Engagement is critical to the future health of news organizations. On that, I bet most folks involved in Gather would agree.

But just what do we mean when we use that word? And what are the dangers of assuming that other people share our definitions?

Loosely, engagement is about the relationship and interactions people have with us and with the journalism we produce. Can we agree on that as an overall umbrella? If we drill down, though, we need to ask: What kind of relationship? Which types of interactions? Which people?

We have people in the Gather community whose work focuses on building relationships with people who are often overlooked by journalism. Earning trust, listening well, meeting face-to-face, etc. Others focus on hosting conversations across divides, seeing journalism as a convener and connector for community members and sometimes also facilitating conversations.

The Gather staff and steering committee like to talk about relational vs transactional engagement, a concept executive director Andrew DeVigal first wrote about in 2015.

The Hearken team wrote this when describing their approach to the work: “Engagement happens when members of the public are responsive to newsrooms, and newsrooms are in turn responsive to members of the public.” Seeking and responding to ideas and feedback — that applies in a lot of ways, right?

Some of us borrow concepts from the broader world of civic engagement, and we see success in terms of action taken as the result of our work. If people protest as the result of an investigation, and that leads to a law being changed, it’s safe to say the community was engaged, right?

How about reporting projects that rely on community stories and engagement? Crowd-powered journalism and crowdsourcing? That could be another category.

Others have work that is focused on the audience as consumer and customer. This work is data-driven, based on how your audience interacts with your content. Newsletter open rates. Scroll depth. Content shares. A recent Consumer Engagement Summit (written about in this Nieman Lab piece) addressed what data can teach journalists about things like encouraging subscriptions and building users’ news habits. That’s engagement, too.

John Levitt of Parse.ly is always up for a conversation about the challenges of measuring things like trust and relationships. Metrics such as engaged time and return visits might not be as sophisticated as we would like at measuring relationships to news organizations, but that doesn’t mean they’re not useful. “If you don't have a relationship and trust with the audience, they won't spend time and come back,” John wrote on Slack this week. He went on to write to me:

“We know that the long-term health of a publisher depends deeply on its ability to build long-term relationships with its readers and viewers. And we know that the 80/20 (or maybe even 90/10) rule is a very real thing for the vast majority — meaning 10% of the audience makes up 90% of the value. So small scale, high intensity engagement efforts can have an outsized impact over time, especially for subscription and membership models.”

Data. Trust. Membership. Impact. Relationships. Engagement.

This post isn’t about deciding which is right or best. It’s about encouraging us all to know what *we* mean when we use the word engagement. What do our colleagues mean? How about our bosses? Teams from other departments? Advertisers and donors?

This is a topic I’ve been fascinated by since I first studied engagement during a 2010-2011 fellowship at the Reynolds Journalism Institute. I interviewed dozens of journalists doing engagement work and wrote a series of posts titled “what engagement means to …”. I ended a year of research by suggesting three categories of engagement work: outreach, conversation and collaboration. It was clear to me then and is even more clear now that to get where we want to be, we need to be more specific about our goals, our priorities and our shared definitions.

Do you have thoughts about more specific language we could be using to describe what we do? Or a definition to share from your own work? Please, join this Slack conversation or email me at joy.m.mayer@gmail.com.

You have three weeks to ruminate on these concepts! The Gather newsletter will take a break and return on Jan. 9. Happy holidays and cheers to 2019!

— Joy Mayer, Gather Community Manager