Baltimore Banner: Engaging the Future— 2023 Champion of Curiosity
The Champions of Curiosity Awards is Hearken’s celebration of community listening, community building, and needs-based service approaches that make the world a better place. In 2023, Hearken’s partners delivered innovative projects that best served their communities, and this is our chance to honor that impressive work in a variety of categories.
Champions of curiosity improve their communities by asking better questions, doing better listening, and creating better services and offerings for their audience, members, and constituents. In return, their communities have rewarded them with their trust, their loyalty, and often their dollars — proving that when we listen to our communities, subscriptions go up, membership bases grow, and retention increases.
How we picked winners: Hearken evaluated submissions based on the implementation of our public-powered model, the creativity of the approach, solution, or offering, and the potential for others to replicate or model it. The winners are Hearken partners who’ve exemplified a commitment to engagement as good business through community-building and listening.
Check out all of the winners of our 2023 competition, doing their part to uplift newsrooms with community-minded curiosity. (We’re posting one per day through February 8, 2024.)
Engaging the Future Award
What they did:
The Baltimore Banner used Hearken to ask people what they wanted from the redevelopment of the Inner Harbor, which is a public space and one of the most-visited places in the city. The current design is considered tired and doesn’t attract or entertain crowds the way it used to. The Banner’s initial callout post generated 106 reader submissions, many calling for the same things — market space, unobstructed views, public transportation, green space, and local businesses. Using these results, The Banner created a chart tallying the most commonly mentioned requests, along with a design that featured the waterfront, food hall, public art, green space, bike and walking areas, and more.
Then, they selected nine reader responses that represented the broader list of submissions and put them up for a vote. More than 500 votes were cast during the week the vote was posted, and they ended up with top three winners. The posts garnered significant web traffic and in late summer, they had an illustrator create sketches of the top three submissions. Next, they contacted the three people whose ideas were chosen and asked them to offer feedback on the illustrator’s sketches — and the illustrator then finalized her designs in color. In October 2023, the Banner published the final results and generated even more traffic. T.J. Ortenzi, The Baltimore Banner’s Director of Audience noted that “the callout performed extremely well, the voting round performed even better, and the final piece showcasing the artist’s renderings performed 7x better than our standard posts when we shared it on Facebook.”
A short time after their designs were published, the developer released their own designs to mixed results. Those developer designs conveyed a sharp contrast between what Baltimore citizens want — and what a developer or politician might want.
Why we picked them:
We admired the multiple “engagement layers” that the Banner used to have this conversation about a central and public space in the city. That is, the initial callout, the resulting charts and designs, the summertime “vote” on the designs, and the subsequent illustration and feedback on that illustration, not to mention the audience and traction gained by the final results.
Key lessons learned:
- Mix up your media. Part of what made this story such a success was the mixed use of a poll, listener feedback and then pushing that feedback into compelling visuals.
- Using local artists gives you a leg up. The team engaged local artists to help to design an ideal Harborplace. Since local artists were already part of the community, they innately had a good feel for how the space was being used and what the community might need in the future.
- Try focusing on the future: Newsrooms can be an important collector and convener of visions for how a place can be better. By focusing on that angle, the team gave Baltimorians an opportunity to share ideas that could persuade the future of this communal resource. (This is in contrast with, say, going to a city council meeting and simply making a comment — in this example with The Baltimore Banner, involving a newsroom gives the ideas more validity and a higher profile).
