Laura Mayer wants to know how you’re doing. The Medill senior is the creator of The How Are You Doing Project, a Web site and hotline that lets callers share their answers to the simple question: How are you doing? Their voice messages are e-mailed to Mayer as mp3 files and she edits them into weekly podcasts available on iTunes.
How did The How Are You Doing Project start? I was getting ready to go to work at Chicago Public Radio. I was just grumpy, and brushing my teeth, and I was thinking: Now is the kind of day where if someone were to ask me how I was doing, I would be really gruff. And it somehow came to me: I should set up a hotline and a Web site. It would be easy to do.
What range of callers do you get now?
I get mainly people that I don’t know. I can’t see the full phone numbers, but I can see area codes. I get people from all over the place nationally. There was this one day, the 18th of February, a friend of mine who is really active on StumbleUpon Stumbled it. It ended up getting something close to 20,000 page views in 24 hours. I remember the first day it got Stumbled, I went to eat some wings or something, and I came back and had 70 voicemails! I get a range of calls from happy to sad. My favorite is the in between, “I’m doing o.k.” Little details I think are what make the question interesting. There are some calls where people start, and then launch into this mini-narrative that can end up being really powerful. There’s one called the Navy story. This woman tells, in under three minutes, her decision to join the Navy the previous day. There was another one, this lady called in and said she was just looking for a purpose in her life. That’s something we can all relate to, which I guess is – in a tiny microcosm – the way that I think of The How Are You Doing Project. The little questions and the little interactions are what make up so much of the conversation we have with people our entire lives. It’s the idea of everyday empathy.
Do you ever get feedback as far as why people decide to call?
With the Internet, when you’re leaving feedback on a site, there’s not a lot of engagement you need to have. Maybe you figure out that weird garbled letter box and type the letters to prove that you’re human, then send it. With this, you see this number on a website and you have to take yourself out of the medium to call. That has kept people who don’t take it seriously from like making this extra leap to call. So I think that’s why the quality of the calls have been so high; it does take a little extra effort to like call The How Are You Doing Project than you would normally for leaving feedback online.
What about the site’s logistics?
I probably spend like seven hours a week on it. It’s been cool to hear the positive feedback about it. And this idea that this can be a more personal take on the way we communicate with each other that is in an online setting but has this offline element to it.
Someone, one day a few weeks ago, called like 50 times and was just swearing. I was checking my e-mail thinking, “Oh yes! More How Are You Doings!” and then it was just what sounded like a little kid, just abusing it. And I was like, “Come on, kid. Come on.”
Do you have any advice for people who want to ask more meaningful questions about their lives, or record things?
It’s pretty easy to do. I’d tell your roommates that you’re planning to record yourself in your room before you go into your room every night and record yourself, which is what I was doing in New York with these girls I didn’t know. I think they thought I was talking to myself in my room the whole time. I think radio is something that seems antiquated, but if you look at the numbers, NPR had its highest peak ratings in like a long time this week. So people are still listening, and it’s an interesting way to tell stories and hear stories. If you really sit down and listen to what people are saying, I think it’s the most engaging way to experience a story.
