology and in-person events to investigate a topic.
A key aspect of this project was partnering with an existing organization in this space as both peer
experts and as a dissemination tool. The North Carolina Early Childhood Foundation worked with us
to help craft the questions we asked in the survey and then disseminated the statewide survey within
their network of partners across the state. We also aligned the release of the series with Attendance
Awareness month in September.
• Better research and content flows from offering community members a variety of ways to
respond to questions including text messaging, community events, door-to-door visits, and in
person interviews.
• Community partnerships are vital in order to reach more individuals. Community organizations
helped us identify venues for our events and neighborhoods to canvas.
Lessons

SECTION TITLE
Durham Pulse
We wanted to test our texting platform with an already actively engaged community. With the promise
of a $40 gift card and dinner, Durhamites joined a series of conversations over one week. Thirty-five
participants answered questions three times a day for one week. After the week, we got together for
a dinner in Durham for folks to meet and talk further about questions asked, issues impacting their
community, and the process of the Pulse.
Process
Questions like these were asked three times daily:
At the end of each day, participants also were asked:
Volume III
Community Events
• What do you need to know or better understand right now?
• Have you been able to find this info?
Yes / No / I’m not satisfied with what I’ve found.
• Would or did this info help you:
Make a decision. / Answer a question. / Make sense of something. /More than one of these.
• On a scale of 1 to 3, how much do or did you need this info?
1 - Really needed it. / 2 - It would have helped. / 3 - I was just curious.
• Did you get the information you wanted from news sources you used today?
I wasn’t able to look or ask. / I looked or asked but couldn’t find an answer. / Yes.
• If you had your own personal journalist working for you, what would you have them look into?

VOLUME III: COMMUNITY EVENTS
Results
How could Durham be a better place for you?
“Durham could pay more intentional attention to the uneven distribution of resources across the
county.”
“Everyone is so busy and moving so fast—it is hard to build deep relationships.”
“Greater attention to issues of equity and, specifically, affordable housing.”
“More resources invested in the education of young people. Better paying jobs that would enable
everyone to have access to housing. More affordable housing. Better mass transportation.”
“Reduce poverty, increase shared prosperity, ensure affordable housing, reduce crime, improve
public education.”
“Would love to know more about what is happening in Durham, both in terms of opportunities
and needs.”

What issues do you wish you had more information on?
“As a single person with a decent income, I’m not affected by weaknesses in social services or the
public school system. I know affordable housing is a hot topic, but what are the other areas in our
county that need the most improvement? In order to be an advocate for ALL of Durham, I need to
be better educated.”
“Cultural events, adult education opportunities, important upcoming civic decisions.”
“DPS plan for improving outcomes for students. Long term master plan for Durham County +
City.”
“Development plans.”
• Residents want personalized, localized, and timely information. Their information needs often
relate to immediate needs in the present.
• They are eager to share their opinion on relevant local or statewide issues impacting their daily
life.
• Open-ended questions or prompts work well with texting as they are conversational.
• Have staff members who are responsive in real time as questions arise throughout the process.
• We should have changed questions up throughout the process. Asking the same questions over
and over again revealed some interesting findings, but also led to declining interest over the
course of the pilot.
Lessons

Cultivating Change
Each month, we co-host a free community forum in the eastern North Carolina town of Tarboro.
Working with local educators and business leaders, we craft a panel around a specific topic and
invite the community to convene for a 30 minute discussion on it. We provide free food and drinks to
participants and document each session. The sessions are built with a design thinking and participatory
design mindset.
After assisting in organizing the first few, we handed off our playbook to our partner organizations
in Tarboro and continued to provide financial and technological support for their events. We assist
in creating a space where community members of all backgrounds can have real dialogue about local
issues, such as race relations, student health, and revitalizing small towns. Along the way, we build brand
awareness and trust with a niche community.
When needed, we can turn to this community for specific projects, such as the project we completed
around chronic absenteeism. We set the theme for one of the Cultivating Change events around this
topic, and brought paper surveys with us to the event to formally document the group’s opinions. These
results were incorporated into a longer report on our findings.

Tarboro continues to execute this series. We would like to use this approach to delve into other
issues. Our goal would be to raise an issue again and again, drive conversation, gain interactions and
engagement, and then give the playbook and prompts to other communities to use as they wish.
Using Reach to facilitate event engagement at scale
We also harness the Reach NC Voices tools at larger events with hundreds of attendees to increase
the audience’s engagement in the event process. In the summer of 2018, we used our technology in
partnership with the Blue Cross Blue Shield Foundation at their inaugural Thrive NC event. Hundreds of
stakeholders in the food and health sector gathered for a day of discussions on hunger, food economics,
and rural versus urban food systems.
The format of the event included four panels with little time for audience Q&A or discussion, so we used
Reach NC Voices to allow the audience to engage. After texting in a short code to join the conversation,
audience members were pulsed a few questions after each panel, allowing them to reflect on what they
learned and discuss what they would do following the event.

