A Strategic Vision for WBUR

WBUR rolled out its strategic plan in early 2022. Then, in the summer of 2023, CEO Margaret Low wrote the narrative below to bring the vision to life. Much of what is laid out below has already been accomplished or is in the works. It is shared here in its entirety.

Our mission: to produce high-quality journalism and enriching experiences that foster understanding, connection and community for an expanding circle of people.

Our vision: to become a daily habit for every person in Boston and beyond who seeks to engage with the most consequential issues of our time.

This memo documents the reality of the current media landscape, why we have reason for optimism, our strategy for the future and the actions we will take to deliver on our mission and vision.

Local news has relevance and importance that it's never had before. Whether we're covering climate change, a pandemic, income inequality or the threats to democratic institutions. These are issues of seismic national and global importance. They're also profoundly local and have a direct impact on our lives — right where we live.

The crisis in local journalism has been chronicled many times over. The pandemic and current economic conditions hastened the decline — with many news outlets shuttered or diminished. Most of the focus has been on the fate of newspapers. Understandably so. They've long been the bulwark of original reporting, particularly at the local level, and their demise is a threat to our shared future. Newspapers are also where many of the largest investments are being made. People of great wealth have made big bets, hoping to restore papers to some semblance of their former glory and revitalize a cornerstone of our democracy.

At the same time, WBUR and NPR provide distinguished local, national and global reporting. NPR reaches 42 million people a week across the country — in red states and blue — on all of its platforms. And WBUR has a monthly audience of nearly 9 million people locally and nationally. It is a jewel in the public radio crown, with a history of first-class journalism and innovation.

In addition, we are and always will be free — a public service. This is especially relevant today, because we now live in a world where only those who can afford a subscription have access to many of the most credible, high-quality news sources. The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe, for example, all have paywalls — further dividing the haves and have nots. Public radio is available to anyone, anywhere, anytime. At no cost.

A Stark Reality

Despite our reach, our accessibility and the quality of our journalism — public radio's future is far from assured. The economics of the digital age are daunting. Like all our media counterparts, we're challenged by massive technology changes, an information ecosystem swimming in misinformation and disinformation, shifting audience habits, declining ad dollars and the growing dominance of platforms — like Google, Facebook and Spotify — that have no stake in local communities.

In addition, most of our revenue — whether membership or sponsorship — is still generated by broadcast. And not only is the competition for people's time and attention fierce, younger generations don't listen to the radio the way their parents did.

There are two other challenges. First, our digital audience is much less likely to contribute. Second, our audience does not fully reflect the changing demographics of Boston and the region.

Reasons for Optimism

WBUR's fundamentals are strong. Here's why: We enjoy high levels of public trust and diversified sources of revenue that make us a little less vulnerable to cyclical changes in the economy. And crucially — at a time when media is depending more heavily on direct, individual support — our membership model still works. At WBUR, more than 15 percent of our local listening audience gives. Not because they have to, but because they believe we add real value to their lives and that we're important to the well-being of our community. By any media standards, our membership levels are impressive.

That's because we learned long ago how to create deep and lasting relationships with our audience — build trust and daily habit. So people come back again and again and, when they can, they contribute.

Our biggest fans tell us that WBUR is "essential" in their lives. They say that WBUR "makes the world a better and more informed place." That we're "a lifeline." "The news source they trust most."

And there is good reason for that. WBUR has a powerful history. We've been broadcasters for more than 70 years and have fostered vital relationships with millions of listeners. Our job now is to deepen those relationships with the audiences we have — and to develop that connection, build those relationships, with new audiences. The biggest task we have over the next several years is to grow and diversify our audience and to light a path to sustainability for WBUR.

Fortunately, we have some extraordinary building blocks in place. WBUR is brimming with talent and ambition. We have one of the strongest local newsrooms in America and are a trusted source of local news. At a time when broadcast ratings for most of our peer stations are trending downward, WBUR's ratings are showing impressive growth. We are a leader in public media in digital journalism and consistently receive national recognition from our peers for our digital storytelling. We reach millions of people across the country with our two nationally syndicated shows — Here & Now, the midday newsmagazine that we co-produce with NPR, and On Point, an in-depth daily exploration of pressing national and global issues. In fact, we produce more national news programming than any other public radio organization in the country.

