Collegeville’s Number One Problem
By: Robert Botti
Tags: Community, Community Engagement

Collegeville’s Number One Problem

In 1998, I co-chaired an ad-hoc traffic and pedestrian safety committee in the Borough of Collegeville. My role was to promote a community dialogue prior to making recommendations to Borough Council. My audience included not only the Borough of Collegeville but the region, and my experience illuminates Collegeville’s communication problem.

I uncovered that at that time Collegeville got its news and information from one of six sources:

The Independent — an 8 to 10 page weekly Collegeville-based newspaper whose coverage centered on the boroughs of Collegeville and Trappe (no longer published). The Mercury — a Pottstown-based daily newspaper whose coverage occasionally included the Collegeville region. The Times Herald — a Norristown-based daily newspaper whose coverage occasionally included the Collegeville region. The Valley Item — a weekly local newspaper focused on communities along the Perkiomen Creek from Collegeville Borough north to East Greenville / Pennsburg (no longer published). The Philadelphia Inquirer — the Philadelphia-based daily newspaper which in 1998 had a comprehensive Neighbors section that included Collegeville (the Neighbors section is no more). No local newspaper — The majority of my audience read no local newspapers. Some read the Philadelphia Inquirer, the New York Times, or the Wall Street Journal for Philadelphia and national news, and had no interest in local news. But the majority of this group was unsatisfied with local news coverage and so refused to read them.

Not one of the five newspapers provided thorough coverage of Collegeville news and events. Even combined — I had to read them all each week — they did not provide enough coverage.

So in order to reach local and regional Collegeville residents to invite them to our public forums and council meetings, or to report on our activities and Council’s actions, I had to:

write articles for The Independent,

write press releases and letters to the editor for all five papers,

develop relationships with news writers and call them or corner them after council meetings to get our work included in their stories,

create and maintain a website and email list,

produce a Walkable Communities event with residents, businesses and Ursinus College, and

create flyers and pitches and go door to door.

In the end, I achieved my communication goals. However, if I had to do all those things to reach a local and regional audience what do you, as a business owner or local government or organization representative, have to do?

The current news landscape and why it doesn’t work

Today as then, many trying to reach an all-inclusive Collegeville audience do not go to the lengths that I did, but consequently; they do not meet their objective. My experience shows that Collegeville news and information comes in bits and pieces from disparate sources that in turn reach disparate audiences — if it reaches one at all. We do not have a collective way to experience our community.

This leads me to my point: The number one obstacle to community and economic development in the Collegeville region is the lack of a Collegeville-based communications resource: We cannot communicate with ourselves.

To communicate with ourselves today, we are using one or all of following:

Newspapers Yard signs Web and social media sites

Newspapers

With the exception that some of the newspapers above are now online as well as on paper, the newspaper landscape hasn’t changed much. The closest things we have to local newspapers today are The Mercury and The Times Herald. Once locally owned, they are now owned by the corporate news group Digital First Media who provides multi-platform local media assets: i.e., something akin to an online newspaper. A similar local news and information product called The Patch now serves a few nearby communities as well.

Each uses the same business model:

A parent company builds and maintains a nationwide content management system (CMS) that allows communities to create and maintain a local news web site at a minimal cost and with minimal technical knowledge

The parent CMS allows local communities to apply their brand, and use local editors to provide local news and advertising

To get the volume of ads to make a profit, the local news and advertising are aggregated along with content and ads from sister publications no matter what community that publication serves.

Newspapers are defined by their sphere of influence. Take the Philadelphia Inquirer for example — and by that I mean the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News newspapers and philly.com. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s sphere of influence is the city of Philadelphia and the counties in the tri state area around it. There are articles about every community within that sphere to reach readers in each one. If you want to target the entire audience in that sphere of influence the Philadelphia Inquirer makes sense.

For the newspapers serving the Collegeville region the definition of sphere of influence is fuzzy. Because the news gathering resources of the individual newspapers in the corporate news groups are smaller, each paper relies on content from its sister papers.

As stated above each local Collegeville newspaper’s sphere of influence includes a portion of Collegeville, but does not encompass it. Add to that that each paper has a small amount of Collegeville news and advertisements — a very small amount — but the bulk of each paper is made up of content and advertising from throughout Montgomery County or some other Philadelphia region community.

It’s as if the business model were: Someone from Chestnut Hill might be visiting in Collegeville, see one of our local papers, and read through it looking for a plumber who serves their area, and we better be ready for them.

If that were the criteria our local papers have all the bases covered. But the real result is that readers looking for news in the Collegeville region have to sort through several news resources and an inordinate amount of information to find a story or ad relevant to them. The experience is frustrating and it is the reason why so many Collegeville residents do not read them.

If you want to reach all of the communities in and around Philadelphia you choose the Philadelphia Inquirer. But if you want to reach all of the communities in the Collegeville region there is no choice.

Yard signs

Many Collegeville businesses and events have turned to yard signs: those 18 x 24 inch signs placed not in yards, but along our arterial roads and intersections. Do businesses and organizations advertise on yard signs because they think they are an effective way to advertise? Based on the volume of signs one would think yes.

There is no research to show that yard signs as advertisements or announcements work. Any online articles promoting them are found on the blogs of the companies that sell then. An obvious bias and they provide no supporting evidence. The only study of them, a study of political signs by Donald Green of Columbia University, suggests that they are no more effective than direct mail or handouts. But seeing your sign along the highway can give you the illusion that it does. It is the lack of a Collegeville-based news resource that drives Collegeville advertisers to yard signs.

Consider this: Horizon Services and P.J. Fitzpatrick, Inc., two Philadelphia-based home services contractors, each have a half page ad in The Philadelphia Inquirer every day — EVERY day. They have those ads in the Inquirer because it effectively reaches their target audience: People within the Inquirer’s sphere of influence. When Collegeville has a Collegeville-based resource that effectively reaches the Collegeville region, businesses and organizations can expect the same result.

Collegeville yard signs are going to be around for a while.

Web and social media sites

Today, web and social media sites are an important part of every business or organizations marketing and communication plan — far more than newspapers were a decade ago. But evolving web standards and user agents — how websites are delivered: browsers, smartphones and tablets for example — have changed considerably.

There is an abundance of web and social media sites that currently represent the Collegeville region. But collectively, they do not paint a full picture of, nor serve, the entire region. And it is difficult to frame an argument for a collective online resource because there are few good examples to point to relevant to our needs.

Digital communications is poorly understood by most regional government, businesses and organizations. Often they don’t have the money or time to seek professional help, or the resources to maintain it. So, for example, their sites do not meet Google’s standard for “quality content” and they are not found in search. Or if they are found in search they are poorly written and/or formatted resulting in confused readers and high bounce rates.

Many have no web site at all and rely on social sites like Facebook as their only online presence. A social media presence alone is not a digital communication solution. Websites and social media work in a hub and spoke fashion: the web site is the hub and the related social media sites (the spokes) push users to the web site. That’s where the complete information and the calls to action reside.

It is Collegeville’s local government, community development, and business organizations that drive and support community and economic development. An abundance of web and social media sites, one for each one in the community cannot be as effective as a single, focused Collegeville-based resource; one that reports on them, or pushes users to them, at the appropriate time. And like the newspapers serving the region our web and social media sites also do not provide a big picture of Collegeville.