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Despite the onslaught of music streaming services, radio can carve out a niche for themselves online by nurturing a loyal, engaged and geographically diverse listener base that can ultimately generate additional revenue, says the team at Fabrik. The team adds that stations will, however, have to overcome their fear of digital and take the leap in order to avoid being left behind. Read more

Every three months, our Customer Success team surveys our customers in both the Radio and Managed Communities industries to get a gauge on the value that Fabrik is currently contributing to your business, and how we can improve our service to you. This is done in 2 different ways: 1. Quantitative information A survey is emailed to each of our Fabrik administrators, i.e. those who have login access to applications such as Smashboard and Echocast. The responses give us quantitative information regarding how our product and services are being received across our base of administrators. 2. Qualitative information Our team also conducts in-person interviews with a segment of our Fabrik client base to gain qualitative insights into how Fabrik is contributing to their success. In the final round of customer interviews for 2020, our team received some interesting feedback which we’ve taken on board and used to iterate our product and service delivery. Innovation In general, our customers scored us 7.67/10 for innovation and found the platform ‘handy and innovative’, noting that the platform is ‘constantly evolving and improving’. Some of our customers felt that the recording workflow on Echocast could be improved and we’ve taken that to heart! A useful suggestion on Smashboard was for a preview of the message to appear when hovering over it. Our dev team determined that this would be a quick (and delightful!) user experience improvement, and have already implemented this functionality to Smashboard. To view all our recent updates, check out our Release log. Adding Value to our Customers Our customers scored us 8.5/10 in terms of how well the platform meets their needs, and 83% of customers surveyed felt that the platform had contributed to improving their teams’ workflows. In specific, one customer mentioned the fact that the ability to remotely access Fabrik’s web-based applications was very useful, and our Metrics data visualisation and reporting tool was specifically mentioned as a feature that makes it much easier to provide post-campaign reporting to clients after app-driven campaigns. Support Our Customer Success team have been working intently to provide our customers with exceptional customer support. We are elated that, in general, our customers are extremely satisfied with the way in which we support them and their app members, scoring us 9.33/10 on our Support provision. Communication In terms of the frequency and quality of our communication, all of the customers surveyed feel satisfied with our current routines around communication. One customer mentioned that they would like to see content in the monthly Fabrik Features Update that is more relevant to their professional services business, so we will be implementing a new monthly newsletter for our PAL communities from February onwards. Propensity for Digital Change Within the survey, we also wanted to gauge our customers' perceptions about their organisations’ own ability to implement digital change and transformation. In general our customers gave their businesses a confidence rating of 7.87/10 in their ability to implement digital change and transformation in their organisations. This is a 10% increase from the previous round of surveys, denoting an improvement which we hope is due to our more robust Customer Success engagement and workshops! Whilst they are eager to embrace change within their organisations, some customers felt that they were limited in terms of time and resources which stopped them from achieving what they would have liked to in the last quarter. While our surveys and interviews are scheduled every three months, you are always welcome to send us any feedback you might have. And as always, we would love to hear of features or tweaks that would make Fabrik more useful for you and your team.

