Kansas City Star
TikTok Strategy
As an audience growth intern at the Kansas City Star, I worked with the audience team to develop a content strategy to grow our TikTok account. I created a spreadsheet on Google Sheets to help us track trending audios, video ideas and weekly metrics to identify content that would help grow our account.
Through my work with the account, we doubled our summer follower goal, reaching 1,090 in three months with an average of nine shares/saves and over 37,000 views per video.
@thekansascitystar The first commercially sliced bread was sold in Chillicothe, Missouri on July 7, 1928, and our lunches have never been the same #missouri #kansascity #bread #breadtok ♬ original sound – Millennial32
@thekansascitystar Here’s what you need to do before you vote in Missouri and Kansas’ primary elections on Aug. 2. #kansascity #kansas #missouri #election2022 ♬ BaLsAmic VINAGAUGh – Da Garbage Prince Hans
@thekansascitystar Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley was accused of transphobia during a heated exchange with law professor Khiara Bridges during a hearing on abortion rights. #missouri #kansascity #senate #pregnantpeople ♬ original sound – Kansas City Star
@thekansascitystar Here’s what Missouri’s abortion ban means for birth control like Plan B and IUDs. #missouri #roevwade #birthcontrol #abortion ♬ original sound – Kansas City Star
Instagram Strategy
As an audience growth intern during the summer of 2022, I helped the Kansas City Star curate posts for breaking news events and longform stories for their Instagram account.
We identified opportunities for growth in our audience, which was predominantly young women, by creating explainer decks to give context to trending topics, updating our channels on big events like the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and developing a weekly posting schedule and strategy for Instagram Reels. Through my efforts, the account grew by over 2,000 followers in 11 weeks, and my breaking news post about Missouri’s abortion trigger ban received the Star’s highest social engagement in June.
Newsletter Writing
At the Kansas City Star, I was in charge of helping write some of our newsletters for the Star’s audience. I helped write the Sincerely, The Star newsletter, which was sent every Sunday to Star subscribers, and our daily afternoon newsletter, the Afternoon Catch-Up.
These two newsletters served different purposes for our audience. The Afternoon-Catch Up newsletter served as an introduction for potential readers to the Star, and drove page views to Star stories. We focused on promoting the biggest news of the day. The Afternoon Catch-Up newsletter has a list size of 96,000 as of early August and a click rate of 3.83%.
The Sincerely, The Star newsletter was a bonus to the paying subscribers of the Star. The goal of this newsletter was not necessarily to drive traffic to the website, but to serve as an additional bonus to help increase the value of a subscription for readers. The tone was more lighthearted, and served as an easy way to start the week. The list size of this newsletter was 58,824 with a click rate of 2.49%.
In my role on both of these newsletters, I selected stories to feature, created punchy subheads and copy to describe each story and selected the order they appear in the newsletter.
Afternoon Catch-Up Newsletter
Click here to download a PDF version of this newsletter, and click on the arrows below the PDF to move to the next page.
Afternoon-Catch-Up_-Did-KS-prison-let-man-get-COVID_Sincerely, The Star Newsletter
Click here to download a PDF version of this newsletter, and click on the arrows below the PDF to move to the next page.
Sincerely-The-Star-NewsletterTwitter Moments
To help increase exposure for our audience on breaking news, I helped the Kansas City Star create Twitter moments for some of our top breaking stories, including gathering reactions to the World Cup host site announcement and covering an Amtrak train crash near Mendon, Missouri.
The goal of these Twitter moments was to capture the reaction and thoughts of the Kansas City community and create a consistent storyline for our readers to digest big stories. We included tweets from our newsroom account and our reporters, as well as important community figures or breaking news videos to tell a story about each event we covered.
View my Twitter moments about the World Cup announcement and the Amtrak train crash.
Twitter Threads
Missouri and Kansas held elections in the summer of 2022, and voters in both states were deciding on big issues. In Missouri, voters would decide the Republican and Democratic nominees for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat. In Kansas, voters would decide whether or not to remove the right to an abortion from the state’s constitution — the first statewide referendum since Roe v. Wade was overturned.
I created Twitter threads to cover the election, giving a history into the candidates in the election, as well as providing resources to help readers register to vote, find their polling place and learn more about what was on their ballot.
View my Twitter threads on the Missouri Senate election and election resources.
Columbia Missourian
Building a newsletter for parents
As an audience engagement producer for the Columbia Missourian, I helped build and launch a newsletter targeting parents to help the paper reach new readers and build digital relationships with readers. We also wanted to increase engagement within the Missourian’s readership — their current newsletters were automatically generated with headlines from stories with an open rate of only 4%.
The newsletter focused on coverage for parents, whether that be covering bills in the state legislature or K-12 education. We specifically chose to target this segment by looking at our audience analytics. We saw that stories in the K-12 education section ranked fourth within the local Columbia audience, meaning that there was interest in this topic, but there was also room to grow the audience.
To help inform the way the newsletter was structured, we used an audience survey that asked parents what mattered to them in coverage of Columbia Public Schools and the upcoming school board election. Through this survey, we found that parents cared about topics like teacher support and school safety.
Our first edition came out the day before the school board election and featured an interview with an education reporter to help contextualize some of the issues candidates were speaking on that mattered to our audience. Ahead of this launch, we created an organic social campaign to promote the new newsletter across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. This edition had an open rate of 72.7% and a click rate of 22.7%. The initial list size was 25 ahead of the first edition.
04-03_Newsletter_SchoolBoardAfter the second edition, we noticed the list was not growing as quickly as we would like. We pivoted to running a paid Facebook Ads campaign to reach parents in the Columbia area who may not be already connected with the Missourian. This campaign led to a 240% increase in newsletter signups.
After focusing on elections in our first edition, our second edition looked at state legislative policy that could impact parents. This edition had an open rate of 68.4% and a click rate of 3.8%. This edition featured significantly fewer links in our featured stories page, which could have contributed to this change.
05-01-StateLegislatureMissouri Business Alert
Facebook Live Q&As
To better position Missouri Business Alert as a resource for the state’s small business community, I started hosting biweekly Facebook lives with guests on various topics impacting entrepreneurs. These livestreams were broadcast to Facebook every other week. In my role producing these events, I selected and vetted guests, wrote minute-by-minute scripts to ensure the event ran smoothly and on-time, and created promotional materials to market the events to small business owners.
After hosting these biweekly events, Missouri Business Alert increased its page likes by 32%.
Staycations to Vacations Webinar
I hosted and produced this hour-long webinar that was livestreamed to Missouri Business Alert’s Facebook page discussing the future of tourism in the state of Missouri with state officials and business leaders. I booked each panelist and wrote a detailed minute-by-minute script to ensure all panelists had even time to speak and the event flowed smoothly. I also developed promotional tweets to help alert our listeners to the event.
This event generated the highest day of social engagement over a three month period. Click on the image to watch the event.