Stuff I'M Thinking About

The purpose of this retrospective series is to share the strategic thinking behind the RNZ website from 2005 to 2016. This will be a grab bag of strategy, insights, history and insider stories.

I left RNZ in 2016, and over the preceding 10 years I gave many presentations on this subject to new staff and at conferences, as well as writing many blog posts covering a range of topics. A number of people have asked me about some of these things since, at least twice this year, so I thought it was probably time to write something down. Yes, I have a very good memory…

My job title was “New Media Manager”, which required a mix of strategy, product management, analysis, business process redesign, operations, user experience, architecture, development, design, editing, writing, web evangelism and more. I did this for 11 years, during which we grew traffic by a factor of over 150 times!

In this first part I’ll cover the basic strategy, and in subsequent parts I will look at the initial choices we made in more detail and how they evolved. 

Back in 2005 I worked on RNZ’s first digital strategy with then CEO Peter Cavanagh. At the time, this was focussed on creating a platform where people could consume RNZ content anywhere, at any time. 

There weren’t separate content or product strategies, just One Strategy To Rule Them All. Choices about content, product, and many other things were made in an integrated manner in support of creating a successful public-facing website.

For this post I am going to set up the original strategy choices using Roger Martin’s Playing to Win (PTW) framework. I did not have this framework at the time, but I have found it a powerful lens through which to view past decisions, and to reflect and learn. To use the framework to create a new strategy, you don’t just slot existing choices in, you must start from scratch, something I covered in Revisiting Media Strategy.

Good strategy is about designing the future, and in retrospect the choices we made did work. The site grew from 30,000 page views a month in 2004 to over 1.6 million in 2014, and 6.2 million in 2016. Content availability expanded from a weekly rotation of audio and news in 2005 to over 27,000 hours of audio and 250,000 news stories available in 2014.

The site became known for some unique initiatives: 

• release of podcasts at scale in 2006, in anticipation of audience demand
• open audio formats, and nearly everything downloadable and embeddable
• market-leading speed
• award-winning design
• a commitment to accessibility
• the ability to publish stories with macrons from its inception in 2005 (and even Chinese)
• supporting and augmenting radio shows with online content.

Since I left RNZ others have worked tirelessly to expand the content being offered and the reach of the site. 

In August 2023, the site had over 950,000 unique pieces of content, and according to RNZ, 872,000 people 15+ accessed the RNZ website per month between January and April 2023. If I recall correctly, it was about 140,000 a month in 2014.

That looks like winning to me.

1. Winning Aspiration

In 2005, the aspiration was to have a website with content that reflected the depth and breadth of what RNZ did, with this being available to anyone, anytime, on the platform of their choice. This was initially severely constrained by cost, and to some extent copyright issues. 

While there was political support for an improved website—this had resulted in an extra (gratefully received) $360K in funding—this was a tiny amount compared with the budgets of other public broadcasters at the time. 

Sometimes constraints are a blessing, and in terms of creating a strategy, those constraints certainly drove a high level of focus and realism about what was of value (and what was not).

We’d looked at the offerings of other public broadcasters, and locally at Stuff and NZ Herald, with envious eyes.

But rather than looking to compete, or copy, a ‘winning’ strategy was defined in terms of maximising the available content offered, and the availability and reach of that content, within our constraints. We already knew there was demand for what we were about to offer, so the initial focus was on optimising supply. Later, we started to focus more on how the demand-side of the equation worked.

How would we measure success, and what is this for a not-for-profit public broadcaster? It could have been any of the following:

• increasing recognition and trust of the brand
• ratings success (with ‘success’ being very carefully defined)
• improved results in both quantitative and qualitative surveys
• increased or solid listenership of quality niche content not provided by others
• expansion of content (and consumption) of content that tells the stories of groups under-represented in other media
• awards in industry competitions
• recognition in other forums.

Looking specifically at the website itself, winning could be defined as sustained increases in:

• content made available, and tailored for online
• number of visitors, on average, each month
• time spent on site for each visit
• time spent on each story
• audio listened to and downloaded
• social media shares and likes
• page impressions, number of pages per visit.

But it was enough to be on the playing field, and even in this we did differentiate ourselves in terms of the quality and style of content, and with the design of the site as you will see in part three of this series.

Targets were not set for some of these measures, at least not at the start. Later, when website targets were required for annual reporting, I provided ‘estimates’ based on a projection of past growth, minus a fudge factor. Targets are meaningless unless we have direct ways to influence the outcome, and on a website, this is rarely possible. The numbers increase (or decrease) due to the interaction of a great many things, some unknown, some unknowable. 

The thing about targets is that we have to have a meaningful basis for believing that staff are able to change something that will make it possible to meet the target. Given that most businesses are complex systems, there is not a magic lever (or two) to pull to meet targets. It is not just about getting ‘content’, ‘website features’ and ‘marketing’ ‘right’.

Setting a target to make people work harder towards it doesn’t work either, because staff instinctively know this, and it just breeds frustration when they are ‘held to account’.

If growth is an objective, there are ways to achieve that, and tracking progress is an important part. Incremental improvement is a better long term choice than periodic pushes that may, or may not, reach stretch targets! 

Of course, one lever that can be pulled is to create viral content. That is not a realistic approach to setting or meeting targets because no one really knows what makes something go viral. Sometimes that content might be decidedly off-brand. It’s not really something that anyone can control, although there are lots of articles on the subject. None of them have gone viral.

2. Where to Play

We chose to play in our natural sweet-spot—providing versions of radio content that could be accessed anywhere, anytime, via a public website. 

