Goli Sheikholeslami

President and CEO, Chicago Public Media

Goli Sheikholeslami is President and CEO of Chicago Public Media, the home of WBEZ. But she's leaving her post at the end of September to assume a similar position at New York City's public radio station, WNYC. In the past Sheikholeslami has served in leadership roles with Everyday Health, Conde Nast, Time Warner and The Washington Post.

Quotes

We’ve grown our member base by over 30 percent in the last four years because we’ve really been running it like a customer acquisition/retention business. We’ve now organized our membership team into a customer acquisition team, or a member acquisition team, and then a member retention team. ... We have very set goals about the amount of new members we need to bring into the organization. And then we are continuously working on improving our retention rates from our existing members.

We, for obvious reasons, have been doing a lot of work to expand our service beyond radio and audio. Or beyond terrestrial radio, to digital audio, and then also to … a text-based product.

We’re really focused on growing the audience. We still feel like there’s an opportunity to grow the audience to our traditional radio service. So, we actually, for the last year, and for the first time in the history of the station, have been doing an extended brand awareness campaign here in Chicago.

Google News announced sort of a partnership with some major news organizations at the end of the year for their Google Assistant platform. And so we’re one of the partners that is working with Google News to really figure out how people are going to want to consume news on these smart speaker platforms, for example. So, that, I would say is the most cutting edge because I think it’s just ... it’s so new. ... What is the news experience in a voice-activated world?

We’ve invested in building out a data warehouse, so that we can really start to understand the behavior of our (WBEZ) members, and understand who they are, so that we can do more one-to-one direct-to marketing to our members. You know, again mostly for retention purposes. But also for the purposes of getting people to increase their giving over time. So, that’s something that we had never done in terms of really starting to use data, and data analytics to message, and market more directly to our members, and to prospects. And we're also building a prospect database. So, as important as the newsletter is to our editorial strategy, and our audience strategy, it’s also critical to our membership strategy. ... Sixty percent of the people that are signed up for our newsletter are not members. So, all of those people are now prospects in a prospect database.