What’s Up with WhatsApp

Oct. 10, 2024: Learn how radio stations can leverage the messaging platform WhatsApp to connect with listeners, share content, and build a more engaged community.

• Presentation slides

Metrics, meet mission: Tracking & telling the whole engagement story

Nov. 17, 2022: So your newsroom has been busy doing all this engagement work — but how does that all turn magically into funding, sustainability, and a revenue win for the station?

In this workshop, Hearken’s Jen Brandel provides tactical methods for making sure your organization is translating the impact of your journalism efforts into business wins. It digs into how to pull together data and anecdotes to serve your organization’s storytelling, audience growth, fundraising and staff morale. We look into success stories and case studies of organizations who have leveraged storytelling effectively. This workshop covers:

o Expanding engagement insights throughout your newsroom
o Translating engagement into audience growth
o Building a case for funding and sponsorship around engagement work

• Presentation slides

Building Trust With Conservative Sources and Audience

Sept. 15, 2022: We all know that trust in news media has fallen to new lows in recent months and years. One of the big reasons behind launching a community engaged-approach to journalism is to rebuild trust with our audiences and expand that trust to new audiences. But what about deeply conservative audiences who insist that we are not just untrustworthy, but are perpetuating lies? How do we connect with those communities without falling into the trap of “both-sides-ism?”

Joy Mayer of Trusting News has been working on this issue since long before it became a crisis for our industry. Also joining the conversation is Ricky Young, a news editor at the Chattanooga Free Press in Tennessee. Both share tips on building trust and connections with this community.

• Trusting News tips for how to reach across the aisle

• Slide deck

Engaged Elections Training

July 20, 2022: How can you begin to center your election coverage on the needs of the audiences and communities you’re serving? And WHY is it imperative to do so?

In this introductory training for the Midterm Election Information project, Jenn Brandel of Hearken will introduce us to the thinking behind a new way of covering elections and politics in this country – a strategy that is aimed at both engaging and expanding audiences, reaching communities that haven’t tuned into us in the past, meeting communities’ information needs and building trust in public media.

Re-inventing the public radio talk show

July 14, 2022: Talk shows are the original form of public radio style engagement: a space where experts can answer questions from the public, where communities can share how issues are directly affecting them.

Andrea Tudhope is the executive producer of the daily news show “This Is Nashville” on Nashville Public Radio and was the coordinating producer for America Amplified 1.0.

She offers a few ideas tailored to producing community-engaged talk shows. You can pick and choose from these ideas and incorporate some or all into your workflow, before production, during production, and after the show. The goal is to put communities at the center and generate innovative approaches and enterprise topics to spruce up your regular programming.

• Re-inventing the public radio talk show

Translating Engagement Into Journalism

May 26, 2022: You’ve engaged your communities — held listening sessions, built texting groups, distributed surveys, tabled at events. How does that translate into content, and how do you know if that content is meeting your communities’ information needs?

We hear from engagement specialists and journalists from two stations who have been working in this field for a while — how they do it!

• Side Effects Public Media turning Engagement into News

• KPCC College Pathways Resources

Development, Marketing and Community Engagement

April 21, 2022: This one-hour session shared a case study of how WFYI Public Media has integrated community engagement into grants, donor acquisition and station branding, with the goal of revealing how beneficial embracing this practice can be not just for news teams, but also for an organization’s overall financial vitality and local prominence.

Digital tools for community and audience engagement

March 17, 2022: From Facebook Groups to Twitter Spaces and Instagram collaborations to callouts. In this digital tools training, we talk through what is worth your time and what you can do to craft meaningful community and audience engagement with limited bandwidth. We also share some tips for when you’re ready to take your engagement to the next level.

• Community engagement via the internet

Newsletter Strategy for Public Media

March 3, 2022: In this session, Emily Roseman, research director at the Institute for Nonprofit News, cover the different types and goals of newsletters, engagement and workflow best practices, the email metrics that really matter, and how to make money from email. This session includes tips and tricks to implement newsletter best practices even when you’re short on time and bandwidth.

• Newsletter Strategy for Public Media

Assessing Information Needs

Feb. 17, 2022: Madeleine Bair, Founding Director of El Tímpano, will show us how to conduct an information needs assessment and how to prepare your newsroom to respond to a crisis. You will gain an understanding of how to design your own INA while prioritizing diversity, equity and inclusion.

• El Tímpano’s Information Needs Assessment Report

• Blog about El Tímpano’s process of conducting an INA

• Listening Post Collective Playbook

• Free Press’s Don’t Just Engage, Organize! 

Engagement Metrics Deep Dive

Feb. 10, 2022: This foundational training by Hearken CEO Jennifer Brandel drills down into a few proven methods for setting goals and understanding if you’re reaching them. We’ll work together to help you develop a draft of outcomes and key metrics for your engagement work and set a plan for how to track them.

• Download the slides

• Goals, Metrics and Impact Tracking Sheet (Template)

• Checklist for setting and using metrics (Template)

How we reached Latino/a/e/x communities

Feb. 1, 2022: Ernesto Aguilar, director of radio programming at KQED, Maritza Felix, founder of Conecta Arizona, and bilingual podcast producer Paola Marizan to talk about Latino/a audience interests, how to reach them, where they listen, and how to build relationships with the nation’s fastest-growing population. Download the handout.

Cooking up meaningful engagement

Jan. 14, 2022: There are some key ingredients that make engagement work – Capradio’s jesikah maria ross has been doing this for a decade and she’ll walk us through a few different projects to share what works, and what doesn’t. Download the handout.

Where Metrics Meet Mission

Nov. 19, 2021: This foundational workshop lead by Hearken's Jennifer Brandel and Summer Fields enables you to take a step back and ensure that what your newsroom has traditionally valued and measured isn’t undermining your mission.

Source Diversity Tracking Training

Oct. 28, 2021: Matthew Long Middleton of KCUR and Caroline Bauman of Chalkbeat join us to get us up to speed on source diversity best practices (the first half-hour) and training on the America Amplified Source Diversity Tracking tool. Get more source diversity tracking resources.