Our Webinars
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Content critique: Race and ethnicity
March 10, 2021: NPR’s Chief Diversity Officer Keith Woods and America Amplified’s Andrea Tudhope share important tips and observations for critiquing content through the lens of race and ethnicity.
What journalists can learn from community organizers
July 31, 2020: A conversation led by Sandra Clark, vice president for news and civic dialogue at WHYY in Philadelphia on how the principles of community organizing can lead to better journalism. The panel features: Venita Griffin, director of communications and digital strategy at re:power; Amber J. Phillips, a creative content strategist and storyteller who has developed training curriculum for re:power; and Terryn Hall, a writer and consultant is a former Detroit Revitalization Fellow.
Lessons in collaborating with local media
July 17, 2020: Oseye Boyd, editor of The Indianapolis Recorder, and Dave Rosenthal, managing editor of Side Effects Public Media, began their collaboration in 2019. They have since shared stories and hosted Facebook Live panel discussions together. In this conversation, they talk about what it takes it make such a partnership succeed.
New Hampshire Public Radio’s Spanish outreach efforts
June 12, 2020: NHPR’s Daniela Allee and Maria Aguirre led this session on how they started the Spanish-speaking engagement efforts, what it takes to keep it going, and why they produce a daily piece for WhatsApp. Informative and inspiring!
Becoming a trauma-aware newsroom
June 10, 2020: Being prepared to talk to your newsroom staff about the impact of covering traumatic events will not help with morale, but also retention. StateImpact Pennsylvania editor Scott Blanchard, who has received training through the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, leads us through this important webinar.
Pandemic reporting webinar
Connecting with and building sources during the pandemic takes extra effort. Our panelists talk about how they use Facebook and what they face reporting in person. Plus: self-care tips.
Power of texting webinar
Brittani Howell of Side Effects Public Media and Robin Tate Rockel of Indiana Public Broadcasting are pros at using texting to build an audience. From soup to nuts, they share how to build a texting club, manage the workflow and turn it into journalism.
Facebook Live webinar
Why jump into live streaming? How do you start? We cover these topics and more in this webinar, led by Mike Russo, director of marketing with KCUR.
Community Engagement webinar
Covering community engagement best practices and how newsrooms are handling coronavirus precautions. Hosted by Matthew Long-Middleton and Ann Alquist.