Impact: 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.
Below are our winners in the Impact category.
The “Public-powered Elections” Impact Award
Winner: KUNR Public Radio: Climate focused elections coverage
What They Did: Electorate-Centric (Not Candidate) Elections Coverage
From April through September 2022 KUNR Public Radio asked community members in Northern Nevada what topics or issues they wanted to know more about from the 2022 candidates running in the primary and general elections (The Citizens Agenda approach). They collected answers using Hearken based embeds in both English and Spanish to broaden their reach, and then analyzed the responses they received.
More than 40% of respondents shared concerns about climate change, and specifically wanted to know how local politicians would respond to key environmental issues such as wildfires and water conservation. Using these questions, alongside additional ones from students at the University of Nevada, KUNR created a questionnaire to send to twenty candidates running in nine races across three counties.
KUNR Community Engagement Coordinator Natalie Van Hoozer managed the process, and shared that when inviting candidates to submit answers she found it particularly helped to emphasize that their constituents were asking the questions, not the newsroom (which is what usually happens). Twelve candidates submitted responses, which KUNR published in a series of articles. Responses were fact-checked and additional explanations and details were provided to clarify information and break down environmental jargon.
Why We Picked Them:
By creating a multi-month process and using both Spanish and English forms, KUNR was able to reach a broader mix of community members and dig into specific, consequential questions on a broad topic. Van Hoozer further explained that, “We know that the environment is a crucial topic to cover, but this community input helped us to prioritize specific environmental questions as part of our election coverage in a way that we would not have otherwise.” In addition to this being valuable for voters, candidates who submitted their responses shared with KUNR that they appreciated the opportunity to answer specific questions from their community.
Key lessons:
- Start early. By beginning to ask questions months before the election KUNR connected with a wider group of audience members offering richer and more diverse perspectives. It also gave them plenty of time to analyze responses and put together their candidate surveys.
- Ask open ended questions. Giving audience members the opportunity to share specific questions and ideas can be much more powerful than using a basic poll or survey. As an aside, if sorting those responses seems daunting, reach out to us to discuss how our machine learning feature can automatically categorize audience questions to save you time.
- Use the power of community. We know newsrooms have a good pulse on what their audience cares about, but being able to share specific questions directly from the community can yield a greater and richer response rate from elected officials, business managers, or other local leaders.
KUNR participated in the 2022 Democracy SOS Fellowship program, run by Hearken, Solutions Journalism Network and Trusting News. To learn more about the fellowship (now called Advancing Democracy), head here.
The “Listen To Youth” Impact Award
Winner: WHYsconsin’s Reporting on Trans Legislation
What They Did: Humanized Reporting on A Contentious Issue
It’s all too easy when doing stories about policy and politics to focus on the politicians, not the people who their decisions are about, and will ultimately impact. Reporter Christine Hatfield wanted to change this dynamic when reporting on a very contentious issue in the state of Wisconsin: public policy affecting transgender youth.
So WHYsconsin asked transgender minors and their guardians about the bills that would limit the rights of transgender people. Within days, they received nearly 20 submissions from parents and, most importantly, children who detailed their experiences, concerns and questions for policymakers. These intimate submissions came from communities across the state — from rural and urban to conservative and liberal, and shaped the reporting, and helped guide which experts and policymakers to reach out to and what questions to ask them.
Why We Picked Them:
As WHYsconsin editor Andrea Anderson wrote in their submission, “Throughout this story process it was clear people were trusting us with the most intimate details of their lives or their children’s lives. The policies have incredible consequences, and to directly give them space to share what those consequences mean for them is something that has more impact than what any social or web metrics can show.”
WHYsconsin shared this note from José, the father raising a transgender child who was featured in the story:
“We are just overwhelmed to be a part of this. I had to pause my day and read it, and I just had all the feelings. Thank you for being a part of this story. And thank you again, Christine. Since being interviewed we’ve started a Trans Parent group here in town, my spouse (redacted) has run and been elected to the School Board in the face of a transphobic campaign to occupy some vacant seats. The intimacy of love, care, and activism has not been so underscored for us here. This article articulates our moment, but hopefully not our future. I hope our love needn’t always be a political act. But now is now!”
Without WHYsconsin, Christine and these courageous people, this humanizing story would not have been told.
Key lessons:
- Partner across the newsroom. Reporter Christine Hatfield is not part of the WHYsconsin team, but knew that her colleagues working on this series were expert in engagement. She knew that working in new ways and collecting input from the community as the focus of her storytelling would result in different, more impactful editorial products.
- Listen widely. WHYsconsin made sure to include voices across a variety of dimensions in the state to ensure that youth concerns were heard alongside their parents.’
- Showing up with care builds trust. The team who collaborated on this story were clearly thoughtful enough in their outreach and communications with parents and trans youth to not only earn their trust to fill out a form, but to share intimate concerns and details that could be part of the final stories they made. This kind of trust is built through consideration in all aspects of engagement and follow-up.
Honorable Mentions:
We also loved two other entries that made or have the potential to make a big impact for communities.
KQED’s Reporting on Bay Area Toll Debt
The Metropolitan Transportation Commission in the Bay Area made a change to how tolls are collected on the Bay Area’s many bridges at the start of the pandemic, but most people had no idea. KQED’s transit editor Dan Brekke discovered the change after looking into a question posed to Bay Curious from a listener who had racked up hundreds of dollars in toll debt, and didn’t understand how. Turns out this listener was not alone: tons of people were unintentionally skipping out on paying tolls, which led to fees that increased quickly and could put a person in hundreds or thousands of dollars in debt within weeks. Yikes!
As the Senior Editor and Host of Bay Curious, Olivia Allen-Price, wrote in their entry, “We wouldn’t have known about this issue without having heard from the public via Hearken. And, once Dan started asking the Metropolitan Transportation Commission about the issue, changes that would help lift the debt burden got underway. We can’t say for sure Dan’s reporting prompted the change, but it may have been a little extra push that helped.”
WPLN’s Reporting on Language Accessibility in State Driver’s License Exams
Sometimes a single little-known fact can motivate an entire body of reporting. That’s what happened when WPLN’s Alexis Marshall learned that Arabic is Tennessee’s third-most common language. She pinpointed this thanks to a question about why Arabic isn’t an option on the state driver’s license exam. Her reporting unpacked the reasons behind this discrepancy and ultimately led to a face-to-face meeting between the question-asker and the state’s top leader over driver’s services. Special Projects Editor Tony Gonazlez wrote in their application, “While we haven’t seen Tennessee add Arabic yet, we believe this impact could still be forthcoming and we’ll be following up during state budgetary discussions.”
- Read about other 2022 winners in the following categories: Creative Community, Impact, Collaborations & Revenue, Internal Culture Change. (links added every day)
- Check out the Champions of Curiosity from previous years dating back to 2016!
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.