Among the first parts of Fabrik to be shipped more than 10 years ago, Echocast was created to address a few key challenges in the Radio industry that unfortunately persist even today: the inability of the on-air team to capture on-air moments live; the inability to create and publish podcasts in real time without having to rely on workflows that were too time-consuming or technical; and the lack of quick and easy access to the broadcast programme archive to retrieve pieces of audio for advertisers or compliance. Echocast has since evolved to the point where it has become a vital content management, archival and compliance tool used extensively across our base of media customers. Radio Programming teams use it to capture snippets of audio that they'd like to make available for listening beyond the live moment, as well as to record and store useful content they may need to access later. Content and Production teams use it for publishing and managing on-demand content (either live or immediately after the moment) to the website, mobile app and social media channels. Promotions and Marketing teams use it to publish featured audio content as part of station promotions and campaigns. Technical teams use it for compliance and audit purposes by downloading any audio from Fabrik's cloud archive. As our Media customers across various departments become more reliant on creating and distributing podcasts, we receive feedback every so often about how the live recording and podcast publishing workflows can be improved. Taking into account our customer feedback, Echocast has received a few updates over the last month to enhance existing functionality and add some new features. Here's what you can expect to find in the latest update: Skip & Return to add Podcast Metadata The workflow of real-time recordings has been improved, providing more options and flexibility upon stopping, saving and publishing the recording. This means that, if you're short on time, you'll be able to skip the capturing of required metadata, and return to complete and publish your podcast at a later time. New 'Publish none' Category Setting It is now possible to set a Category's publish setting to either All, Latest or None. This setting impacts what is shown in your public feeds on your website or app, and all recordings, regardless of this configuration, will still be available in your Echocast admin view. While 'All' is the default, 'Publish latest' is useful for frequent, repetitive recordings (such as News, Sport or Weather) for which your listeners might only be interested in the latest recording in that category. When configuring your Category as 'Publish latest', the previous recordings available in your public feeds will be automatically unpublished whenever a new podcast is published to that category. The 'Publish none' setting is useful for podcasts that are required for archival or proof-of-execution purposes, but not necessarily for publishing to your general consumer. This setting is perfect for sponsored audio content such as live-reads or competition moments that must be captured for business purposes but may not be compelling on-demand listening for your audience. And, when used in conjunction with a Preset associated to this Category, 'Publish none' enables a streamlined and consistent recording workflow for your presenters/producers of content. Increased live-stream buffer One of the most important components of Fabrik for our broadcast customers is the digital live stream, which enables your live radio broadcast to be transmitted via your mobile app and website. The way the app or website transmits the live broadcast is that it loads small sections one after the other into the app to make sure that any breaks in connectivity or interruptions to the stream are sufficiently buffered, providing time for the stream to recover from any unexpected interruptions. In order to make your live stream even more resilient to network interruptions, the duration of that buffer has been extended to allow for a better experience when your listener's connectivity is strained, thereby reducing the likelihood of interruptions to the stream. Increased time tolerance of missing audio segments In the past, if there had been an interruption or break in the audio broadcast, Echocast would restrict the ability to request and retrieve a piece of the audio that had been interrupted. This was fairly limiting in terms of being able to retrieve audio from that section - a feature our Media customers require quite regularly. To ensure all audio (regardless of interruptions) is accessible to those requesting it, this restriction has now been adjusted and is more tolerant to periods of missing audio. Once having downloaded that audio snippet from the archive, you can then go ahead and edit or manipulate the audio as you see fit. Reworked Architecture Echocast was initially engineered to solve a few key challenges in the Radio industry more than a decade ago! Since then, Echocast has undergone a number of iterations, and different parts of the application have been worked on and improved at different times. Although the application had been maintained consistently over the years, it had come to a point where some of the back-end code and architecture had grown outdated and required quite a bit of work and time to bring it up to date. After this update, you should find that the Echocast application loads and processes your audio more quickly, and that podcast recording, audio archive requests and manual uploads are more reliable and speedy. Bug Fixes Preset Recordings Recordings configured with a Preset were occasionally affected when the Pause/Resume recording functionality was used. The result was that, when the recording was resumed, the assigned Preset would be automatically and incorrectly cancelled and erroneously saved to the General Preset. Now that this bug has been addressed, recordings categorised with a Preset will record, pause, resume and publish as expected. More Informative Error Notices In the past, when an audio archive request or a podcast recording failed, a generic email would be sent to the administrator notifying them of the failure. The email notification is now more useful, containing more information around the error. In addition, the way technical issues are logged to our Support team has been improved so that we receive more information regarding the issue, allowing our team to be more proactive when diagnosing issues and/or failures. Content Type Validation on Audio Upload Additional validation has been added to the audio upload functionality so that invalid content types are flagged before the podcast goes into a Processing state. Assigning Podcasts to a Blank Category A bug that caused podcasts to be assigned to a blank Category has been fixed. Further Info Watch our webinar about Echocast's podcasting and content management capabilities.

