KSFR Community Services Report
Describe your overall goals and approach to address identified community issues, needs and interests through your station’s vital local services, such as multiplatform long and short-form content, digital and in-person engagement, education services, community information, partnership support, and other activities, and audiences you reached or new audiences you engaged.
Our overall goals were:
1) To use digital platforms to grow our audience. Since the advent of changing over to a new website platform, we are hoping our postings and subsequent social media postings will strengthen our reach.
2) Reach out to surrounding schools to begin starting a feeder program at the station to expose students/interns to the various aspects of public broadcasting. In the spring of 2022, began engaging journalism students working on the university daily newspaper from the large university south of our location. We provided them onsite training to learn the basics of broadcast news and ran their stories in our midday news segment. Our relationship with the journalism students carried on throughout the year with the live election coverage noted in our answer on question #2. The only robust journalism education taking place in our region can be found by traveling 55 miles south. We hope to engage more students/interns in 2023 either onsite or remotely now that we have demonstrated this activity can be done.
Describe key initiatives and the variety of partners with whom you collaborated, including other public media outlets, community nonprofits, government agencies, educational institutions, the business community, teachers and parents, etc. This will illustrate the many ways you’re connected across the community and engaged with other important organizations in the area.
For live coverage of the NM gubernatorial race, we collaborated with several news outlets from around the state. Included in that effort were journalism students and public radio reporters from a large university south of our location, a digital publication, a newspaper on the border of New Mexico and Mexico plus three New Mexico think tanks who delivered live updates on legislative initiatives and commentary.
We have fostered our relationships with several non-profit community organizations who are involved in delivering weekly and/or monthly programming. Some of those organizations and educators who provide this input are: Somos Son Un Pueblo Unido (a statewide community-based and immigrant-led organization); The Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian (New Mexico’s oldest non-profit independent museum); Santa Fe Community Foundation; Santa Fe Extension Master Gardeners Project; Santa Fe Community College.
What impact did your key initiatives and partnerships have in your community? Describe any known measurable impact, such as increased awareness, learning or understanding about particular issues. Describe indicators of success, such as connecting people to needed resources or strengthening conversational ties across diverse neighborhoods. Did a partner see an increase in requests for related resources? Please include direct feedback from a partner(s) or from a person(s) served.
Our indicators of success are tied to the number of inquiries we receive via email or telephone. We entertain suggestions from the audience, answer questions that run the gamut from weather forecasts, to what song we played at a certain show/hour, what topic aired during a particular show, etc. We gauge the number of show downloads we receive each month and what the website analytics produce. National companies that administer audience listener surveys are not distributed in our region so our methodology to gather data is varied. Each year we do note slight increases in website visits to various parts of our schedule.
We have been attempting to forge a partnership with an adjacent college to our location and recently have been successful in gaining an intern from that college. We hope to continue to build upon that relationship. We have also accepted a journalism intern from a university across the country in the state of Main who will finish up contact hours with us in May 2023.
Please describe any efforts (e.g. programming, production, engagement activities) you have made to investigate and/or meet the needs of minority and other diverse audiences (including, but not limited to, new immigrants, people for whom English is a second language and illiterate adults) during Fiscal Year 2022, and any plans you have made to meet the needs of these audiences during Fiscal Year 2023. If you regularly broadcast in a language other than English, please note the language broadcast.
As mentioned in above in question #2, part of our weekly program delivery includes a half-hour program that is often delivered in Spanish and the subject matter is targeted towards migrants and their rights. We run public service announcements in Navajo, Spanish and Tewa. Our news reporters post original news stories throughout the day at the top of the hour and have achieved a robust leads list of state, federal and tribal entities who send in their information for follow-up reports. Our plans are to seek funding that will help us expand our coverage about the surrounding 8 northern Pueblo nations in northern New Mexico and possibly collaborate with reports from the Navajo Times Newspaper that encompasses Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.
Please assess the impact that your CPB funding had on your ability to serve your community. What were you able to do with your grant that you wouldn't be able to do if you didn't receive it?
Very simply, we were able to continue to operate during and coming out of COVID with the help of CPB funds. Because we were operating with a skeleton crew for much of the year, we persevered and were able to continue the same level of news reporting and local public affairs programming despite that our underwriting revenue stream was greatly diminished through the laws of supply and demand because of the recovering economy.