We also have a flourishing slate of podcasts and newsletter offerings and we have CitySpace — an exquisite, state-of-the-art events venue that puts WBUR at the center of civic and cultural conversation in Boston and the region. In addition, almost everyone who connects with WBUR, connects with us on multiple platforms — broadcast, web, newsletters, podcasts and live events.

While we clearly have our work cut out for us, and we need runway and investment, we have a strategy that will ensure that WBUR can continue to thrive and to serve our city, our region and our country for decades to come.

Our Five Strategic Objectives

These are the commitments we're making. We must:

And here is how we will execute on these goals:

Focus on Editorial Excellence

This is first and foremost — core to everything we do. Quality is essential if we want to prevail. Our coverage also must be varied and distinctive, help address the dire need for trustworthy news and information and ensure we're reaching audiences wherever they find their news.

Here is how we will succeed.

Our daily news report will add tangible value to people's lives. From our hourly newscasts to our daily newsletter and podcast, these reports will be clear and compelling and provide meaningful context on the most important news of the day — making WBUR's coverage relevant and resonant at every turn.

We will focus on beat reporting. Health, education, transportation, politics, arts and culture, business, environment and investigations. The expertise and rigorous reporting of our journalists will reveal new truths, capture untold stories and enrich our audience's understanding of our city and our region.

We will deliver agenda-setting enterprise and investigative journalism. We will set our sights on ambitious and original WBUR journalism that sheds light where there is none. We'll produce agenda-setting stories and investigative scoops. The need for explanatory journalism and watchdog reporting that holds public officials and institutions accountable is crucial to creating an informed public. And WBUR is in a rare position to do this. We have the editorial heft to deliver on this promise, the audience to make a meaningful difference and no paywall.

We will expand our editorial partnerships. To deepen our coverage and grow our reach locally and nationally. Our current partners include: NPR, The Washington Post, ProPublica, The Marshall Project, The Trace, Grist, Chalkbeat, The Dorchester Reporter and El Planeta. Many news organizations are eager to work with WBUR, because of the trust we hold and the audience scale we can provide. Scale they couldn't possibly achieve on their own.

We will be attentive to craft. On air, online, on demand and on stage — the quality of our writing, our storytelling, our host-led conversations, our use of sound, our audio production, our visuals and our live experiences at CitySpace will be unrivaled.

Our local coverage will better reflect the full breadth and depth of the community we serve. We will track our sources to make sure we're meeting the mark. We will evaluate signs that our community trusts and believes in WBUR's journalism and sees and hears themselves reflected in our coverage. To that end, we will devote time and care to deepening relationships with the region's increasingly diverse communities, including the rapidly growing Hispanic population. We will also continue to diversify our newsroom and ensure those telling stories and making coverage decisions reflect the region we serve.

We will leverage AI, while protecting our journalism and our values. While we are still in the early days and must develop guidelines for how we will experiment, test and deploy artificial intelligence, we believe AI can accelerate routine production tasks and provide new tools to our reporting arsenal. We won't allow AI to trump our editorial judgment, nor will we produce or publish stories without the involvement of a WBUR journalist. That said, we believe AI will allow our journalists to do more high-touch editorial work and meaningful reporting as we alleviate the number of rote tasks. And like any other tool, we will use it to improve what we do and to expand our reach.

Our audience will be at the center of everything we do. We understand that our job is not just to report the news, but to help make sense of an increasingly complex world, illuminate ideas, foster understanding, build community and, as often as possible, spark joy and laughter. This is what distinguishes WBUR's journalism.

And for every story we tell we will ask these questions:

Our relentless audience focus will make our coverage essential so that more people can't imagine a day without WBUR.

Grow the Audience

We must widen the circle and serve more people. As we learned from research during the development of our strategy, there are hundreds of thousands of people in Boston and the region who share the values and interests of our most dedicated audiences, but who don't currently engage with WBUR. Importantly, many of them are younger and people of color.

The people we aim to reach and those who already rely on WBUR are united by what they have in common. They are lifelong learners, endlessly curious, civically engaged and interested in understanding their city, their country and the world.

Our goal is to grow our local listening audience by 2% and our national listening audience by 4%. At the same time, in the next three years, we will go big on digital with the aim of achieving an aggregate 33% growth across web, mobile, podcasts and newsletters.

