Workshop: Collaboration with + for community in Northeast Ohio
Welcome to the online toolkit for the Friday, Oct. 25, 2019 collaborative journalism workshop for Northeast Ohio, hosted by the Center for Cooperative Media in partnership with Cleveland Foundation and Akron Community Foundation. The Center’s work for the event is supported by funding from Rita Allen Foundation. You can find the full agenda for the workshop here, and the slides here.
Below you’ll find the worksheets we’ll use during our time together. For your reference, we’ve also compiled a series of documentation examples, all taken from the recent Stories of Atlantic City project. You can refer to these examples as you build out your own collaborative reporting project.
Stories of Atlantic City examples
- Example: Collaborative project proposal
- Example: Collaborative project MOU (plus find other examples here!)
- Example: Collaborative project financial budget
- Example: Collaborative project shared language
- Example: Collaborative project media partner responsibilities
- Example: Collaborative project success metrics
- Example: Collaborative project risk mitigation
- Example: Collaborative story budget (this one is not from Stories of AC)
Additionally, in case it’s helpful, you can refer to our tip sheets that cover different models of collaboration.
Project outline
Use this worksheet to outline your collaborative project. The series of questions on the worksheet will walk you through the basics of building a collaboration. This is just for brainstorming, and is not all-encompassing, so let the ideas flow!
Project budget
Use this worksheet to create a budget for your project. When you budget, don’t forget about expenses related to meetings, marketing, software, obtaining data, website maintenance, costs related to tracking impact, costs related to producing an end-of-project report, etc. Some of these things may be required if you are applying for grant funding.
Success + impact metrics
Use this worksheet to outline and plan for what success looks like. To ensure your project is successful, you’ll want to think about what success looks like when you’re first starting to map out the project. Envisioning what success looks like early on will also help you decide what you’ll need to track and measure to gauge the success and impact of your work.
Risk mitigation
Use this worksheet to assess any potential risks associated with your project. To ensure your project is successful, you’ll need to openly acknowledge, discuss and plan for risks that could derail it. By having an honest conversation about what could cause the project to fail, you’ll naturally start to think about how you could restructure the plan to avoid those risks.
More info about planning collaborative reporting projects:
Do you need additional help planning your next collaborative reporting project? Contact the Stefanie Murray at the Center for Cooperative Media by sending an email to [email protected] and we’ll do our best to help you or connect you with someone who can!
You can also click here to learn more about the six different models of collaborative journalism, or you can click here to see our database of collaborative projects from around the world.