Is your CRM connected to your donor database and video viewing analytics? Are you utilizing the cloud and building an infrastructure for operations and reducing data silos? Have you stopped sending emails with attachments and are instead using real time dashboards? The single most important thing to do in 2024 is set your organization up for data success. As speed of computation increases, and AI methods advance, new extensions of decision making capabilities will help business leaders address increasing complexity and make customer experiences fantastic. But only if they’ve done the groundwork of setting up data architecture for efficiency, transparency, and better collaboration of independent systems. With new laws being passed in a lot of states, 2024 will be the year that organizations must gear up for a privacy-first world. Setting up data capability with a lakehouse and a clean room will allow you to derive insights that will help deliver more personalized customer experiences, compute fundraising propensity modeling, determine marketing effectiveness, and create ML/AI solutions — all without sharing underlying consumer data.

Tech-enhanced live streaming of local, educational, and experiential events will captivate audiences. Hosting town halls, concerts, festivals, virtual tours, training programs, breaking news and sports that can only come from your State/city and perspective will create demand for your content over others and strengthen your communities’ affinity for your public media station. And if you connect tech features into the stream like real time analytics, chat, polling or fundraising, you will cultivate participation and a dialogue with your audience. The technologies powering live streaming with data, allow you to connect on a more emotional and personal level, fostering deeper engagement and understanding with your audience. And while it sounds advanced, it's actually a lot easier than you think to get started.

People want to stay entertained while they watch TV. They use their smartphone for content extension about the program, like scanning QR codes to learn more about what they are seeing on the screen. Plan ahead for this in 2024 by baking additional content into the production contract to capture footage not featured in the show like behind-the-scenes experiences. Or work with the writers to tell parts of the story that cannot be done through a 2d screen, like turning your living room into the set, scene and characters right in front of you with an AR portal. Shifting demographics, immersive technologies, and the desire for high-quality content experiences are driving the evolution of storytelling. Audiences will embrace 2nd screen experiences driven by immersive tech if it is matched contextually and with relevancy.

Casual games can create engagement and brand connections without having anything to do with IP. On only one day in mid-October 2023, the average daily active users in the NYT Games app was 2,615,333. One year earlier, it was 886,000. That is a 225% increase! The Times is now a gaming company in addition to a fantastic news organization, but they are not trying to become Activision. They are just producing mindful games for curious readers, brain teasers and short challenges that work for their demographic for a few minutes on a daily basis. Public media could be doing this too. The nearly $300 billion gaming industry is expected to more than double by 2030 as it massively outpaces the rest of the media and entertainment industry. In 2023 we also saw cinematic and interactive universes merge. Some of the largest and most successful film and TV franchises on for-profit media began as video games, and some of the biggest video games began as film and TV shows. And the extensions of these become multi media opportunities. Millions of people play Wordle every day, then share, discuss and debate how they tried to win.

In 2024, almost every business will turn to artificial intelligence to optimize their efforts. There are thousands of ways to use AI for public media, but to do it correctly we need that data layer mentioned in the first trend. Public media can use these tools to improve: Automating tasks, personalization of customer experience, and decision-making capabilities. And that can help us focus on our mission. But it is important to stress that they are just tools, and they need humans at the helm. The foundational models that make this tech possible are revolutionizing every layer of the cloud computing stack from processors to systems to networks. You've probably heard of most of the major tools by now like ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, Claude, Dalle, Mijourney, and Llama. Some of these tools can help us with day to day work, and some tools can help with creating. What makes Generative Artificial intelligence (AI) so fantastic is the way we interact with it and its ability to produce something for us. In the past, we have never really been about to ask a computer to perform a complex task in plain simple english. We are now seeing how it can be a powerful collaborative partner and creative partner.

Here are a few ways nonprofits will use AI in 2024:

Generative AI will be used for chatbots, writing assistants and meta data enhancements.

Machine learning will help deliver tailored messages to specific viewer or donor segments, resulting in more targeted and efficient engagement strategies.

AI algorithms will be deployed to analyze donor behavior, predict giving patterns, and personalize fundraising campaigns.

The integration of artificial intelligence into our internal tools will amplify efficiency and impact. It will make our data more retrievable, accessible and speed up our workflows. That will unlock value for growth, distribution, differentiation, personalization. Freeing up our focus to be more dedicated to our mission.

There are a lot of great tactics mentioned! But we know that Stations like you are already doing this work. So what is missing? To me it is a big groundbreaking idea that will revolutionize public media. Or how you engage your local communities with technology. Or the actual tactics that tie programs to strategies. But I am not sureChatGPT will ever be able to tell us that. That needs to come from you!