South Africa: Durban-based tech company, immedia has invested R10-million to help African media entrepreneurs to build sustainable community radio by using Fabrik, a set of cloud-enabled digital tools. Read more

Durban-based tech company, immedia has invested R10-million to help African media entrepreneurs to build sustainable community radio by using Fabrik, a set of cloud-enabled digital tools that empower media entities to live-stream shows, grow and engage with audiences around the world, and benefit financially by monetising their audiences. Read more

South African full-service technology company, immedia, has invested R10-million ($684, 230) with the aim of helping African media entrepreneurs to build sustainable community radio. This will be accomplished through the use of Fabrik, a set of cloud-enabled digital tools that empower media entities to live-stream shows, grow and engage with audiences around the world whilst benefitting financially through the monetisation of their audiences. Read more

Durban-based tech company immedia has invested R10m to help African media entrepreneurs to build sustainable community radio by using Fabrik, a set of cloud-enabled digital tools that empower media entities to livestream shows, grow and engage with audiences around the world and benefit financially by monetising their audiences. The 25-year-old company, which has the backing of Microsoft and the Industrial Development Corporation, has been developing their Fabrik technology since 2017. Fabrik allows media entrepreneurs to upend the traditional notion of “we broadcast and you receive”, by creating a feedback loop that directly helps the stations and listeners that use it to leapfrog old technology, to become citizen journalists and find their strategic space in a digitally transformed world. It is already being used by 15 commercial clients, including radio stations Gagasi FM, Smile 90.4FM and YFM. As part of its Digital Leap programme, immedia will be giving its platform to qualifying media entrepreneurs across Africa for free for a year. This includes consultation, training and support to help monetize the technology, cumulatively valued at R10 million. Phil Molefe, a veteran of broadcast radio in South Africa, Fabrik’s head of business development and strategy, says the programme was key to the company’s vision to spearhead media transformation. He says the uptake of Fabrik by energetic entrepreneurs at community radio stations showed how empowering the suite of digital tools is. “It enables them to deepen their relationship with their audience and monetise it sustainably because the quality of their engagement with listeners is meaningful.” Building stable, sustainable community radio across Africa Molefe points out that while community media is often under-resourced and struggles to retain skills, the company’s case studies have shown that it is more than possible for them to thrive - and that the Digital Leap programme is the kind of opportunity they need, and can succeed on. Fabrik helps media entrepreneurs by solving key challenges for them, including: Providing them with a mobile application that allows community and campus radio stations to livestream shows, as well host podcasts, allowing them to reach audiences well beyond the geographic constraints of their traditional radio broadcast signal. By shifting to a cloud-based tool, radio stations get access to archival and backup that is compliant with BCCSA and Icasa regulations. This helps them to significantly cut down on time and resources required to manually back up radio content to on-site servers or even tape. Messaging functionality, including push notifications, so that stations can better engage with their communities, publish written or multimedia content and even promote active conversation between listeners. Push notifications help drive engagement by bringing attention to active competitions, surveys and polls, recently published content, and more. By encouraging listeners to register as a member and provide some of their personal information, such as geographics and demographics, stations are able to build audience profiles for their listeners, and gain a better understanding of their needs and preferences. These detailed analytics provided by Fabrik gives stations the data they need to convince advertisers and marketers of the value of promoting their products and services through the station’s app, helping bring in much needed revenue. Fabrik has a range of users, and about 60% of their listeners have an opt-in relationship with their broadcasters. By building and growing owned communities, stations then stand to benefit financially by serving highly relevant ads to their digital listeners. In addition, where sales conversions on social media are around 2%, Fabrik users enjoy 8%. According to Tamie Mbombo, head of marketing and PR at Izwi loMzansi, one of the largest community radio stations in South Africa, says that the platform has revolutionised the station’s engagement with its listeners, and has led the digital charge with featured podcasts and integrated advertising campaigns on the Izwi mobile app. “Community media’s aim is to provide trusted information and expression, and Fabrik has helped do that,” he says. A change of mindset is required The Fabrik team made some interesting observations based on the experiences of early adopters of the technology, including around community radio, where many advertisers and business decision-makers are often dismissive of the audience. “For example, one of our clients is a station with an audience in the LSM four to six range. That audience is typically regarded as ‘too poor’ or too marginalised to go digital and yet our clients are proving that they are taking to it like ducks to water,” Molefe says. He says that the take up by media entrepreneurs, either regarded as ‘on the fringes’ or as outliers, is the best showcase for Fabrik. “They are doing what they do because nobody told them they couldn’t - and it is proving to be a great leveller. We’ve seen how powerful this platform is in the community media space, which is why we are looking at boosting the rate of transformation.” Watch the full event here:

