Champions of Curiosity Awards 2020: Best Overall Service, Offering, Or Outcome
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.
Winners: Citizens Agenda
What They Did:
The Citizens Agenda, a framework shared by media critic and journalism professor Jay Rosen, is a powerful model for reaching new audiences and deepening your existing relationships, that allows newsrooms to focus their coverage on the most important issues and demand accountability for responses from candidates.
This approach centers on a key question: What do you want the candidates to be talking about as they compete for votes?
During the 2020 election, multiple Hearken partners incorporated the Citizens Agenda to their approach, which makes this our Best Overall Service, Offering, & Outcome of 2020. Our partners like Capital Public Radio, Colorado Public Radio, KXLY, WBEZ, WNIJ, and others all adopted the Citizens Agenda to bring meaningful, of-interest campaign coverage to their communities. Moving away from horse-race coverage, our partners prioritized community questions and insights to push policy and real-life implications to the forefront of political coverage.
Why We Picked Them:
By putting the community front and center in their election coverage, Hearken partners were able to provide a valuable service during the unprecedented challenges of 2020 — highlighting the voices and interests of citizens during a stressful and often confusing election year. The Citizens Agenda went above and beyond our standard expectations for public-powered engagement, providing informative coverage that could be immediately applied to political decisions at the voter level, all the way up to the organizational level.
If you’d like to apply this framework within your organization or newsroom, start with our Citizens Agenda Guide.
Key Lessons:
- Earlier is better when it comes to engagement. Newsrooms that asked their audiences early what issues they wanted the candidates to address were able to shape more of their reporting around those key issues.
- Turning to the public increases accountability. Journalists reported that turning to candidates with concerns sourced from the public made their questions more powerful.
- Collaborations drive results. Several newsrooms created partnerships with other organizations in order to increase the reach and impact of their Citizens Agenda results.
Honorable Mentions:
Curious about what other work is being done in this category?
Check out our partners at Business for a Better Portland (BBPDX) for their community stewardship on our Switchboard platform. BBPDX’s consistent support of their entrepreneurial community, both by community members and official Switchboard stewards, has made the space more than just a digital place to gather and do business. It’s become a regular resource and helpful extension of the organization. In the spring of 2020, BBPDX was highlighted by KOIN6 News for its quick pivot to providing mutual aid to businesses and entrepreneurs affected by COVID. Read more about it here: Switchboard offers vital support for Oregon businesses by Jacquelyn Abad (KOIN)
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 New Hearken Use-case
- Best Use of Community Listening & Response in a Crisis
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.