In November of 2018, we leveraged our tools during the Institute for Emerging Issues ReCONNECT
NC Forum in Asheville. Throughout the day, an audience of about 300 stakeholders from across North
Carolina heard from leading experts on topics related to civic engagement. Our lessons learned from the
Thrive NC event allowed us to perfect the process of pushing out multiple sets of questions to a large
audience.
Over the course of the event, we pushed out 14 unique question sets via SMS to over 250 audience
members. Each question set pertained to the topic being discussed in real time, allowing audience
members to engage actively in the process of the event rather than just absorbing what they were
hearing. The question sets that we pushed included open-ended questions to gather general feedback,
links to resources where they could access more information on a topic, and an option to send us an
email address to sign up for a program discussed during the event.
In the final question of the day, we allowed users to opt-in to future communication about the Institute
for Emerging Issues. This question created a cohort of over 100 numbers that will continue engaging in
an SMS conversation about topics related to the forum.
During the event, our team quickly pulled the results, identified common themes, and returned the
results to the event organizers to display in real time. After the event, we shared a more in-depth report
of the results with the event organizers as well.

This model will continue to be used in future events, with the following elements:
The goal is to take the conversation outside of the room for any given event, while also making it
possible for us and/or our partners to create an ongoing community outside of a one-time event.
• Be thoughtful about when and where you will collect numbers. It helps for attendees to feel
bought in on handing over their phone numbers because it is a higher barrier for participation.
• In our experience, SMS leads to a higher response rate than asking attendees to go to a website or
download an app to respond to questions.
• We believe organizations can then use SMS to continue to build their community moving forward
beyond the event itself.
Lessons
1. Work with event facilitators to design surveys to be used before, during, and after their event.
2. As people are arriving, add their phone numbers to a list for the event by either 1) having them all
text into a short code before the event begins or 2) having them provide their phone number in a
form upon arriving at the event.
3. As the event progresses, pulse out short series of questions to participants. Include a combination
of a few multiple choice followed by at least one open-ended question that allows them to share
their thoughts.
4. If possible, project survey results in real time in the room while people are taking the survey.
5. At the conclusion of each session or at the end of the event, pull the final results of all surveys and
quickly analyze for common themes and best comments. Provide this information to the event
organizers to use in their closing remarks.
6. A day after the event, send a full report of survey results to the event organizers.

SECTION TITLE
Development of our own SMS solution
To better understand the full breadth of interactions, Reach brought its text messaging and email
correspondence tools under one roof to manage membership and subscriptions in one hub. By doing so,
we can track users across article views, emails, and online and SMS voting. This ties back to our ability to
understand how deep their engagement is and how loyal to our content they are over time.
User testing and sprints
Reach NC Voices is all about listening. We would not be taking our own advice well if we did not hear
from our users and partners on how we can better serve them. Feedback on our tools is critical to ensure
we are making the correct investments in our technology. We live in a world of scarce resources, and we
want to make sure we are focused on the needs of both our audience and the broader community.
In-house CRM
Our CRM allows us to track and update user information. We feel that having a better understanding of
our audience allows us to ask better questions.
Volume IV
Technology

VOLUME IV: TECHNOLOGY
Collecting the dots
Reach collects a number of data points about members. A non-exhaustive list includes:
Connecting the dots
For data like this, the whole is more valuable than the sum of its parts. To move toward capturing that
value, Reach began surfacing this compiled data to admins in a new “Participants” section.
The participants section now provides a full listing of members engaging with a particular topic or
survey.
Location (GeoIP or user-provided) Demographics
Question responses (qualitative and quantitative) Event RSVP’s and attendance
Name and contact information Article views
Email subscriptions Email opens, clicks, and views

Understanding individual narratives
This data is connected to each individual so admins can get a complete history of Reach’s interactions
with a person to better understand their unique story:
This compilation of information offers journalists a more holistic view of a given member and offers a
chance to build a deeper narrative about each participant.
Segmenting participants into custom groups
To get more granular to understand what we’re hearing by geography and demography, Reach created a
dynamic audience segmentation tool to group participants by location, demography, answers to specific
questions, or even keywords they’ve mentioned in comments.

Data lookup tool
Time and time again, our Reach NC Voices community has made it clear that they value localized
information. One way we provide this is via our data lookup tool, which is designed to help journalists
take large data sets and make them accessible to the public.
Fully integrated into our technology, the data lookup tool presents a question that allows users to text
or type a location — be it zip code, county, town, school name etc. — and receive a data point based on
that location.
Users receive tailored, relevant information that might otherwise be buried in reports or in large,
inaccessible datasets. In this example, readers can share their location to find out how likely it is that
they’ll see snow this holiday season.
Most recently, we leveraged this data lookup tool during a series around chronic absenteeism. First,
we scraped the chronic absenteeism rate for every school district and every individual school in North
Carolina. Then, we set up a data lookup tool question that allowed users to text in any school name or
any district name. In return, they received the exact chronic absenteeism rate for that district/school
and information about where that district/school ranked relative to other districts/schools in the entire
state.

• Building your own technology allows you to meet the needs of your community and organization
both.
• User testing and design sprints are essential when building new features. It makes a difference to
understand the needs of the users before committing wholesale to building new features.
• Serendipity can unfold as you build features. One new feature can lead to another.
Lessons

Reach NC Voices Playbook

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