Why we built EdNC so differently from other outlets

Now seven years old, the award-winning EdNC is reinventing nonprofit education news with extensive fieldwork and a commitment to share its platform with its community. Its strategies and tools are being picked up by other outlets and networks.

By Mebane Rash

Hey y’all. My name is Mebane, and I work with the team at EdNC.

Our job is make sure everyone in North Carolina has access to nonpartisan news, data, research, information, and analysis about the major trends, issues, and challenges bearing on education.

We cover the continuum from birth to career, and since our beginning we have known we can’t cover education without also covering poverty, health care, nutrition, and the economy.

We’ve been at it for seven years, starting with an audience of zero in a purple state with great trepidation about education journalism.

In the four months before we launched, I had 150 meetings with people across the state, asking them to pull out their phones and show me where they got their information about education and then what they did with it. How we do our work was and is based on those conversations.

We believe in servant leadership, working together as a team of peer experts. Collectively, it is our privilege to write the story of education in North Carolina.

We believe in servant leadership, working together as a team of peer experts.

Our work is mission guided: “to expand educational opportunities for all students in North Carolina, increase their academic attainment, and improve the performance of the state’s public schools.”

We work, averaging 50 hours a week including travel. We have organizational meetings on Mondays so our team can be in our offices from Tuesday to Friday — our offices being the schools and community colleges across our 503-mile-long state.

Traveling had to be our DNA. Long before COVID, we traveled, spending more than $100,000 annually to make sure we are in communities long enough to get to know the people and the place and have a pulse on the communities we serve.

We continued to travel throughout COVID. From March 2020 to March 2021, we traveled in person to 45 school districts and 29 community colleges, sleeping in our cars when we were scared and unvaccinated just like our teachers. From the start of delta until omicron, I have been in 20 counties, and that’s just me. We have 15 people on the team out and about in community.

As described in our annual report, we are organized as a nonprofit, and the work costs us about $2.5 million a year. We strive to have 6-8 months of liquidity, and we build runway through multi-year grants. We spend an equal amount of time producing the content, publishing the content, and pushing it out in the world, and our grants include funding for reporters, researchers, editors, multimedia, travel, convenings, equipment, our platform, and distribution.

Our audience increased 142% during 2020, and we retained that audience in 2021 with 1,171,164 users and 2,021,970 pageviews. We send out 249,272 emails each week through four newsletters. We partner with BCom Solutions to optimize our paid media strategy on Facebook.

We recently published our strategy on content distribution, audience growth, and engagement. This strategy can be iterated for the work of any news organization taking into consideration whether they are for purpose or for profit, the size of the team, and the resources available.

Are we different? We were just fortunate to build EdNC from the ground up and not be caught between the ways things have been done and the ways things can be done.

We were just fortunate to build EdNC from the ground up and not be caught between the ways things have been done and the ways things can be done.

We practice diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging across four dimensions:

intrapersonal, including wellness stipends and equity coaches for our team;
organizational, including ongoing DEI training through both the educator and journalist lens as well as changes in board governance to distribute power;
community, including an equity editor and an equity auditor;
and systems change, including the NC Media Equity Project and sharing resources with other organizations like LatinxEd.

We use a layered reporting strategy.

Social first content happens when we are out and about so people know where we are, who we are with, and what we are talking about. Our news documents in real time the when and where and why, providing comprehensive coverage of policymakers and policybreakers.

We then conduct in-depth research and policy analysis on the issues surfaced by the news. EdNC’s surveys allow our audience to weigh in on the issues and our work — sometimes our reporters follow up and a respondent becomes a source for a story; other times, we go on to share responses with stakeholders.

Our multimedia capacity infuses our work with graphics, audiograms, podcasts, videos, short and long-form documentaries. Instead of having annual or traditional convenings, we use a more responsive events strategy, holding listening sessions in community or convening stakeholders as needed.

We share our platform. To date, we have published 1,882 perspectives, and this year 17% were authored by people of color.

We share our platform.

Our theory of change includes eight drivers of impact: journalism as the fourth estate in a democracy, in-depth research on the issues surfaced by the news, building and engaging our audience, tracking the impact of our work, moving the needle on policy change, responsive experimentation in the new media and nonprofit world, a broad base of financial support for our work, and increasing leadership capacity statewide.

Better News has taken note of our student town halls with candidates and how we build trust with new audiences.

An external review of our work by the Oak Foundation last year found, “With a significant distance between the education system’s political governance and actual events and activities in our schools, EdNC’s work is critical in helping education stakeholders and the public better understand the various and sometimes complicated issues impacting children’s learning and instruction. Their work helps fill the information gap between the capital and the classroom and encourages engagement and conversation among those with an interest in education.”

This year we will broaden and deepen our reach in all 100 counties, replicating the BBC approach to local news partnerships and conducting an analysis of how information moves and who influences how information moves. As the news becomes more local so will we.

Annually, we survey our audience to assess and track our impact. This year, more than 1,500 responded — double that of last year. Seventy-eight percent agreed or strongly agreed that our coverage is neutral.

Here is what our audience does with our articles:

67% of respondents discuss something they read on EdNC with colleagues,

39% share our articles,

33% apply knowledge gained from EdNC,

21% changed their mind about an issue because of our work, and

13% discuss what they read on EdNC with policymakers.

Our tools for engagement – which we call Reach – now power newsrooms around the country, including Outlier Media and Resolve Philly.

We believe our approach builds a true “architecture of participation” for those we serve.

I learned the most important lesson of all from my first boss, Rolfe Neill, then the publisher of The Charlotte Observer. He said, “We were not afraid to be caught loving our community. On the other hand, we were never intimidated about addressing the community on sensitive topics that we felt needed talking about or taking a stand on.”

Consider yourself invited to come visit us here in North Carolina. We’d love to take you to see what education really looks like in the classrooms and schools of this state we call home.

Raised in North Carolina and trained as a lawyer, Mebane Rash is the is the founding CEO and editor-in-chief of EducationNC. You can follow her at @mebane_rash.

Previously from The Grade

Canopy Atlanta’s 5 key elements of community-driven education coverage

Covering communities that are not your own