How ready is your business for digital transformation? If your answer is 'not very', the data shows that you're not alone. Read more

How ready is your business for digital transformation? If your answer is “not very”, the data shows that you’re not alone. That’s the answer we received from a surprising number of our clients we canvassed in a recent survey. We got a similar response when we polled our audience during a recent webinar on 'Radio's Digital Transformation in a Data-Driven Age'. Watch the webinar: https://youtu.be/kmusgBFh5ys I say “surprising” because you’d expect companies in the media and broadcasting space to be ahead of the digital curve. While many undoubtedly are, particularly those who have adopted digital tools such as Fabrik, quite a few others aren’t as ready for digital transformation as they might need to be. If 2020 has shown us anything, it’s that momentous change is not only inevitable, it’s upon us, whether we’re ready or not. While we were all busy drawing up our ‘Digital Transformation’ strategies and debating the definition of “4IR”, Covid came along and thrust everyone off a cliff into a digital sea. Whether your company sinks or swims may depend on how quickly and adeptly you adapt to a new reality, one where formerly fringe concepts like WFH (work from home) have entered the business mainstream and niche products like Zoom have become verbs – much as Google and Skype did for an earlier generation of netizens. The good news is that there are three practical things you can do starting today that will help ensure your success in this regard. While the experience I draw on is largely in technology and broadcasting, these three principles are relevant for decision makers in most industries who find themselves confronting the reality of digital transformation. 1. Look within It may not always be apparent, but most members of your organisation can help point the way to your digital transformation priorities. The younger people are more obviously digitally savvy, having grown up in a world of smartphones, memes and connectivity. But don’t discount your older team members. They’ve already lived through the arrival of - and in many cases helped usher into their workspaces – tech like fax machines, the internet, email and voice conferencing, long before the arrival of instant messaging and video calls. They bring a wealth of institutional knowledge and expertise as well as solid values and ethics to any discussions around your company’s digital transformation journey, all of which can be the perfect counterpoint to their younger colleagues’ enthusiasm, energy and comfort with cutting edge tech and the latest trends. This may mean looking at your people through new eyes, employing a collaborative process, and being receptive to ideas from unexpected quarters. But if you’re open to allowing discourse, debate and conversation, looking within will help you find the seeds of change - and maybe also the agents of that change - inside your own organisation. 2. Look without While change starts from within, looking outwards can take its positive effects to an entirely new level. Internal collaboration unlocks the potential of your own team, but external collaboration can unleash the power of the entire supply chain. To get started, identify at least one external partner – perhaps a supplier or even a key customer or a loyal advertiser – who would be prepared to take this digital journey of discovery with you. Try looking at your supply chain in an entirely new way and identifying individual links as potential partners. Digital transformation is a convergence problem and the more partners you have in this journey, the more perspective you can collectively bring to solving problems. Taking this path requires courage and will push you well out of your comfort zone. It will require a leap of faith and trust in your prospective partners. But the rewards are worth it. 3. Adopt a culture of change If it wasn’t already apparent, 2020 has driven home the fact that change isn’t a once off, but a continuous, often disconcerting, reality of life. To survive and thrive in this state of constant flux, you will need to adapt your internal culture and structure to embrace change and encourage it within your organisation. This may involve re-examining the metrics you currently use to measure progress, productivity and other organisational priorities. You’ll need to ask yourself, “Do the things we measure encourage change or do they entrench established practices that may be at odds with change?” As important as being agile and responsive to change is finding consensus as an organisation on what constitutes good change. Chaos is change, but you want to avoid that. Throwing stuff up against the wall and seeing what sticks is not meaningful change. Nor is change for change’s sake. Yes, the prospect of transformation can be daunting. But doing nothing simply leaves you vulnerable to unwanted and unexpected changes you haven’t planned for. So, tap into the insights, energy and experience of your own staff and external stakeholders, then have a robust conversation on what kind of change you want. If our own experience and that of our partners is anything to go on, this will get you out of the starting blocks and further along the path to sustainable digital transformation than many, maybe all, of your competitors. In a recent webinar on digital transformation in the Radio industry, Anice delves into the subject in a lot more detail, as well as discussing issues like customer privacy and opportunities for real-time rich data in metrics. “You are not flying blind. That’s the digital transformation - it makes reality a lot more accountable.”

