How KERA in Dallas used a ‘brackets’ strategy to build audience engagement

This is a series on Better News to a) showcase innovative/experimental ideas that emerge from the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative and b) share replicable tactics that benefit the news industry as a whole. 

This “win” comes from Carla Jimenez, audience editor at KERA, which participated in the Poynter Institute’s Table Stakes program in 2020-21 and 2023.

Question: What problem were you trying to solve, and why was that problem strategically important to your organization?

A: KERA is a community-supported, public media organization in North Texas. It includes two music radio stations (KXT for indie, WRR for classical), a TV station that is a PBS member station, and KERA News, which is the news arm of the organization and also an NPR member station.

In the first quarter of 2023, KERA News started a new morning newsletter called “Wake Up with KERA.”

For this newsletter, we wanted to grow the subscriber list organically, meaning we didn’t want to automatically add subscribers from our other newsletters, like our afternoon newsletter. We set out to grow the subscriber list from 0 to 3,000 by the end of the year as part of our challenge in the Poynter Institute’s Table Stakes program.

We were looking for audience engagement tactics to grow the subscriber list, so we decided to use brackets, much in the style of March Madness: We came up with a list of 16 barbecue restaurants in North Texas and our audience chose a winner by voting every week. The first week had all 16 restaurants; the second week had eight; the third week had four; the fourth and final week had two.

This was strategically important because while our afternoon newsletter was more like an RSS feed of stories we had published throughout the day, our new morning newsletter was meant to be more engaging and more curated for our specific audience. So the best way to find people who wanted to be engaged in our newsletter was to use a tactic that would encourage our audience to interact with us.

The brackets were a strategy for growing KERA’s “Wake Up with KERA” newsletter subscriber list. The two brackets garnered 1,182 newsletter sign-ups, which accounted for a third of their overall goal for the year.

Q: How did you go about solving the problem?

A: If there’s one thing that we know our audience likes, it’s talking about food – most especially, meat.

So our first bracket was asking our audience to vote for the best barbecue restaurant in North Texas. We started with 16 restaurants, and we took one week each for the voting. At the end of the voting form, we asked if they would like to sign up for “Wake Up with KERA.” If yes, they submitted their email address.

Q: What worked?

A: What was key to the success of the brackets was social media. Whenever we posted the brackets to Facebook, we tagged the individual restaurants. For the burger bracket especially, the restaurants were reposting and resharing daily, asking their followers to vote for them.

For both brackets, we ended up getting 10,059 responses and 1,182 newsletter sign-ups, which accounted for a third of our overall goal for the year.

Additionally, we found that the bracket posts on our website consistently landed in the top five most read stories every week, with decently long engagement times (close to a minute per post).

By the end of Table Stakes, we did reach our goal of 3,000 subscribers for “Wake Up with KERA,” by also including sign-up boxes in stories that had high audience engagement and encouraging subscribers of our other newsletter products to sign up.

Q: What didn’t work?

A:  Like I mentioned earlier, we as a staff came up with the initial list for the barbecue bracket. When we did the first round, we got a lot of comments asking, “Why isn’t so-and-so restaurant on this list? This list is invalid!” and other comments in the same vein.

We realized from this that we needed to make sure that audience input was given from the very beginning. So when we were coming up with the initial list for the burger bracket, we asked our followers on social media to tell us what they thought the best burger restaurants in the area were. We ended up with a much bigger list, but also more buy-in and overall engagement.

The Dallas Observer wrote a story to decide if the KERA audience was right in their winner of the burger bracket.

Q: What happened that you didn’t expect?

A: We expected engagement from our audience, but we didn’t realize or expect that other North Texas media organizations were part of our audience. After the burger bracket was finished, the Dallas Observer brought it upon themselves to decide if the KERA audience was right in their winner, and they wrote a whole story about it.

We also didn’t expect just how invested the individual restaurants would become over these contests. We were getting pretty regular comments and emails from the owners of these restaurants, asking us if they had won, when the winners would be posted, etc.

Q: What advice would you give to others who try to do this?

A: If you would like to run your own bracket, our advice is to make it locally specific to your area. Given Texas’ love of meat, we chose barbecue and burgers. If we were to run this in Denver, we might choose breweries or hiking trails. Given that this is an audience engagement tactic, you have to pick something that your audience will feel passionate about.

Lee “Pops” Edwards with a Low & Slow Burger at Pop’s Burger Stand in Waxahachie, Texas, the winner of KERA’s burger bracket. (Yfat Yossifor/KERA News)

Q: What’s next for this work?

A: We’ve expanded our bracket project outside of the newsroom, and it’s become an audience engagement tactic that other departments at KERA have been using. For example, our music station KXT is running a bracket about anti-love songs ahead of Valentine’s Day.

We’ve also planned other brackets for the new  year. Our next bracket is moving away from meat-based restaurants (per the request of our staff’s resident vegan), and we’re starting a bracket in March for the best breweries in North Texas. Our audience has already given us an extensive list.

Our Table Stakes team has also considered other tactics surrounding the brackets. We’ve raffled gift certificates in the past when people opted to sign up for our newsletter, but we have also considered further partnerships with future bracket winners for events.

We’re also using brackets to grow other newsletter offerings we have at KERA, not just the news newsletters.