Atlanta Civic Circle collaborated with Neighborhood Nexus to build a listening tool to bring in revenue and build connection

Saba Long is the executive director of Atlanta Civic Circle, a newsroom dedicated to in-depth and solutions-oriented reporting that encourages and provides opportunities for civic engagement. While running her newsroom in the Atlanta Metro area, they saw a gap in community listening at scale. This is where building Atlanta POV came in. 

Atlanta POV is a tool that engages a panel of community members, currently at 2500, who provide their “perspectives, opinions, and voices” on any given topic. Long envisions this as not only an opportunity to create their own data on public opinion, but also a revenue-generating product for the newsroom. 

Reddy: What is Atlanta POV and what made you want to build it?

Long: Atlanta POV is a tool to really bring community voice to life and at scale. Oftentimes, from a reporting standpoint, you can talk to a community leader for example, who might represent a number of voices, but it’s still not community listening at scale. That’s really the point of Atlanta POV, to allow us to do community listening across a specific neighborhood, but also over time. We are building it to be regional in nature, so it’ll be across the five county metros. My ultimate goal is that this is a statewide effort where we’re able to do this listening across Georgia.

Reddy: What goes into it? What is your process for community listening?

Long: We’re building a 10,000-person panel. That would be representative of the metro region. One of the reasons why we want to do this is because there’s no entity in metro Atlanta that can do a public opinion poll on how Latino voters or Latino residents might feel about a particular issue, whether it’s immigration or something that’s more local public policy in nature. That was one of the emphasis for putting the Atlanta POV together — to allow us to understand at a deeper level what’s happening in the community. 

How we’re doing that is through surveys. The surveys can be something that we’ve initiated, or it can be something that a client has initiated. So another interesting component of this is we see this as a revenue generating opportunity for Atlanta Civic Circle. There’s a lot of consternation about the future of local news and recognizing that, at the moment, a lot of our funding is based on philanthropy. We really want to right-size our financial structure and bring in as much revenue as we can, so that we’re not so reliant on philanthropy. 

This really serves two purposes. One, it’s a revenue generating program, but then also it allows us to deepen our reporting and deepen our engagement in our neighborhoods, city and region. 

Reddy: So you’re working with different clients as well. What does that look like? 

Long: Yes, we officially just launched our first paid client. We’ve done some test scenarios to build a minimum viable product, and in those test scenarios, those were not paid clients. As an example, we’ve done a survey on crime and public safety. We had a survey, and we got public input from key community organizations before the survey went live, and then we implemented the survey in the field, and then we followed that survey with a focus group to go deeper into the questions that we asked. 

In that survey we found a couple of interesting things that I don’t think we would have got to in another way. We found that there’s a customer service gap in public safety, which is something you don’t really hear about, right? So we hear about “Do you feel safe” and the conversation about perception versus reality of crime, but in both the questions that we asked in the focus group, we learned that there had been instances where folks had called 911 to report a crime or something had happened to them and they felt that there was gap with the customer service experience with their local police department. That can also contribute to the feeling, the perception of crime. That level of care and attention contributes to an overall feeling of not being safe.

Our first paid client survey that we’re working on right now is an interesting project. It’s the city of Atlanta, and it is a known long-term community organization. They actually do work across the country called Focus Community Strategies, and they go in and work with neighborhoods that have been historically distressed, and try to understand the gaps and assets of a community and how to bridge the two. Bridging can look like public policy change, funding, philanthropy, improving civic programs, things of that sort. We’re launching it in one neighborhood, and then over time, we’re going to expand it to about another six neighborhoods. 

Reddy: Atlanta POV has journalism elements to it. How do you blend it in with your newsroom and how do you use it in your day to day? 

Long: We’re still building a strong database, but how we envision this is when a reporter is writing about something that is neighborhood focused, or something that’s policy focused, they can go in the Atlanta POV database. As people are enrolling in it we have them check to ask if they are okay with a reporter following up. That gives the reporter instant access to a number of sources that they otherwise would not have. 

Then they are able to look and see, okay, this is Sriya. She lives in this particular neighborhood and she has responded to surveys about public safety, about childcare and about housing. So we know these are topics that she cares about. When I’m writing a story about any of these topics, I know that I can reach out to her. 

The hope is that it becomes this feedback loop where you take the survey and then you also could become a source in our reporting. As we are reporting on things that you care about, you then take action on those things.

Reddy: That makes sense. So how many people are currently a part of your panel? And how do people hear about it?

Long: I believe we are about 2,500. They hear about it through a mix of things. One, when we have a survey live, we’ll parse it out and send it to folks on the panel that we know it’s relevant to such as if it’s geographical, we’ll send it to that particular geographic area. 