This covered news text, mostly taken from radio bulletins and edited lightly to work online. The audio was a catchup service for stuff you may have missed on air. This was augmented with programme schedules, staff profiles, recipes (as broadcast), and press releases.

The bar for providing content on the 2005 RNZ Website was set quite low, given the level of funding. It had to carry the following:

• news
• audio on demand
• daily radio schedules
• staff profiles
• host and contact information for each show
• recipes
• publicity material.

RNZ also had the advantage of lots of audio, which was, and still is, unique in the New Zealand market in terms of depth and breadth. Recipes are far more popular than you might expect.

3. How To Win

We came up with these:

• support staff in fashioning their work so that it can be used in both radio and web channels with minimal extra effort
• create tools to assist staff with the above
• publishing consistently both on terms of time of day, and with content correctly identified in a way that people know what it is
• a clean and simple design, with clear navigation pathways, and some personality
• all content will be formatted consistently
• we will meet as many of the WCAG accessibility standards as possible
• HTML, CSS and images will be optimised for fast delivery over dial-up
• industry recognition through awards
• growth in the number of visitors, and amount of content consumed
• being able to deploy new features quickly in response to visitor or story-telling needs.

If I were doing this today, I would want to closely align content choices with listeners’ Jobs To Be Done (JTBD). 

JTBD is a way of understanding the demand-side forces that exist in consumers, and in particular what progress they are trying to make that might push (and pull) them towards what you are offering. Once that is understood, you can respond. 

This approach is far more powerful and goes beyond surveys and analytics as an input to the strategy process because it is about the customer’s unmet needs. Most of the data available to most companies is about the past, and says nothing at all about these needs. 

A strategy focussed on the demand-side needs of customers would be unique in ways that differ from most typical industry strategic choices. I will cover that in a separate post after this series.

4. Capabilities

In order to support the above where to play and how to win choices we needed these capabilities:

• digital leadership
• support for staff in culture change and work-practice change
• business process analysis and redesign
• ability to influence
• web editing
• audio editing
• design
• image processing
• accessibility practice
• software development
• photography (to a limited extent).

Most of these are self-evident.

The plan—something that we did achieve—was to up-skill radio producers to edit and post their own content wherever possible. This made the programme pages on the site an integral part of the programme that the producers could use to deliver their content.

Capabilities is not another word for head-count. When the site started there were 3.5 FTEs working on the team, some of those with split (non-web) duties.

Even at its peak, the core web team was only five or six people, and this was disbanded in 2015, and was replaced by a new Digital division into which all existing roles moved.

There are key capabilities that we must have within the team. Others can be hired as needed, or borrowed from other departments.

5. Management Systems

In many respects the RNZ web project was run like a skunkworks project. My boss at the time had one instruction for me: I want you to come to work and think about the internet. 

A by-product of effectively running as a start-up inside of the company, was that everyone on the team got to do everything—writing, editing, social media, design, and coding (just me), to name a few things. This required a different way to hire, evaluate staff performance and how to create and size jobs.

We did have to follow good project practice, but the removal of certain constraints such as what technology platform to use—RNZ was a “Microsoft Shop” at the time—gave us the freedom we needed to truly explore the available solution space through an open RFP (covered in the next post in the series).

One very important constraint was the requirement for the website to follow existing editorial policies, procedures and controls. This was achieved by leveraging off existing procedures and systems, with the additional ability to review some content prior to publishing, and to take down any content if needed.

All radio content had already gone through a thorough editorial process prior to being broadcast, or had just been broadcast live. No other input was needed, apart from an agreed process to stop live content being published if there was a problem, something that would occasionally happen if a guest swore, for example. 

As we started to publish more documentaries, some were subject to additional legal checks because of their permanence on the site, and availability internationally. Winning does not include getting sued.

Schedules and publicity also had their own processes to ensure that the content was accurate, and met the required standards.

Leveraging off all these existing processes ensured a simple, well-understood, and incredibly predictable and reliable system.

The other point about building on existing radio processes is that it was more efficient. Adding a whole new structure full of people double-handling work is just wasteful duplication. Winning was about keeping costs down! 

A second concern was to eliminate as much manual work as possible through automation. An example was the parsing of schedule documents (compiled in MS Word) to extract and format the daily schedules. Likewise, daily content pages for programmes were automatically created by running a special piece of software each week. Both of these innovations reduced two person-days of work per week, down to about 20 minutes.

Lean and agile thinking were are the forefront of most of this work.

Strategy should naturally cascade down through an organisation, creating the chance for more choices to me made lower down, based on local departmental context. Delegation to staff is key, so that they can make these choices based on an understanding of the overall vision and upstream contexts. A different style of leadership was needed, and I have always been a fan of intent-based leadership, on which this model is based.

Closing Thoughts

Retrofitting the choices we made in 2005 into the Playing To Win framework was a useful way to present and collate all the choices we made, and to review them for this series. If we were doing this from scratch, we would obviously apply some tests to the strategy such as what would have to be true. Looking back, they do appear to be a fairly integrative set of choices that were unique, and could place RNZ in its own place in the field of play. They were also choices that we could build and improve on, as I’ll show in later posts. I think it was a good strategy because it stood the test of time, and delivered results.

Some of the choices we made were highly contextual and a product of the time, while some are choices that I would still make today.

Here is what you can expect in future posts:

• the RFP Process and hosting (next up)
• information architecture, visual design and front-end technology
• The content management system and site speed
• audio, programmes and schedules
• news
• growing the audience, and summing up.

As they say on the radio, stay tuned, details coming up…