Audiences are at the heart of everything we do

“There is nothing like face to face interaction with the audience.” These are the words of Radio 1Xtra Producer Hermeet Chadha who worked with young people from Hackney on the design of a radio debate about what it means to be Black and British.

Hermeet was one of hundreds of BBC staff who volunteered to work on Outreach projects in 2016. The projects they worked on were exciting and varied - and all designed to enrich and inspire the content the BBC makes for its audiences. And here are some of the highlights.

David MacNicol, Assistant Producer in Newsround, worked with The Proud Trust in Manchester to help a group of young people, who identify as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and/or Transgender to make a short film exploring identity. For David, the volunteering experience helped him to learn to challenge his assumptions about areas he assumed he knew well – which is key to making programmes with integrity.

In BBC Scotland, Jane Fowler and her colleagues found a new way to use the BBC’s archives to prompt conversations between families and carers and people living with dementia.

Outreach in the BBC is all about getting to know and understand our audiences, and them getting to know us. We do this by running an employer-sponsored volunteering scheme that brings BBC people together with specific audience groups we’d like to serve better. Many of our projects focus on younger audiences.

2016 started with the premiere of BBC Three’s Murder Games: The life and death of Breck Bednar.  The BBC’s Outreach team organised the screening to raise awareness of the dangers of online grooming, with an expert and teaching resources from BBC Learning. It was one of a number of events organised by BBC Outreach to maximise the impact and reach of the programmes we make. After the screening, BBC volunteers worked with teachers and youth workers on how key messages from the film could be built into lesson plans.  

Take it to the Bridge was an ambitious outreach project for BBC Music Day, featuring community groups and choirs across the UK performing live for their local audiences.

One of the landmark events of 2015 was ‘Who Benefits: Television & Poverty’ a conference bringing together programme makers, commissioners, people living in poverty and the charities who work with them, to talk about responsible ways to work together to portray people living in poverty.  In 2016, we worked with Rural Media to put together an event Media on the Move for the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) community and journalists from inside and outside the BBC. The aim was to move away from the stereotypes attached to that community to more genuine and informed coverage. Journalists and people from the GRT community learnt about each other, new relationships were forged, and this has already resulted in new content for audiences.  Helen Jones, CEO of Leeds GATE, visited the BBC Hull studios with of the GRT community, where they were made welcome, shared their experiences and learned more about how news programmes are made. Dave Howard, Senior Producer for BBC Generation, came away with s and ideas, some of which have already been made into programmes.

We also inspire people to consider a career in the media. Volunteer Anthony Williams, who works in BBC Comedy, managed to do this by telling the story of his personal career journey to young people during a day of employability workshops. And 6thform student Valentina from the West Midlands was inspired by meeting people at the BBC who had just started their jobs, such as runner Muaaz Khan, calling it ‘a spectacular experience’ which helped her start to think about her own career.

Marvin McKenzie is BBC Outreach’s Volunteering Manager. He organised a Science, Technology Engineering & Maths (STEM) Roadshow where a series of BBC volunteers with ‘some of the coolest roles’ in the BBC showcased their skills and their jobs to inspire and encourage young people from 32 schools across the UK, using challenges such as weather forecasting, coding, testing games, budgeting for a TV show and design & engineering.

The amount and range of work we did in 2016 was only possible through the help and of the community organisations we worked with, our BBC volunteers and the BBC Outreach team – all of whom have been generous in sharing their experience and skills.

So what does 2017 hold?

In 2017, our primary Outreach focus will be on BBC News School Report – a project which Is a partnership between BBC’s News, Academy, Sport and Children’s Departments. It gives thousands of 11-16 year olds students in the UK the chance to make their own reports for a real audience, using lesson plans, BBC learning resources and the help of BBC volunteer mentors. Duncan Kirkhope is a Senior Broadcast Journalist for BBC Scotland. His enthusiasm for journalism was sparked by the visit of a reporter to his school nearly 40 years ago. Nowadays he tries to repay that debt by being a School Report mentor.

School Report is important work for the future, teaching young people how news is made: how to put together a news story, how to check facts and sources - increasingly important as they come across ‘fake news’ in all its forms.

Volunteer Yasmin Ojo, who works at BBC Radio London but took time out to get involved with ‘Pitch and Tour’ sessions for young people at Radio 1, sums it up: “My main goal of volunteering was to inspire other young people and show them that it’s possible to get a job within the BBC – and I feel like I achieved that. It has improved my confidence and I have been given an insight into what other young people want from the BBC. I can now take that back to my role at Radio London and help inspire some fresh ideas to our programmes.”