We know that starting anything new can be hard, and that as your organisation embarks on your journey of digital transformation, your advertisers need to come along too. One of the most simple, yet powerful ways you can start to build familiarity and trust with your advertisers, generate revenue and connect with your audience is by using app billboards. What is an app billboard? An app billboard is a promotional image that appears for a few seconds after your app is launched. Billboards are a popular choice for advertisers, and can also be used communicate special campaigns or any other newsworthy information you'd like to share with your audience. Within your app, you have the option to display more than one billboard at the same time. These can represent separate advertisers/campaigns or a single campaign with a number of different billboards. If you are flighting a number of billboards at the same time, you can choose whether you'd like them to appear in a particular order, or randomly. You also have the option to add a call-to-action to your billboard which could consist of either a clickable link allowing app members to navigate to a website or a clickable button allowing them to dial through to a predetermined phone number. The billboard/s will display once every 10 minutes so if you're coming in and out of the app frequently, the maximum amount of times the billboard/s will be shown is once every 10 minutes. And once you're in the app, there's no need to quit and reopen in order to view the billboards again. Simply tap the star in the top right of your app. Benefits of using app billboards Billboards can be used effectively to stimulate app engagement and offer value to your advertisers regardless of what industry you're in. Our customers across all industries, such as broadcast entities, residential communities or business groups, use billboards to support their business objectives in a few different ways, including: Promoting local business specials, products and deals. Providing community-interest info such as Covid-19 awareness. Supporting broader engagement campaigns or initiatives. Building strong brand affiliation over a longer period of time. Informing audiences on features and functionality within the app. Introducing an Advertiser to Billboards Billboards are a low-risk way to introduce a new advertiser to your digital audience, or to get an existing advertiser comfortable with the wide range of app-based inventory options available. It's easy to measure and provide statistics on the performance of a billboard campaign and, for an advertiser who would like quick in-flight changes, it's so simple to change or adjust a billboard on-the-fly. Pricing of billboards could also be offered at an introductory or promotional price, or part of a package with other elements such as on-air or social media. You can price this inventory in a similar way to your other inventory so as not to deter your advertisers from being willing to experiment. You could even consider offering premium pricing if a customer would like their billboard to always appear first when the app is launched. how to set up a billboard campaign Now that you've aware of what an app billboard is and its benefits, there are a few simple steps before you're ready to run a successful billboard campaign, whether it's an internal initiative or a partnership with an advertiser. Step 1: Plan your Billboard Campaign For the purpose of this exercise, let's imagine our community is hosting a Fun Run to raise funds for the local SPCA. The community would like to share a billboard in their app to let people know about the event, and potentially add a link navigating to a website for registrations or ticket purchases. Some questions you can ask when considering how to create your billboard are: What is the message you'd like to get across? Is it simply one billboard or a campaign of several billboards? Would you like the billboard to link through to a website or video when tapped? How long would you like the billboard to run for? Step 2: Design your Billboard Once you've decided what it is you'd like to say in your billboard, it's time to create the design. As this stage, it is important to be aware of a few simple guidelines to ensure that the billboard displays appropriately within your app. One design for the billboard will be required, which will respond to different device sizes. The actual size of the billboard will be different to the size of the 'safe area' which is the area that will be visible within the app, to accommodate for different device sizes. Any text included in the billboard should not be too small or illegible, and images should be clear and not too detailed. Below is an example of what our Fun Run billboard could look like. Including a call-to-action button that informs the member that the billboard is clickable will help our community find out more and maybe even sign up. Step 3: Submit your billboard to the Fabrik team for flighting Once your billboard design is complete, and you've decided how long you'd like the campaign to run for, you're ready to get started with your campaign! When you're ready to submit your billboard/s for flighting, please contact our Customer Success team who will do that for you. Measuring the impact of a billboard campaign Once the billboard is live, you will need to find reporting and insights about how the advertising campaign is performing. This information is available within the Metrics application, where you'll be able to see exactly how many times the billboard was viewed within the campaign and, if there was a clickable URL associated with it, how many times the billboard was clicked or tapped. To find out more about how to use billboards to engage with your advertisers or to flight your next billboard, please get in touch with our Customer Success team. And stay tuned for some exciting upgrades we have coming to app billboards soon! further info Read more about Fabrik's other Advertising Inventory possibilities. Watch our webinar about different campaign ideas and opportunities within Fabrik.

Execute a high-impact, integrated campaign that works across your digital platforms to support your audience growth and engagement objectives. Fabrik's suite of applications can enhance your traditional audience engagement campaign by adding a powerful real-time element, along with sophisticated campaign insights and metrics you can leverage in-flight to increase your outcomes. To help you get more comfortable with executing app-based campaigns, we'd like to share some guidelines on how you can get started. Let's imagine an example of a campaign that can more clearly illustrate these steps. How about something like 'Create your own Christmas Jingle?' For this kind of campaign, we'll be asking our app members to send us a voice-note of themselves singing their most festive Christmas tune. The winner at the end would be the person who'd sent through the best one! Step 1: Plan your campaign The first step in this process is to consider what you'd like to get out of the campaign, and start to plan the activities required to achieve those goals. Determine your Campaign Objectives: The objective/s you'd be aiming to achieve with an app-based campaign should ideally support your Business Strategy, such as: growing your digital audience or membership, increasing engagement, or obtaining more meaningful demographic or psychographic information about your membership. For each campaign, consider any particular objectives you have around audience growth or engagement, and whether there are specific audience insights you'd like to gain or habits you'd like your audience to form. These could be objectives such as: Educate your audience on how to use key functionality of the app i.e. sending voice-notes or images. Increase the size of your app audience through new downloads. Increase the size of your addressable audience through new registrations. Enhance audience insights through the addition of new profile fields or through surveys and polls. Create a compelling case study you can take to future advertisers or sponsors. In our Christmas Jingle campaign example, we want to increase the size of our audience and engagement through new app downloads and registrations, as well as introduce our audience to the concept of sending voice-notes. Create your Campaign Mechanic: Consider how you'd like to invite your audience to enter the campaign in a manner that aligns with your objectives. Ensure that the mechanic is easy enough to follow so it does not deter your audience from entering. For example, in our Christmas Jingle campaign, we would want to encourage our members to Download the Fabrik app. Register your profile. And send us your most festive Christmas Jingle via the Contact Us conversation! You'd also want to make sure your mechanic is very clear when it's being mentioned within social media promotions or during your on-air broadcast. For more fun campaign ideas, check out this video with promotions expert Jonathan Lumley! Choose Inventory to support your Campaign: There are a number of in-app inventory options you can use to support your campaign objectives within the app, including a promotional billboard, or even a pre-roll audio that can be added to your live-stream or podcasts, or both! Within our Christmas Jingle campaign, we're adding a festive billboard and an audio pre-roll (a clip that plays before our livestream and each podcast) to remind our audience about the campaign and how to enter. Read more about the various kinds of advertising options available. Engage with potential Advertisers: When planning the campaign, consider whether it would work best as an internal engagement campaign, or whether you'll invite an advertiser to be a part of it. This may be a good opportunity to get one or more of your advertisers or partners acquainted with how to use the app, and demonstrate how their investment can yield pleasing results. Consider offering sponsored prizes to incentivise your audience to engage with the campaign, and ensure they pose a large-enough incentive to obtain the engagement you're looking for. STEP 2: CONFIGURE YOUR APP At the heart of any