In this final post in our series on how we can look at our projects when aiming at reaching audiences, engaging with them and arriving at the desired impact we’ll talk about one of the more crucial aspects of today – collaboration.

There is an ever-growing need to be a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to creating content and reaching audiences. You’d need to be a good producer to manage the project, you need to be a brilliant storyteller in order to craft something people will find interesting and engaging, you’d need to be proficient in marketing and social media to reach the right people, you need to be a social savant in order to engage with them etc and so on. This is especially true for those of us who work in smaller outfits and don’t have a large number of colleagues to call on as the need arises. And this is even more true when it comes to what we’re discussing in this series – reaching, engaging with and validating audiences. But if you feel you are lacking in one or more of these areas – which I guess most of us do on a daily basis – the key is to find the right people to collaborate with in the right amount.

Some questions regarding collaboration that can help you frame you and your project in the correct light would be:

• Who are our participants and stakeholders, and can we leverage their reach somehow? Absolutely try to tie down agreements that participants and other stakeholders agree to use what reach they have to help your project reach more people. Ideally, offer them suggestions for messaging, calls to action etc, to make the process easier.
• How do we activate audiences, and once we have, how do we reward and validate them? Following up on the call to action point above, how would audiences best be activated in connection to your project? What kind of rewards would make sense in this context? How can we ensure that the ones who do become active feel properly validated?
• What other narratives or pieces of content can we tap into to increase our own relevance and attractiveness? Are there zeitgeis-pieces that our project would fit in alongside of, naturally? Can we collaborate with those creators somehow?
• Where are our own weak points? What do we not master, and do we have the time to master those skills? If not, who can we approach for guidance or assistance or even deeper involvement?

This concludes the series on reach, visibility and engagement. Speaking of which, do let us know how you find this series in the comments below or through any other channel. The same content will be framed as a questionnaire for creators and producers to take part of and utilize as needed, in the near future.

Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash