APPENDIX N: INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT – MILES SANDLER

00:00 Valerie: Go ahead and start off by telling me your name and how long you've been working at the Kauffman Foundation.

00:05 Miles: Miles Sandler, and I've been working at the foundation a little over a year and a half.

00:11 V: All right. Yeah. We've got a nice range of experiences. I talked to Matt Long who's been here forever. And then we've got like you and Katey who have been here a year now, but so much has happened in a year.

00:23 M: Oh my gosh. Yeah. It feels like a lot longer than a year and a half, but yeah.

00:28 V: That's awesome. Tell me a little bit. In that year and a half kind of what kind of work you do now whether that's for the editorial team or other departments that you might serve with.

00:36 M: Sure. So, Overarching, right, I'm technically on the Public Affairs team

embedded in Education. I see my role in three parts. My primary role is to really help tell the story of the Education team and the work that they do whether that be through many different mediums. I think my second part of my role, which is actually becoming more and more prominent, is really to support engagement. So, we see that as any way that we kind of interact with the intended audiences that the Education team either wants to connect with and or learn from. In that regard, we see kind of the opportunities as events, focus groups. Sometimes it's more research-based. Sometimes it is more opportunities to connect on a social medium kind of platform or with a campaign.

01:40 M: But whatever that looks like, really that role of how do we make sure that we're learning from community instead of just communicating out to community? And then I would say the third role is just kind of internal comms work. So, anything that's needed on the team. Sometimes just very tactically like a piece of collateral or also how the team communicates with itself, the Education team specifically.

02:12 V: Mhmm. Cool. Well, that gives me a pretty nice overview. I feel like I know everyone in their editorial roles very well, but I don't always work with the Education team. I actually have very little overlap, so that's cool to know.

M: Sure.

02:23 V: That being said, can you give me an overview and your understanding of what this new editorial approach is? Like how would you define it?

02:33 M: Hmm. How would I define it? Other than the squid burger?

02:42 V: I think that needs to be in my paper. Like as a diagram.

02:45 M: Yes. Yes. It should absolutely be in your paper. And you should call it squid burger.

02:49 M: So, I think the approach is really, if I was defining it, is a way for us to prioritize our storytelling in a way that we feel like connects well with our kind of typologies and or audiences that we want to reach the most. And then allows and creates mechanisms to do that better. I feel like that's the refresh of the process.

V: Gotcha.

M: Yeah.

03:23 V: No, that's really helpful. I feel like for some people it's like, 'Boom. Got it. Can put it in words. I understand it.' For other people, it's like 'Ahhhh. We're still...I don't know.'

03:34 M: I often feel like we're still in the 'Uhhhh, I don't know' space, but I think that's

— in my perspective — that's the intention.

V: Mhmm.

03:43 M: Whether we've gotten there or not, that's a whole other thing.

03:47 V: And kind of with that intention in mind, what do you see as the overall goals coming out of this? Are there things we want to change or see as outcomes of making this more intentional effort to prioritize storytelling and to prioritize audience?

M: Mhmm.

04:01 M: Yeah, so I think the goals are to be able to tell more poignant stories that are, again, much more interesting to the folks we want to tell them to. I think it's also an intention to this weird way it is to be in a foundation, and what does that mean on an editorial, journalistic level? And so, to help prioritize what gets told and what doesn't, I think you need this process. Otherwise, everyone thinks everything is important. And if you don't kind of give a filter and a way to focus what actually gets told or what energy or work gets put into, then it leaves people — and I say people in general — but I think programmatic folks with the feeling of like, 'Oh. You just don't think what I do is important.'

05:02 M: And that's not it. Right? But, you have to focus and make sure that you're setting a tone to the type of storytelling that you want to do as an organization. I feel like that's the difference.

05:18 V: Yeah. Yeah. I think there's been a lot of focus on how do we articulate the strategy? And the squid burger is still in process, but I know that that's a big sensitivity.

And I know that Public Affairs kind of plays a role in helping others in Education and in Entrepreneurship also stick to their strategies. And making sure that there's continuity over time with that.

05:38 M: Yeah. Yeah. But I think what the tension is is again on the editorial level, there has to be appeal to a kind of broader audience. Where, on a programmatic level, certain things just have to get done. So you might need to market something. You might need to get the word out about something or what have you because that's what you need to do on a programmatic level. But that's not a story.

V: Right.

06:05 M: so, how do you surface the things that are actually going to have a broader interest? And then, how do you deal on the other part of Public Affairs, which is just that tactical level? Because there are things that have to be addressed for programmatic teams, but that don't get moved up to editorial because they don't need to.

