KQED: Most Creative All-Around Engagement — 2023 Champion of Curiosity
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. In 2023, Hearken’s partners delivered innovative projects that best served their communities, and this is our chance 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, membership bases grow, and retention increases.
How we picked winners: Hearken evaluated submissions based on the implementation of our public-powered model, 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.
Check out all of the winners of our 2023 competition, doing their part to uplift newsrooms with community-minded curiosity. (We’re posting one per day through February 8, 2024.)
Most Creative All-Around Engagement
What they did:
After discovering that their local audience had some fatigue around depressing stories, KQED created a fun and unexpected daily news quiz last July. Each day at 5:48 pm, the KQED announcers began posing a single question about that day’s programming. Listeners engaged on the KQED site (via Hearken), answering news questions for a chance to win a spectacular monthly prize — for instance, a weekend resort stay for two, valued at over $6,000. In this way, KQED not only broke the programming mold but also tapped into listeners’ excitement about their programming and what they learned, keeping folks tuned in. Even better, the daily quiz format served as an ongoing feedback mechanism. Through listeners’ participation, KQED was able to gauge their responsiveness to multiple aspects of the station’s programming. At the time of this award, they’d received nearly 8,000 submissions: That’s 8,000 opportunities to get closer to the people they serve, and learn more about who is turning to their reporting.
Why we picked them:
We were impressed with KQED’s inventiveness around use of our technology and at the way that the quiz both challenged and rewarded listeners. We also admired the way that the quiz created an ongoing, sustainable way to monitor and receive information about audience interests. According to Ernesto Aguilar, Executive Director of Radio Programming and Content DEI Initiatives, “Since the quiz’s inception, our audience share has increased by two points. While growth is multifaceted, this quiz has likely played a role in rejuvenating audience engagement and charting a course towardd a more exciting listening experience at KQED.”
We also appreciated how KQED applied this same quiz philosophy to a monthly quiz for their beloved Bay Curious series (scroll to the bottom of their page to see the quiz). Their monthly Bay Curious quiz also uses the Hearken EMS to allow listeners and readers to enter the contest. Each month, they randomly select one winner for the prize pack of Bay Curious and Sierra Nevada goodies (a value of $50).
Key lessons learned:
- Teamwork makes the dreamwork. According to Aguilar, “Corporate Support secured sponsors and prizes, Product handled web presence, and Creative designed compelling banner ads.” By engaging a variety of departments, they were able to create benefits for the whole station. The successful execution of the project was due to KQED having a “holistic approach to understanding and meeting audience expectations, with Hearken serving as the linchpin for this cross-departmental collaboration.”
- Creativity FTW! We love that KQED applied a different use-case to the Hearken tech, going from asking their audiences for their questions to asking them for answers. We love when partners expand and test out other methods, like using the form to ask for memories, ideas and whatever they dream up!
- Long-term engagement habits. The ongoing nature of this quiz can help KQED create a long-term, sustainable effort instead of a one-off opportunity for listeners to show their smarts and be rewarded for engaging with the news.