For the Outreach team and for the BBC volunteers, Yasmin makes a point that’s very important to us: it’s all about the audiences. It’s what it says on the badges BBC staff wear every day: ‘Audiences are at the heart of everything we do’.

Dave Howard attended the Media on the Move conference which explored the past, present and future portrayal of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities. It was held by BBC Outreach and Travellers’ Times, which is a magazine and website for people in the communities and those who work with them.

 

How can you represent people in programmes if they don’t trust you?  And how can you get people to trust you, if you don’t represent them in programmes?

These ‘chicken and egg’ questions were on my mind, as I attended Media on the Move.  The event, commissioned by Diane Reid, was intended to foster understanding between the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community and of the media.

People had stories to tell of media misrepresentation, broken promises, and of harm done to them as a result.  Yes, there is the ongoing travesty – as they see it – of Channel 4’s My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding.

Elsewhere, it was pointed out the BBC and others often use words like ‘Travellers’ and ‘locals’ as binary opposites, as though it is impossible to be both.

Damian Le Bas of The Travellers’ Times described being asked to contribute on local radio, of waiting and listening on the line as caller after caller made derogatory or unsubstantiated claims about his community.  By the time he was asked to respond, he felt goaded into anger.

‘Once bitten, twice shy’, goes the old saying.

People from Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities told they feel as though they have been bitten, bitten, and bitten again, to the point where any relationship of trust with the media is near to impossible.

My team and I know this to our cost. We run the BBC’s Generation youth outreach cohorts. We find young contributors from across UK political and social spectrums, particularly from harder-to-reach communities, and connect them with programme-makers.

Across four iterations of our project in the last three years, we have completely failed to find any young person from a Gypsy, Roma or Traveller background who was willing to be included.

We reached out, we invited in.

No luck. No one would come forward. No one trusted us.

A few years ago, a colleague and I made a Radio 1’s Stories documentary with the rapper Professor Green, hearing experiences of young people who had survived suicide attempts.

Elsewhere, I’ve recorded mums talking about how it feels to be bathed, toileted, or psychologically ed by their young carer children. Other mums have opened up to me about being physically and emotionally abused by their children.

All of these are difficult stories; the kinds of stories you can only tell if you can establish and maintain a strong relationship of trust with your contributor. I would argue that they are the kinds of stories we need to hear, if we want to understand modern Britain.

These stories can stop you in your tracks. When well handled, by the likes of Michael Buchanan or Fi Glover (and the teams around them), they can be raw, powerful, captivating - in short, brilliant.

However, if we screw up our dealings with people who have chosen to share these kinds of experiences with us – perhaps by riding roughshod over how they wish to be portrayed, by taking for granted what it has taken for them to share their experiences on air, or by breaking promises either made or implied – we shatter that trust.

In so doing, we scupper any chance of those individuals or communities ever talking to us again.

We have a lot of work to do to build a working level of trust with the country's estimated 150,000 to 300,000 Gypsies, Roma, and Travellers.

And if Media On The Move showed us anything, it was a willingness from both sides to get started. The very fact that the BBC was hosting the first ever dedicated event to discuss these issues was warmly welcomed.

There were other positives to build on, too.  BBC drama Peaky Blinders was praised, for having well-drawn, in-depth, relatable Gypsy characters, as opposed to caricatures or one-dimensional cartoon-villains.

On a more everyday scale, we were asked always to capitalise the word Gypsy or Traveller in copy, when referring to ethnicity, just as we would words like French or Chinese. One BBC producer enquired about a familiar pitfall; when captioning or introducing someone in a programme, what words should we use to describe them?

The response was delivered with a wry shrug: “Ask them. Go with whatever they tell you”.

Media On the Move was about building bridges between Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities, the BBC and the media. It is often hard to define success in matters of ‘trust’ or ‘community relations', but in this instance I can give one concrete example.

I went back to Edinburgh at the end of the day with details in my pocket for a young Traveller woman who is happy to be approached for our next BBC Generation project.

After three years getting nowhere, I call that progress.

 

BBC Outreach & Corporate Responsibility brings the BBC closer to its audiences - particularly those audiences we have identified as harder to reach - with face-to-face activity, community and staff volunteering.