Creative Community: Champions of Curiosity Awards 2022
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. We know that over the past year Hearken’s partners pulled through and delivered innovative projects that best served their communities, and we want 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, memberships grow, and retention increases.
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: Vermont Public’s Brave Little State
What They Did: Brought New Vermonters Together
In the spring of 2022 a listener Sydney Lucia asked Vermont Public’s Brave Little State, “How are people who moved to Vermont during the pandemic doing now?”. Vermont saw a large influx of workers move to the state in 2019 and 2020 but then the pandemic hit and life changed pretty dramatically. While producing an episode in response to that question, Brave Little State found out that many of those folks were feeling a bit lonely and were craving community. So Vermont Public hosted a “New Vermont Mixer” at a local brewery complete with their own branded beer (seriously!), lawn games, and even activities where people cycled through different conversation prompts.
The event saw a huge turnout from Vermonters from across the state including families, retirees, and young people. It provided a unique gathering opportunity for the community that had started listening to Brave Little State to learn more about their new home. By the end of the event people were exchanging phone numbers to stay in touch and inquiring about when the next mixer would be!
Why We Picked Them:
Brave Little State does a fantastic job of answering listener questions, but this mixer took creating a sense of place and helping people meet their needs to the next level. Through creativity and a bit of planning they were able to both discover a need their listeners had and create a unique way to address that need.
Key lessons:
- Create connections. Consider ways you can help your audience to connect with both you and also with each other.
- Be creative. Consider ways to involve your audience beyond just printed stories or on-air reporting. In-person events, podcasts, social media postings, virtual gatherings, and creating tangible items could all be additional ways for people to engage more deeply.
- Let your audience be your guide. Before hosting the mixer Brave Little State told their listeners they were considering putting on an event and asked for ideas on what it should look like.
Honorable Mention: KQED
KQED racks up two honorable mentions for our creative community category through multi-faceted reporting projects born through their public-powered initiative Bay Curious.
Russell City Reporting Package
The Bay Curious team collaborated with KQED’s digital team to tell the story of Russell City, a once thriving black community that was completely erased. It’s a story that very few local residents knew about. The story inspired a live event, put on by KQED’s new Live Events team. KQED welcomed the community into our building for a night of music and storytelling about Russell City. The event sold out, and many of those in attendance were folks who had a personal connection to Russell City. Many were part of a historically underserved community, who were pleased to be getting this attention from KQED. Check out video from the live event here!
We love this entry for many reasons, but two standouts are: it created a community around a lost community, and created new relationships and community within KQED, as teams who had not collaborated before worked together to pull off an ambitious multi-faceted story package!
Youth Takeover
Every year, KQED has an event called Youth Takeover, where shows run work created by local students. It’s a great opportunity to hear from a segment of the population not often in the news, or at the center of what’s being talked about in mainstream media. Bay Curious collaborated with a class at John Henry High School, and worked with students to turn the stories they were curious about into podcast episodes. The Bay Curious team selected two to feature on their podcast and their audience loved learning something a little outside of what Bay Curious usually covers.
We always appreciate when newsroom staff stretch to report not only on, but with people of age groups out of what’s typical. Hearing the voices of youth and collaborating with them not only provides original, compelling content, but provides vitally important opportunities for young people to be heard, valued and shape the stories the community uses to understand itself.
- The other 2022 categories for Champions of Curiosity include: Editorial, Impact, Revenue & Impact, Internal Culture Change. We’ll be announcing them, one category per day.
- Check out the Champions of Curiosity from previous years dating back to 2016!
