Vermont Public: Engaging Culture — 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.)
Engaging Culture Award
What they did:
Vermont Public’s people-powered show Brave Little State took the zeitgeist-y popularity of musician Noah Kahan’s Vermont-centric song “Stick Season” to ask listeners about what else about Vermont has put it on the global cultural radar. The resulting episode included a trip to LA’s Vermont Avenue, a roundtable conversation with Vermont experts, and a lot of name-dropping of Bernie Sanders, Phish, maple syrup, Jasper Hill cheese, and craft beer. Because the whole experience of making the show inspired friendly debate on the Vermont Public’s team and newsroom, they decided to reach out to their audience, to hear what they had to say about Vermont’s cultural icons.
Mimicking the NCAA’s March Madness, they created a bracket featuring 64 of Vermont’s biggest cultural icons (divided into Pop Culture, Food & Drink, Politics, and The Outdoors). Over the next week, they had a pop culture “party” in Vermont Public and Brave Little’ State’s Instagram stories, conducting one poll for each “matchup” in the bracket, resulting in, for example, Robert Frost facing off against the Burton snowboard company.
Why we picked them:
Sheer delight! By leaning into their beat — and creativity — so completely, Vermont Public delivered a new mix of mediums and methods for audience engagement. The cross pollination they did by utilizing Instagram in tandem with the Vermont Public website resulted in people finding the episode who otherwise might not have. In so doing, they created a vibrant and continuing public conversation about the state’s outsized cultural impact from scratch. They also thought analog, distributing a printable PDF for folks who preferred to fill out their brackets manually!
Key lessons learned:
- Consider how you can utilize a multi-media approach: Brave Little State didn’t use one medium but several, using elements of a traditional audio story but enhancing it with visual “brackets” on Instagram and short, quippy videos and images showing their Vermont-centric results.
- Lean into collaboration. A lot of people with different talents — graphic designers, social media managers, and reporters — were needed to pull this off.
- Embrace your community: In this era of culture wars, Brave Little State’s approach was something that could actually bring people together to celebrate what they and their state are known for and have in common.
- Keep morale in mind. Vermont Public Media produces plenty of meaty stories but this piece created an outlet to keep morale high during a politically and socially tumultuous time.
