Champions of Curiosity Awards 2020: Best New Hearken Use Case

The Champions of Curiosity Awards is Hearken’s annual celebration of community listening, community building, and needs-based service approaches that make the world a better place. Throughout this challenging year, Hearken’s partners pulled through and delivered innovative projects that best served their communities, and we wanted to honor the impressive work they did.

How we picked winners: Our team at Hearken evaluated submissions based on the use of a Hearken service or platform, 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.

Winner: Oregon State University Alumni Association

What They Did:

The Oregon State University Alumni Association (OSUAA) found themselves in a position last March similar to what many of our partners experienced. With the onset of COVID and the cancellation of most (if not all) in-person events, the association’s ability to gather and serve its alumni was severely diminished. In order to pivot quickly and keep service high to their alumni experiencing new needs and challenges, OSUAA became the first organization of its kind to use Hearken’s Engagement Management System to collect alumni insights that would directly inform programming and content creation.

Hearken helped them create a working group across different functional areas of the association, including Regional Networks, Career Engagement, and Travel Programs, to focus on keeping service to alumni high in these primary engagement areas. This working group completed our “Activating Your Digital Network” training that taught them how to utilize CARE responses like celebration, amplification, recognition, and empathy to connect with, highlight, and even locate new alumni in their network. Using Hearken embeds specifically tailored for their respective program’s audience, Callie Kennel, Yuliya Dennis, and Kate Sanders piloted this new, more intimate approach to institutional engagement — a scalable way to make alumni feel heard and personally supported within a network of hundreds of thousands of people.

As a result, the association was able to quickly respond to career support requests, as well as create larger scale career webinars and resume review materials based on questions submitted through the embeds. New domestic travel programs were piloted, and up-to-date travel advising was made available based on what alumni wanted to know, making content immediately useful. The OSUAA’s new engagement approach was so innovative that the working group began teaching these new tactics to others on their team for a more robust implementation.

Hearken’s embed on The Oregon State University Alumni Association (OSUAA)’s website

Why We Picked Them:

The OSUAA took an innovative leap at a time when we saw many others pressing pause on their outreach. Association leadership like John Valva and his staff recognized the need to increase support for their alumni members in the extraordinary time of COVID, not halt or reduce it. By being the first to pilot new engagement approaches in a time of upheaval, the Oregon State University Alumni Association proved their readiness to innovate in the field of higher education, putting their community first.

Key Lessons:

1. It’s difficult to be the first, but well worth the investment: As the first alumni association and institution of higher education to implement the Engagement Management System across multiple workflows, it took time to implement and test the right processes. Each new attempt provided a valuable engagement lesson that wouldn’t have been possible if they hadn’t decided to try something others weren’t doing.
2. Starting small is okay: When we’re testing something new, it doesn’t all have to be done perfectly in the first attempt. Design thinking best practices encourage us to test, pilot, and iterate along the way so that we can incrementally improve with each new version. From this mindset, OSUAA was able to act quickly to adjust and tweak according to what they learned, rather than investing tons of time and energy into something that hadn’t yet been proven out.
3. The feedback is there if you look for it: Many industries, like higher education, operate within a hub-and-spoke model, in which the organization is at the center and members, communities, or users revolve around it. This can sometimes make it difficult to see what feedback is being shared through channels that don’t connect with the official organization. OSUAA modeled an outbound engagement approach, in which they searched for more organic (not university-prompted) ways to engage with their alumni, and collected more (and more unique) insights than alumni would have been willing to share with the university itself.

Read about other 2020 winners:

• Best Participation by a Question-asker, Community Member, or Steward
• Best Listening During a Live Event
• Best Collaboration Between Organizations
• Best Use of Creative Visuals or Interactivity
• Most Creative Promotional Strategy
• Best Use of Community Listening & Response in a Crisis
• Best Overall Service, Offering, Or Outcome

Want to become a Champion of Curiosity? We want that, too! Check out more about what we do and who we work with at wearehearken.com, follow us on Twitter @wearehearken, or sign up for our newsletter, The Hearkening.