Transcript:
Hi thank you so much for joining us and for being up for sharing your experience of working with Contribly. First of all tell me a little bit about who you are and what you do?
My name is Martin Ward, I’m the deputy web editor at Farmers Weekly. I work within the team to manage the publication of online content. So that’s working with 15 to 20 say news stories that are coming in that day, and working ahead to schedule features and long form content online, working to optimize everything for an online audience because we have our weekly print magazine so all of that content needs to be processed and made relevant for an online audience. That’s the main aspect of my role.
Tell me a bit more about Farmers weekly.
Farmer’s Weekly is the leading publication for farmers in the UK. It offers a range of topical news stories about what’s happening in the various farming sectors, as well as offering business advice. So we’ve got a lot of tips and business guides to help Farmers meet the challenges that they might be experiencing at the moment.
It’s a tricky time in farming at the moment and since Brexit there’s been a huge change in the sort of agricultural policy landscape so a lot for Farmers to process and so it’s our job really to walk them through that and help them as best we can.
What other projects were you working on before you started working with Contribly? What did your engagement look like before working with us?
I think it was one of my predecessors that got started with Contribly. At the time we had an active social presence but we weren’t utilizing it as much as we are now. We had to find a solution like Contribly because we wanted to be engaging more with our audience and honing in on the community aspect of Farmers Weekly, bringing people together. That was the main motivation.
From what you understand what were the frustrations before using Contribly.
I think the frustrations we had before we started using Contribly were that it was difficult pinning content down. We would be reaching out to our audiences on social media asking them to share their images and their stories. We would receive a mix of emails, social media posts, messages on social media. Contribly allows us to bring everything together in one place and actually bring it together in a public forum so our users can access it in real time as they are uploading images. It’s really helped solve that problem of managing the process of user generated content.
What were the main drivers that made you want to develop that change within the organization?
I think we knew we wanted to hear from our audience and to make that as smooth as possible we needed a tool that brought all that together and allowed us to manage it.
For Farmers weekly it’s really important to be able to moderate the content as well. Farming is one of the most dangerous industries to
be working in and so we have to be really careful about what we’re actually showing to our audience. We want to encourage best practice in terms of being safe on the farm, so having those moderation tools built in as well has been really helpful for us to manage the content that we’re allowing to go public on our website.
Overall it’s allowed us to build on our community and encourage our readers and our users to get involved and send us their pictures which has been great.
Can you tell me maybe a little bit about the results that you achieved doing that? How has it improved your job or even the publication?
Since we’ve started using Contrbly we’ve noticed a surge and engagement and nowadays we try to use it hand in hand with social media. We run a lot of competitions every year. This year we did a photo competition and we saw a huge spike in the number of submissions since we started promoting the Contribly gallery through social media. It actually worked really well to direct our social media followers to the Contribly galleries and encouraging them to upload directly through our site.
I think this year we had over 5,000 entries compared to in 2022 it was just under 2,000. It’s been a huge surge there.
Since we’ve used it we’ve had multiple galleries. In terms of how we work in the team, it’s allowed us use it as a tool for generating our own stories. The farmers will contact us and they’ll send us their pictures and some of them have really interesting stories behind them so we’re able to then get in touch and find a bit more and perhaps run that as a story on Farmers Weekly. We actually run a weekly feature which is the photo of the week that goes up online every Sunday, it highlights the best photo that we’ve seen that week. Iit can be something that has a touch of humor or makes you think a little. It’s a really nice way of highlighting what’s going on in the industry.
Why do you think the results have improved so much?
We’ve started to um sort of cross promote and use social media as a tool to bring people to the Contribly galleries that we’re hosting on our websites. We are utilizing the online social media following and bringing them online. It has encouraged more engagement and more interaction.
How did the tool itself support you in that? What were the best aspects?
The Contribly tools make it really easy to set a gallery and also it makes it really easy to plug into our existing website. We’re using WordPress and Contribly slots into that really well. We can embed galleries onto pages and in articles.
We use the Contribly galleries as a way of entering our competitions and our photo competitions that I mentioned. We can use it to create the forms that allow people to enter their details. Even competitions like Britain’s Fittest farmer which we’ve been running for about five years now.
