Champions of Curiosity Awards 2020: Most Creative Promotional Strategy
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: The Dallas Morning News (The News)
What They Did:
The Dallas Morning News leveraged Instagram Live to foster audience curiosity and answer Hearken powered questions. Nataly Keomoungkoun coordinated the effort with Mallorie Sullivan, making it a goal to reach a younger audience and engage the existing community in a new way.
In 2017 they launched Curious Texas with the intent of bringing readers into their reporting process. So far, they’ve answered hundreds of questions about the state Texans know and love. Over the summer, Nataly and Mallorie relaunched Curious Texas with a fantastic new look, heralding the exciting changes on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and newsletters.
The relaunch was a perfect way for The News to reach new readers and re-engage old fans. Nataly, Mallorie, and Saher did a great job of appealing to both of those audiences — that’s something you can see illustrated in this Twitter thread. If you’re new to Curious Texas, there’s an introduction to how it works. If you want to relive some of the best highlights, there’s an opportunity for readers to take a walk through the archives. The launch was timed around the release of a series of new stories answering questions generated through Hearken, and they used each of those as opportunities to re-promote post-launch.
In addition to a new logo, a series of new Instagram templates was designed to create a uniform look and feel across social media so that readers would immediately recognize that the post was from Curious Texas.
Want to hear Nataly share some of the answers to reader questions? Check out their Instagram Live!
Why We Picked Them:
This project illustrates how important it is to take baby steps to build trust with an audience, and to pay close attention to the technologies that drive communication within different demographics. Consistent outreach through tools like Instagram Live enabled The Dallas Morning News to build a true community!
Key Lessons:
- Go to your audience: A good community-first approach is to consider where your audience spends time and create a presence for your organization in those places, rather than waiting for the audience to come to you.
- Align social and marketing for a cohesive look and message: To make the Instagram Live happen, Nataly joined efforts with Mallorie Sullivan, who helped organize social plans along with Alexandra Powell and Saher Merchant, who helped with background marketing.
- Make a game plan ahead of time: Mallorie collected the questions early on, passed them to Nataly about a week before the scheduled live event, and then Nataly was able to report the answers back to the audience during the live. Mallorie was the true mastermind behind it as she helped answer questions and dropped links to the story while Nataly was going live!
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
- Best New Hearken Use-case
- 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.
