By Kara Andrade

Photo Credit: Serdir (at home) Creative Commons

Through a Monday night downpour in San Francisco, I made my way to the TechSoup office on Brannan Street for a Full Circle Fund meeting. It was important, the Fund paid for my position and here I was walking in as a “tangible” – almost like an avatar walking out of virtual world into the Real World, so I got very firm handshakes.

It was a great group of folks and we presented our project and got some thoughtful suggestions regarding strategies to help us address our main challenges right now of getting more story pitches and more donors.

Here were some of the ideas that really caught my attention:

For quality assurance and customer satisfaction

• We need to set up some rating and customer satisfaction model.
• How about implementing a rating or star system that users could vote on stories or reporters? 

Scalability and Accessibility

What’s a mechanism for making it easy for people to submit stories?

• Hire someone to do an iPhone app since we’re in an area with many IPhone users and we’re a local project. 
• Create an SMS gateway so people can text a tip. Kara thinks: It’s like reporting potholes, people will use it more often if they have the  number in their cellphones.
• Creating a Twitter hashtag for submitting stories. This will also allow people to monitor stories using an RSS feed.

Creating a Brand

A lot of time it’s about brand recognition.

• Look at ways of highlighting bigger stories on the Spot.Us Web site 
• Start adopting syndication models that build brand awareness, HuffingtonPost is one good example, as is there OffTheBus.net.
• Increase our scope of project funding so certain donors will gain social recognition for the stories they fund. 

Creating a Quality Product and Trust In that Product

• Create a ranking for journalists and reporters so there’s an incentive for doing good work. 
• Try to guarantee them a placement on a web site based on their reporting so they might excel in a healthy, competitive reporting environment.
•  Think about news placement on the web site. 

Core Development

• What kind of organization do we want to be in terms of the structure? What are the measurable outcomes? 
• While the plan has always been to develop a platform, it doesn’t mean we don’t come up with some core development. 
• These are the areas we need to focus on: 

1. Media specific partnerships 
2. Organization specific partnerships 
3. Individual partnerships 

Don’t lump them together, but pay attention what you’re doing as an Organization. Think about a stable pool of writers. Keep track of what works and doesn’t work. It’s what the board can help you do. That core development can go a long way, as can media partnerships.

Related posts:

1. First look at Spot.Us in Action
2. Spot.Us: Building a Plan to Release the Kraken!
3. A Young Reporter’s Experience Freelancing the Spot.Us Way
4. My Chat with Beth Kanter
5. LA Spot.Us Announces Managing Editor, Ramps Up for Community Funded Journalism