How will we do this?

We will develop new experiences across platforms that engage and delight our audiences. We will launch new newsletters, a new app and new podcasts. Like great design, first-class products are an essential element of any digital media play. Every experience with WBUR should be of the same high quality as our journalism.

We will also add new live experiences at CitySpace — featuring younger and more diverse artists and writers, thinkers and doers who will allow our current audiences to feel plugged into emerging trends while appealing to the next generation.

We will launch a WBUR Festival in the spring of 2025. The timing is perfect: Our 75th anniversary. WBUR will become a centrifugal force in the city and the region. A Boston festival will raise WBUR's profile locally and nationally and provide a powerful annual experience for the community for decades to come.

But it will take more than that.

We need to tell the WBUR story. So more people know about us and are inspired to discover more.

That means refreshing our brand and meaningfully marketing WBUR. In order to grow the audience and serve more people we need to know how to talk about ourselves. How to compel people to make WBUR a meaningful part of their lives — a daily habit and a source of news they can't find anywhere else. And we need to have an irresistible story to tell.

We don't live in an environment where "if you build it they will come." Like any business, if we hope to grow, we need to tell people what WBUR has to offer and define the WBUR promise. In this cacophonous world, with so much competition for people's time and attention, it is imperative that WBUR stand out as offering something special and distinct from our competitors. We have an opportunity to reignite the imagination of the audiences who already know and love us and to capture the interest of those new audiences we hope to win over.

This brand work will be an accelerant. And it is a fundamental part of our growth strategy. We don't need to redefine who we are, but we do want to break free from outdated perceptions and establish novel ways to communicate with our audience and tell the WBUR story.

Deepen Engagement

The third pillar of our strategy is deepening engagement on every platform and developing one-to-one relationships with our audiences to build daily habit, loyalty and membership love. This is one of the most complex and critical dimensions of our strategy. We will:

Design cross-platform experiences. To offer a more integrated experience with our journalism and our storytelling. So that some of our most enterprising work appears across all our platforms — on air, online, on demand and on stage — and we will cross-promote with abandon, so that our audiences understand the depth and breadth of WBUR's offerings.

Complete the digital transformation of WBUR. We're developing the infrastructure required to support digital audience growth, engagement and conversion. So people become devoted fans and donors. We're calling this digital transformation The Catapult Initiative. It is, in part, an investment in new technology that will revolutionize the way we work and dramatically improve our ability to deliver results.

Know our audience. In the digital age, we can no longer rely on pledge drives and direct mail alone to fuel our membership efforts. We need to understand each and every audience member's interaction with WBUR across every platform — from their first anonymous encounter, to the next time they visit wbur.org, sign up for a newsletter, attend an event, donate and ultimately become a sustaining member. And that requires both technology and expertise to put that information to good use.

The first step is to get audience data — things like name, the history of that person's relationship with WBUR, editorial interests and favored platforms — into a single repository or customer relationship management system (CRM). The second is to combine that information with real-time analytics — where you came from, how many stories you consumed, how frequently you engaged, what actions you took — so that we can deliver the right "prompts" or calls to action at the right moment in your audience journey. This is the job of a customer data platform (CDP).

Understand audience habits. WBUR has struggled for years to build a larger, more engaged and loyal digital audience. That's because we don't have enough information about the crossover between broadcast and digital engagement. We know even less about our digital-only audience and we're unable to address people in real time with anything but the most generic messages.

We've effectively been flying blind. Catapult will allow us to identify our audiences across many platforms and to understand their behavior and propensity to become more involved with WBUR.

What inspires someone to go from being a casual listener to someone who puts a WBUR bumper sticker on their car? What prompts someone to give for the very first time? What are the shifts in that person's relationship with WBUR that result in these displays of affinity?

The Catapult Initiative will support our vision — to become a daily habit for every person in Boston and beyond who seeks to engage with the most consequential issues of our time. And to provide an essential source of news and information. In order to do that, we must know our audience in a more meaningful way.

The power of Catapult. With a new customer data platform, when we look at our audience profiles, we will know if you subscribe to one of our newsletters, what you've read on wbur.org, if you've attended a CitySpace event, if you've downloaded our listening app and if you've donated and when.