But we also partner with community organizations for each survey. So like I mentioned, the crime and public safety one, we partnered with for that one, an organization called PAD, Police, Alternative Diversions programs. They are working with the Atlanta police department to take calls that are not necessarily a pure public safety call. If it’s more often a mental health call, that person can be diverted from the criminal justice system. We partnered with them and asked ‘Hey, what are some questions that you think we should be mindful of?’ And then they helped distribute the survey within their networks. 

We’ll do that for every survey. We’ve got one out right now about healthcare in metro Atlanta, and we partnered with a number of health related institutions to help disseminate it. We’re also looking at ways that we can collaborate with folks who are already plugged in and they’ve got trust in that particular community, and they can help distribute so that it’s accessible across income levels.

Reddy: What are the motivations of participating? Is it to help you, or is it to help a cause that they care about?

Long: I would say we see this as the first layer of civic engagement. Maybe you don’t want to go to a council meeting about public safety, maybe you don’t feel like writing to your representative, but you can take the survey, and we will share this information with your representatives. 

So we’re really framing it as a first layer of civic engagement, number one – and then number two, we’re intentional about sharing the high level results. We do a report after each survey, and are intentional about sharing the results with the relevant stakeholders. 

Reddy: Do you offer any incentives? 

Long: Yes, we do. For each survey, we randomize five participants to receive a $25 gift card, and that’s sent to them digitally. Then for our focus groups, those are paid participants, because it’s more time intensive.

Reddy: What are some successes from Atlanta POV?

Long: We want the information to be useful for the public and for the stakeholders. We did one on child summer care. The YMCA of Greater Atlanta helped distribute it, and we did a report on it, and we found out that there’s a subcommittee at the state House around summer childcare cost and how much of a burden it is on Georgia families, not just Metro Atlanta families. And we found that lobbyists who were pushing for some relief used our report in their advocacy and conversations with elected officials. 

We also shared that data with the Metro Atlanta Chamber’s chief economist. He used that in conversations with the business community about helping them think through what incentives they might offer their employees during the summer, because we found that there’s a clear correlation between worker output and if their kid has access to summer child care programs.

Reddy: What about challenges?

Long: Time is a big one, I’m doing this and running Atlanta Civic Circle. What I really want to do is focus more on the revenue, and then have someone else handling the day to day at ACC. That’s the challenge of being a small nonprofit outlet. Being stretched here and stretched there. What I would really prefer to do is is bring home the bacon, so that we can put more of that into our reporting. 

And then I think because this is a data effort. I think it’s hard for funders to wrap their heads around why they should fund data. They can get why you should fund summer childcare, but funding the distribution and the intake of information, it’s harder for folks to wrap their heads around why that’s important.

Reddy: How are you envisioning Atlanta POV growing in the future?

Long: Next year is a huge election year for the state. We’ve got gubernatorial elections. We’ve got a State Senate election. One of our Senate seats is up. In the last election cycle, there was not a way to get reliable data and a poll about where a number of different constituencies stood on a particular issue. There was not a statistically significant sample available. I want Atlanta POV to be that statistically significant sample for the 2026 election cycle.

I mentioned revenue generation. Our goal is for this to be a key part of the funding of Atlanta Civic Circle. We’re inching there, we got our first paid client. And the hope is, once you get one  they start to roll in because you’ve got that clear proof of concept for folks. If I think about five years from now, Atlanta POV will be the go-to source for key regional data. 

We want to be able to use POV as a way to track if we are building community, and what are the barriers to community? We want to basically create a ‘A cup of sugar’ index for the region. Do you feel connected enough to go to your neighbor and borrow that cup of sugar? 

Reddy: What’s it like working with people who are not necessarily journalists, and do you ever find yourself kind of at odds with what our ethics are versus what their goals are? And how do you deal with that?

Long: Because the folks we work with are really eager to hear from the community. We, knock on wood, haven’t had those points of tension. And our data partner is another nonprofit and both of the folks there have a background in social work. We’ve been very intentional about who we’ve partnered with and making sure that it aligns with our values.

Reddy: My last question is, do you think this is something that other newsrooms can replicate in their own communities, and if they’re interested in doing that, what advice do you have?

Long: In this era, newsrooms across the board are trying to figure out how do we engage in different ways, and how do we bring money in the doors. We think this is a way. We think that this will be really transformative for us. And I think the biggest thing is to be open. I’ve continually had this conversation with our team, to be open to a completely different approach. 

On its face, this does not seem like something a newsroom would be doing. My background is in communications and PR, not in journalism. And I think because of that, I’m more willing to break the box and say, okay, how can we do this in a different way?

And I think that is going to be key to the future of the industry: Being willing to say who is innovating, and how can we innovate with them? Look in your community and see who is doing work in a different way. Who’s challenging the status quo beyond journalism? What’s something that we can do together that might seem a little unconventional, but actually serves their audience and my audience.

Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

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Cite this article

Reddy, Sriya (2025, March 17). 2024-2025 Atlanta POV: Listening to community at scale. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/atlanta-pov-listening-to-community-at-scale/