In terms of logistics there’s a lot of built-in things that make it really easy for our audience to enter competitions, to submit their details.
In terms of our own events as well, we can create our own galleries. It’s not solely used for User generated content, we’re using Contribly for Farmers weekly hosted events. We’ll create our own gallery and we’ll submit our own pictures. It’s a nice way of hosting that Gallery on the the event micro site and online as well. It’s a really nice showcase for an event that we might have held. In the last year we’ve done a series of events called Question Time which has been a panel event where we host farming experts and bring them together. We pose questions on the Hot Topics in the industry at the moment and those are really exciting events where we have really high-profile speakers. It’s great to be able to showcase the photography that we have at these events to show what what took place on the date if you weren’t able to attend . We often publish a gallery on our website that we plug in to the site and it works really well.
I love that I the internal side. It’s something that’s quite unique actually, because at Contribly we always focus on that user generated content piece and your users submitting but the fact that it’s being used internally too is so nice to hear.
If you had to list the main benefits of Contribly what would you say the main benefits are?
I would say the main benefits are the ease of use. Being able to plug it into whichever platform you’re using, for us it’s WordPress, and it just seems to slot in really easily.
It’s easy to embed. It’s not too technical to embed a gallery onto a page, which is crucial because we need to be able to share the galleries and that’s really easy to do so, that’s a huge plus.
I would say moderation as well because it’s good to have a little bit of control and say over which images we want to put a spotlight on. Being able to go into the back end of Contribly and at the click of a button say whether an image is approved for use is great and it means your colleagues know as well if there’s an image that’s a red flag. We can make that really obvious using those tools
It allows us to self-populate our pages. We have our Gallery on one of our pages on the website and as users are are contributing to it it’s updating in real time. It’s almost a self- populating page that produces its own content so that’s great and and takes a lot of the work and manual process out of it.
I would say another plus is the way that Contribly manages the data. It’s really easy to be able to download the copyright information.So when someone submits a picture to our gallery, they have to fill out a form and that tells us who they are, where they’re from, whether they’ve agreed to give their permission for us to use the image. That makes it really clear that there’s no issues with us sharing this image online. We’ve got the full copyright which is a big thing in publishing. That makes it really easy.
How much do you expect it to help in the next 12 months? Where do you see it going?
We are always finding new ways of using it, for some of our more recent events we’ve used the forms to encourage signups to events. Things like that, we might not have considered when we first signed up to use Contribly. It was more of an image sharing tool. So yeah, we’re constantly finding new ways of using it. Who knows what the next use will be in the future. Certainly in the next year I’m sure we’ll just be continuing to do what we’re doing and encouraging people to share their content with us.
Do you know why you chose Contribly?
We were building a presence on social media and we wanted to take that to the next level and so we knew that we needed a tool that would allow us to encourage more interaction from our audience and engagement on social media. Contribly has been perfect for that.
What area do you value most, particularly for your role and why do you think that is?
The area that we value most at Farmers Weekly is certainly the image galleries because we use it to create themed content. We can have a gallery for different seasons in the year, depending on what’s going on the farm. Throughout the year we have a harvest Gallery, a Christmas on the farm Gallery. We can collate all of these moments that are happening on the farm and it’s really easy to create content where the galleries just fit into our website really well. That’s definitely what we value the most. I think is just being able to showcase what’s going on with our audience and mirroring what’s happening in their lives on the site.
How likely are you to recommend Contribly?
I think we’re very likely to recommend Contribly because we’ve had such a great experience and over the years it’s proved more and more valuable as we’ve expanded our social presence and tried to build our community. It’s just become more and more useful and we couldn’t recommend it enough.
If someone were listening to you now, why would you say they should start using Contribly today?
There’s no better time to start using Contribly because we’re all trying to build a presence on social media, it’s such an important part of publishing now. So, if you are looking to build a community and have your audience interact with you, then there’s no better tool than Contirbly. We’ve had such a great experience, so I would say use it now to start building that community.
Thank you so much Martin for your time and great stories. i