PBS Unlocks Audience Insights and Drives Impact with Fathom Text Analytics
PBS cares about American viewers:
PBS, America’s most trusted broadcaster, connects over 130 Million people each year to the worlds of science, history, culture, and public affairs.
However, their ability to understand how content impacts viewers—and how PBS could enhance its impact—was limited without the means to analyze open-ended data at scale.
Fathom unlocks insight from viewer feedback:
By partnering with Fathom text analytics, PBS has revolutionized its approach to open-ended data analysis.
Using advanced text analytics, PBS now scalably and accurately interprets viewers’ responses in their own words, translating those insights into actionable strategies that amplify its mission of educating and inspiring Americans.
"Fathom has completely shifted how we approach qualitative survey data, it’s allowed us to turn untapped potential into actionable, trusted insights."
-- Erin Moroney, Senior Manager, Consumer Insights & Analysis, Business Intelligence at PBS
PBS had robust analytics, but needed to analyze open-ended responses to understand the “why” driving behaviour
PBS has a robust viewer analytics program with plenty of information about who is watching what, where and when. While closed-ended data revealed "what" audiences were doing, PBS lacked a way to understand the "why" behind behaviors. As an organization deeply committed to their viewers, PBS felt this gap needed to be addressed.
PBS faced significant barriers to fully leveraging open-ended data:
Scaling Thematic Analysis Took Too Much Time: It was time-consuming and resource-intensive to process large datasets of open-ended survey responses. This left valuable insights buried and untapped.
Connecting Viewer Feedback to Business Outcomes and Innovation: Qualitative data, often captured anecdotally across business units or Member Stations, lacked the measurable rigor needed to connect audience feedback to strategic decisions.
Missed Opportunities for Evaluating Outcomes: The many and varied personal stories of how PBS had inspired viewers and changed lives were difficult to combine into a cohesive picture of impact.
Fathom’s human-in-the-loop text analytics empowers PBS to scale open-ended research across program areas
With Fathom, PBS quickly identifies, quantifies and analyzes the themes showing up in their data — with the nuance, detail and control necessary to truly understand the “why” driving impact and viewer behavior.
PBS can now report out on valuable open-ended insight, which is increasingly trusted across the organization for their transparency and rigour, on tight quant timelines.
This in turn helps PBS make data-informed decisions, based on viewer feedback, and better fulfill the organization’s mandate to have a positive impact on American viewers.
“With Fathom we can accurately code and quantify open-ended data. Stakeholders have a new appreciation for qualitative insights, which leads to decision making that’s based on viewer feedback”
-- Erin Moroney, Senior Manager, Consumer Insights & Analysis, Business Intelligence at PBS
Understanding the “why” behind viewer behavior drives business outcomes across PBS
The PBS research team supports content, programming, branding, marketing, member engagement, donor relations, business analytics, Member Stations and more!
Knowing that Fathom can easily generate a customized code frame to get the specific insight a business unit is looking for, the research team is better able to integrate and analyze open-ended data wherever needed, and drive value across the organization.
“Different functions of the organization need different things from research, but they all need to go from what to why, in order to drive desired outcomes for the business. Fathom was the missing link.”
-- Erin Moroney, Senior Manager, Consumer Insights & Analysis, Business Intelligence at PBS
The team leveraged Fathom to move from hypothesis to confidence in a single round of open-ended survey research, when evaluating member satisfaction with PBS Passport.
The research team discovered, with statistical confidence, that viewers who described PBS Passport as a "membership benefit" had positive sentiment, while those who thought of it as a "subscription" drew negative associations. This insight helped PBS to quickly align their Passport strategy with audience expectations, and double down on these efforts.
When evaluating member satisfaction, the team analyzed open-ended responses to:
Create a custom code frame based on associations viewers have with PBS Passport
Combine themes with sentiment and closed-ended segments to identify key insights
Quickly and easily report out to stakeholders, who aligned on refined positioning
Analyzing viewer stories at scale enables PBS to quantify programming impact
PBS’s annual survey of 20,000+ respondents measures how YouTube programming impacts viewers’ lives. Respondents share rich qualitative stories about their relationship with PBS. As a public broadcaster, whose mission is to educate and empower Americans, understanding impact is key.
Fathom text analysis enables PBS to:
Categorize verbose stories into detailed themes to codify impact
Quantify these themes to reveal powerful insights about the ways PBS impacts viewers on the YouTube platform
Share a clear, comprehensive, data-driven story about PBS’s societal impact with stakeholders and funders
“With Fathom, we can not only quantify the impact of our programming, but also tell the rich stories behind those numbers."
-- Erin Moroney, Senior Manager, Consumer Insights & Analysis, Business Intelligence at PBS
By using Fathom to transform thousands of unstructured stories into quantifiable and actionable data, the team identified that 24% of new PBS Digital Studio viewers credit PBS with impacting their career paths. Combining this with behavioural data allows the team to pinpoint programming and events that have the greatest positive impact in order to build on this success.
Supporting Member Stations with community insights & driving organization wide outcomes
"Fathom allows us to scale our efforts, supporting Member Stations in ways we’ve never been able to before."
-- Erin Moroney, Senior Manager, Consumer Insights & Analysis, Business Intelligence at PBS
With Fathom, PBS can support member stations with local insights based on their community needs, and can aggregate and analyze open-ends to analyze impact organization-wide:
Empower stations with an intuitive analytics interface to analyze their data
Aggregate data across stations to interpret and report on impact at a national scale
Help Member Stations better serve their communities, while reinforcing PBS’s overarching mission
PBS Member Stations operate in communities of all sizes, as a hub of connection and education, providing local content and local events. Supporting Member Stations with distributed infrastructure to measure and refine the impact of community initiatives is a priority for the PBS research team.
The team also needs to be able to aggregate all that data to analyze and report on impact and surface opportunities for innovation at the organization-wide level.
Fathom’s advanced text analytics is delivering transformative results for PBS, leading to tangible business outcomes:
Actionable Open-Ended Insights at Scale: Fathom’s human-in-the-loop model enables PBS to process large datasets quickly and accurately, connecting audience feedback to strategic outcomes
Enhanced Decision-Making: Trusted, quantifiable insights helps PBS optimize member benefits, refine programming decisions, and improve marketing effectiveness
Closing the Loop Between Mission and Impact: By better understanding audience voices, PBS continues to align content and initiatives with its mission to educate, inspire, and represent Americans.
Reinforcing Member Centric Culture : Fathom is elevating the role of qualitative data within PBS, transforming how the organization values and uses audience feedback
With Fathom, PBS has opened new doors for qualitative research, transforming open-ended data into trusted, actionable insights. From supporting Member Stations to informing content decisions, Fathom empowers PBS to fulfill its mission with greater precision, confidence, and efficiency—bringing the voices of the American people into every strategic decision.
PBS and PBS Member Stations are America’s largest classroom, the nation’s largest stage for the arts and a trusted window to the world. In addition, PBS's educational media helps prepare children for success in school and opens up the world to them in an age-appropriate way.
Erin Moroney is the Senior Manager of Consumer Insights and Analysis at PBS, where she leads custom research and audience analysis within the Business Intelligence Group. Passionate about qualitative data, Erin focuses on understanding audiences to create actionable solutions that drive growth and social impact.