06:29 V: Yeah. It's definitely an interesting dynamic. In talking about this kind of broader appeal, how do you think this new approach has affected the way we consider and think about audiences in our work? I know you've kind of mentioned the typologies and that framework.

06:43 M: So, the thing I liked the most about the Atlantic 57 typology framework is less about where we landed. I think they're primarily pretty general. But I think it helped us to start to think about motivation instead of type of people. I think motivation when you're thinking about audience is so, so important. And so, when we're trying to capture stories that reach futurists so to speak, we can think about, well, what motivates a futurist?

Right? They want something that's progressive, that's thinking outside the box. That's thinking about what comes next. They want to hear something that is not perfectly buttoned up but has a sense of optimism and solutions to it as well.

07:37 M: I think when you understand an audience's motivation, you can actually craft a much more compelling story. Versus when you just kind of say, 'Oh. We want to get this to people that are in education.' Well, that's a type. Sure. That's a persona you could kind of boil down from that, but it actually doesn't mean that you'll get to the right type of people.

07:59 M: But when you think about motivation, it really changes what type of story you're trying to tell and who you're trying to tell it to.

08:05 V: Yeah. Yeah, I would agree with that. I think thinking about motivation, thinking about interests, while it might be more difficult for some team members to envision, 'Well, who is that person then?' I think on a broader level it helps us generally

understand, well, here are the kind of people that are going to be engaging with it. And knowing that those can be in flux, too, is really helpful for me. And I don't know how you understand it or how everyone kind of grasps it. But I think knowing that you could be

multiple typologies is really helpful, too. Because my demographic information might not change that much, but the way I think. The way I feel. That's fairly ingrained in deeper values and beliefs and things like that.

08:47 M: That's right. That's right. And depending on the subject matter, right. I might be a champion on one subject matter because that's what I live and breathe, and I hold up all the time. But I might be a futurist in another subject matter. Where like I'm maybe not doing that, right? But I absolutely promote it because I'm like, 'Yeah! That is forward thinking. That's really interesting.' Even on a personal level, I often times what comes on from the Entrepreneurship work, I will read that not because that's my work but because it's interesting. I'll never be a champion of that work. I'm never going to go into the body of that field, but I can be a futurist in that space. Of saying, 'Wow. That's really

interesting. How do we think about economic development in a different way?' And I can share that with folks who I think might be interested.

09:37 V: Right. Right. Absolutely. We've talked a little bit about motivations for audience members. I'm curious if you have any thoughts on what values or interests Kauffman has in communicating and if there's alignment between those two things.

09:54 M: Ask that question one more time.

09:55 V: Yeah. So. We're talking about audiences and what they value. I'm curious then, on the flip side, how do we align Kauffman's values and interests as well?

10:09 M: Yeah. So, I think it's difficult because again we don't have the...we're not journalism. We can't just kind of follow the trends of the day. And we have to kind of shoehorn — sometimes it's shoehorning — what the foundation cares about and what message it's trying to get across. On the flip side, what I think always makes it interesting on the editorial level for us is how do you actually? Because...I'm going to jump around a little bit. I think a foundation has a really unique role in this kind of communication space and editorial space because there's a social mission. And because there's a social mission, there's a real core values that you're trying to inspire other people to grab onto. And so, as much as we need to obviously figure out what people are interested in, what motivates them, what are timely kind of subject matters we can connect with, we consistently have to have this drumbeat of values that we're trying to communicate because we are trying to shift behaviors.

11:38 M: We're trying to shift perspectives. We're trying to provide the opportunity for people to see what else they can do around these social issues. So, that to me is kind of the higher calling. We always need to keep that forefront and then help connect that to things that are going to get eyeballs on it.

12:03 V: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean coming from kind of a mixed background and I know a lot of people on our team have backgrounds in journalism or some of those areas, it is interesting to see the work that we do can invite people to make change. It can convince people to think differently. It can persuade them to think about new concepts and to think

not just about their experience but what the experience of future generations' is going to be. It is very powerful, and I think that's where storytelling is a good fit for that. Because it captures all of those feelings and that mission very well.

12:41 V: That being said, keeping audiences at the forefront, do you feel like that's truly the case? Are we actively thinking about our mission and our audiences in tandem when we're working? And has the approach maybe gotten us to do more of that?

12:58 M: I think time will tell. I don't know if we're there yet. I think the coverage areas will be helpful in that regard. I think it helps, again, focus kind of what kind of stories we tell that are very much in line with our missions. And then, on top of that, I think those kind of overarching values that we hold onto will help tighten that even further and prioritize.

13:31 M: But then, of course, that next step, OK, then what is our audience interested in?

And or are we even reaching the right audience? Or, do we need to start to figure out, which we've already been doing, but on social, on these other different channels, how do we reach the audience that we're most interested in?

