Normas Internacionales de Auditoría

Truth be told, we wanted stations to turn outward not just W h y W e ’ r e h e r e

to reconnect with their aspirations but so they could make a difference in the community—have an impact. We wanted them to make their aspirations real. Otherwise, their efforts would have been an academic exercise, which would have been quickly snuffed out and rejected, seen as just another fad. This meant that stations had to rediscover and rethink their potential for creating impact in the community. Everything they did needed to pay some impact dividend.

By creating a focus on community impact, cei opened up a new way of thinking and acting for stations. They moved from seeing themselves as producers of programming to generators of new possibilities for leveraging their assets, in different combi- nations and with different partners, to improve the civic health of their communities. The focus on community impact became the anchor for station efforts, keeping staff focused on the larger goals at hand. Absent this focus, stations would slide back into internally focused business-as-usual.

This relentless insistence on community impact helped change the conversation about station priorities and push station staff to rethink long-held assumptions. Rather than hoping that myriad activities added up to impact, station staff began to see the goal of community impact as a way to turn their efforts toward mean- ingful action. Take Illinois Public Media, whose focus on com- munity impact led the staff to begin to talk about the station in a fundamentally different way. Director of Internet Development, Jack Brighton, captured the change this way: “We’re a media organization that changes our community for the bet- ter. We’re about making an impact.” The station’s General Manager, Mark Leonard, went a step further: “Now our projects start in the community, not in our conference room.”

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Leonard went on to describe the station’s new approach to any new efforts, saying, “We ask, ‘How will we impact the community?’”

For Kelly Luoma, the Station Programmer for Vermont Public Television, the focus on community impact prompted her to evaluate the likely effect of projects, programs, and partnerships in a new way. This meant finding a clear sense of purpose, one that was tied to the community, not just the station. Turning outward and seeking community impact required her station to make more choices and judgments, not fewer. She put it this way:

To find the impact means you really have to have some sense of what you’re trying to accomplish by creating content or creat- ing engagement. It’s not just doing something to do it; it’s really trying to think things through in much more depth than we ever have before … being ruthlessly strategic, and making sure that what we take on is truly strategic, and we understand why we’re getting involved. This has really made us think differently, think far more strategically, think far more about the impact of taking on projects, work, and partnerships.

What Luoma’s quote makes clear is that setting community impact as a clear goal means that the station, in a word, has to be

focused. As she says, “It’s not just doing something to do it.”

Putting the focus on impact and not simply on going through the motions helped change the conversation in many of the

cei stations. Turning outward and seeking community impact

fundamentally alters the conversation. People now must explore and articulate their intention and purpose.

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At ketc, in St. Louis, a focus on creating community impact

prompted the station to develop a formal statement about the kind of questions it should consider when doing its daily work.

ketc wrote an updated strategic plan that was heavily influenced

by their cei involvement. The updated plan stated:

We seek to focus outward, to leverage our reservoir of trust and integrity to provide pathways to strengthen the civic health of our region. To that end, we are considering the questions that frame the Community Engagement Initiative:

• How can ketc’s community-engagement efforts become better linked to daily operations?

• How can our efforts lead to greater community significance, where ketc is more involved and engaged in the community? • How can our efforts lead communities to view ketc as a

trusted and essential leader?

• How will the public challenges in our region get addressed through our approach to our work?

• How can we strengthen our community?

You can see that these questions focus squarely on community impact. The station realized that if it was to turn outward and have community impact, it needed to create a set of questions very different than those that previously had guided its activities.

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