Fabrik-powered campaign is your mobile app, and using it effectively throughout the campaign is important to maintain a high level of engagement and interest with your audience. Plan your App Engagement and Content: The way the app's Messaging functionality is employed is a key part of sustaining audience engagement throughout the campaign. During our Christmas Jingle campaign, we might consider adding a dedicated channel for the duration of the campaign where we could share regular updates about the campaign, celebrate winners, etc. Consider whether you'd like to make it a Conversation in which people would be able to chat about the competition, or a Channel in which only Trusted Members in your organisation can share information that everyone else can view. Watch this video to learn how to use Conversations and Channels more effectively. Create your campaign using Campaign Manager: To make it easier to monitor and measure the impact and engagement of your campaign, you'd want to track responses to the campaign using Smashboard's Campaign Manager. Campaign Manager empowers you to enter a particular keyword associated with the campaign that would be monitored throughout, and facilitates the selection of winners from those who've submitted entries using that keyword. In the event that your campaign is active across other messaging platforms, you also have the option to consolidate all entries from Twitter, Facebook or even SMS. Update your app's Profile Fields: Consider the kinds of information you'd like to collect from your audience, and use your campaign as an opportunity to encourage people to update these fields. Profile fields are configured within the Community Centre application and can be set as 'Required' or 'Optional.' STEP 3: set up your Promotions In order to ensure the success of your campaign, there are a number of activities you can embark upon to promote your new campaign and create awareness. Use Social Media to create awareness about the campaign & drive engagement: Use all your social media platforms to create awareness around your campaign, mention the entry mechanic often and share information about winners to create buzz and excitement. Put together a content plan to begin a few days before the campaign and to run throughout the course of the campaign Set aside some budget to boost specific posts promoting the campaign within which you'll ask your followers or those targeted with the content to download your app. Co-ordinate any other Promotional Activities: Consider how else you could create awareness around your campaign. Rally your internal team around incorporating the campaign into their routine communication initiatives like monthly emailers or your on-air broadcast. If your organisation is a radio station, consider prepping your presenters with live-reads they can incorporate into each show or include your on-air audience in the fun by getting your presenters to read out the winners on air, or better yet, call the winners back on air and ask them to answer the call with a specific phrase to win. Step 4: execute & Monitor your campaign It's now time to execute! During the duration of your campaign, your aim will be to optimise the effectiveness and impact of the campaign to provide the best ROI possible. Looking at the data on a daily basis will help inform "in-flight" tweaks that need to be made to the execution, and help keep all important stakeholders informed on the campaign progress. Create in-campaign analyses for internal and external stakeholders: Keep all stakeholders informed throughout the campaign with regular updates. Consider including information like new downloads, new registrations, daily engagements via Smashboard's Campaign Manager and social media engagement. You can obtain all this information easily using the Metrics application. Watch this video to learn about the engagement information available within Metrics. If you've included an additional action in your campaign mechanic like asking your audience to update their Profile Fields, you may want to include some information about how many individuals have updated those fields. Get in touch with our Customer Success team if you'd like access to insights or information that are not yet available within Metrics. Step 5: Create your post-campaign Reporting Fabrik offers powerful data and audience insights after the fact, which you can use to demonstrate value to your advertisers or impact to your team. Create a post-campaign analysis: Use Fabrik Metrics to create an insightful post-campaign analysis which your stakeholders can use to gauge the impact of the campaign. Create a campaign case study: Once you've created your post-campaign analysis, you may want to package it in a different way, to appeal to your press office for added publicity, or send out to your Sales teams which they can use to engage with potential advertisers. Further Info: Read this case study around how one of our customers successfully implemented a Fabrik-powered campaign. Watch our recent webinar around how a Fabrik customer achieved over 1 million campaign entries!