13:47 M: For example, with my intern this summer, I'm going to be doing some kind of student voice project. And really the goal is — because I don't expect the intern to be able to accomplish all that much in the 8 weeks — to start to flesh out what would an

embedded strategy be around elevating student voice. And what are some levers that could easily get pushed throughout the year that we could actually accomplish consistently elevating student voice.

14:27 M: So, that's going to maybe be a very different audience that's interested in that than the one we currently have. For definitely the one we currently have for "Ideas at Work." Maybe it's more of the folks we have following us on Twitter or Facebook.

Maybe. I don't know yet. But that's the thing. If we were just a traditional media platform or something like that, we wouldn't introduce something that we didn't feel like was going to appeal to the audience we already had or grow our audience. But as a

foundation, we have a bigger mission. So, this might not be a game-changer in growing our audience, but it might carve us out an audience that's really important for the work.

15:13 M: We need to elevate student voice because we need to start elevating that their voice as the end-consumer to our education system is essential in actually defining how we actually make changes in our education system.

15:27 V: Yeah. I mean that makes total sense to me, especially since students have so many different experiences now. No one is following one path, and they never were. But I think that is a voice we're kind of missing and that'll be interesting. That's cool to know.

15:45 V: You know, in kind of shifting to talking more about the coverage areas and how that is helping us focus, I'm curious then how that's maybe affected what kinds of topics we're interested in covering either for these audiences or for our mission?

16:05 M: Ask the question one more time.

16:08 V: So, in thinking about the coverage areas and how that's maybe helped us focus, with those, what kinds of topics is Kauffman interested in covering? And are those any different than maybe they have been in the last 2 years or so? Maybe when you just got started.

16:29 M: Well, hm. So, processes can change all they want, people don't change all that quickly. I think that the coverage areas gives us a new filter. I don't know if we have per se shifted enough to actually be pulling out stories that fit those filters. I think what we've done more of is like, 'These are the stories we were probably going to tell already. And then, what's the angle now of those stories that is different through those filters?' 17:08 M: So, for example, we're working on the Ewing Marion Kauffman School

graduation story. We have now looked at those coverage areas and said, 'OK. What if we told this story in the angle of an idea to reality? So, at one point the school was just an idea. And then, they started to actually build the school. Create it. All the things that went into it. And when you start having rubber hit the road, and you actually had students and teachers and parents and families and all those dynamics. How did they take what their idea was and transform it to what it is now? And how did that actually lead to success?

By listening, by responding to what their students’ needs were.'

17:57 M: So, it's not that we wouldn't have told a graduation story before. We absolutely would have. It's really important to us, to our work. But now, I think with the coverage areas we say, 'OK. What's the filter? How do we want to tell that story that's in line with our coverage area?' I think that gets us a meatier result than maybe what would have happened previously.

18:23 V: Yeah. Yeah, I would agree with that. I think there's been a lot more conscious focus on not just saying this event is happening, OK, so we'll go find the story. It's saying what do we want the story to be? How do we want to tell this? And thinking much more proactively about how we shape that. And I guess that's, for me, where there is that alignment between we know what our audience maybe wants. We have a fairly good general idea of what they might be interested in. But then we also know what we are very much interested in in terms of our mission.

18:57 M: Mhmm. Yeah. In that point, too, we know our audience is probably not that interested in the graduation story. But they're really interested in that idea of a startup and what it takes to make a startup successful. And if we think about the school and again that idea to reality framework, of like literally it was a startup. 'We don't know how all this is going to work, but we'll put it together and figure it out.' To like all the learning that had to happen to then now get to this result that's amazing. And these young people are having all this success. That's the story we want to tell. So yes, I agree with you.

19:43 V: So, keeping in mind that the thought is maybe we're not changing what stories we cover just how we cover them, has there been any shift in how stories are really planned or decided upon in this approach?

20:05 M: Yeah. I think for good reasons it's started to actually get more centralized back to Keith and Julie as really the editorial team. So, that instead of things popping up and getting put on because someone decided to write a Currents piece or what have you, there's a little bit more of that filter that it goes through. Even our process of the creation and the implementation, all of those steps to help make sure, 'Hey, is this really what we want to tell? Does it have the right angle? Does it fit in our coverage area?' So that by the

20:05 M: Yeah. I think for good reasons it's started to actually get more centralized back to Keith and Julie as really the editorial team. So, that instead of things popping up and getting put on because someone decided to write a Currents piece or what have you, there's a little bit more of that filter that it goes through. Even our process of the creation and the implementation, all of those steps to help make sure, 'Hey, is this really what we want to tell? Does it have the right angle? Does it fit in our coverage area?' So that by the