By knowing who you are, we can personalize your experience with WBUR — recommend stories, newsletters or podcasts you might be interested in, or invite you to an event you don't want to miss — and we can send these messages via text, email or social, using the platforms we know you spend time on. This is a seamless and elegant way to strengthen our relationships.

Securing our path to sustainability. Once we know who each audience member is, we can move that person on the path toward membership, with more personalized messaging. This is also where the power of our technology platform comes into play — helping us to know when to engage someone, with the right message — authentically and not intrusively. Deepening our connection so you can't imagine a day without WBUR and will continue to give and give more.

The same capabilities will be put to use by our Business Partnerships colleagues, allowing them to organize their prospects and create messages for the audiences they want to reach.

Respect and appreciation for the audience's experience is paramount. All of our work has to be done in a way that respects personal privacy. Readers always have the option to opt out of tracking. But if well executed, the information we gather will result in a better experience for everyone who engages with us. This will be a dramatic shift. For decades, the only way broadcasters like WBUR could develop a giving audience was with relentless pledge drives. It should be noted that this is still the most effective way to drive new member support. But as audiences increasingly move to digital platforms — and escape the intrusiveness of the pledge drive — we need smarter ways to engage people.

The ultimate goal is to have robust and complete profiles of everyone who interacts with us. That won't happen right away. We will have rich profiles on some of our users. Others will remain anonymous. But by understanding their behavior, we can create the ideal WBUR experience. So, over time we can convert them from anonymous visitor to email registrant to first-time donor to full-fledged member and Sustainer. And do it efficiently, at scale for thousands and thousands of people.

This is table stakes in the digital age. We must connect with our audiences as individual human beings, deepen the experience of those who already know and rely on us and give newcomers a reason to come back again and again.

Future-Proof Revenue

Key to our future is making sure that we have the funds to sustain our journalism and our programming so that we can serve current and future audiences for generations to come. Simply put, we must generate more money for WBUR in more ways.

First, we will transform the membership experience. We will find new ways to drive member support and identify potential major gift prospects across channels. With the deployment of our Catapult Initiative, we expect to increase our annual fund (funds raised by our development and membership teams) by more than 15% by the end of FY28.

We will strengthen pillars of sponsorship support. That means we will deliver comprehensive cross-platform packages that allow sponsors to reach audiences with a message that speaks to their values, initiatives and place in the community.

We will launch the next capital campaign. This $125 million comprehensive campaign will allow us to power the continued transformation of WBUR, while deepening relationships with major donors.

We will launch the Bob Oakes Legacy Circle. This will allow us to deepen our reserves with planned giving. This is an enormous and under-realized opportunity for WBUR.

We will focus on other bets. These are business opportunities that have not been front and center for WBUR, but like our car donation business, which delivers at least a million dollars a year — we will focus on everything from CitySpace rentals to our custom podcast studio to our Circle Round Club — all of which have the potential to deliver meaningful revenue for decades to come.

Make WBUR an Exceptional Place to Work

This last pillar is the underpinning of our entire strategy. Because WBUR's success is wholly dependent on the people who work here.

We're committed to fostering a vibrant, generous and inclusive culture. One that inspires excellence at every level of the organization. We want WBUR to be a place people flock to and find hard to leave — an environment where ambitious, creative, collaborative colleagues can do their very best work.

We will continue to communicate with frequency and transparency. So that everyone at WBUR embraces our mission and understands that they're part of something bigger than themselves.

WBUR is designing an organization where everyone thrives. That begins with quality onboarding and ongoing training and development — so that all our WBUR colleagues have a chance to grow professionally, build their knowledge, improve their skills and strengthen their leadership.

We are streamlining all our systems and processes. So navigating any HR issue at WBUR is a seamless and humane experience.

WBUR is building a staff, leadership team and boards that reflect our diverse city and region. So that we look and sound like the people we hope to serve in Boston and beyond.

In Closing

We believe that public media is one of the last great hopes for journalism — a cornerstone of our democracy — and we're at a critical inflection point. Major philanthropic support is essential to our future and to the well-being of our city and our region. WBUR is a public trust, with a nearly 75-year track record — worthy of investment so that we can be here to serve the public, report the truth and enrich lives for another 75 years.