Hearken’s EMS

Engage your audience on their terms

Hearken’s Engagement Management System empowers organizations to generate actionable insights from the public to create more relevant, representative and original content.

The path to conversion on Hearken-powered story pages had an average that was almost double the average recorded for all stories. Average conversions for Hearken-powered stories were more than twice as many as all stories combined.

The Dallas Morning News

Hearken’s tech has been a very powerful tool for us to really get to know our audience in a new way. The tech has really elevated what we are doing around engagement beyond just pumping our stories out on social media and watching people talk about them. 

Olivia Allen-Price, Host & Editor of KQED’s Bay Curious

Engage Your Audience Directly

The EMS enables the public to submit questions or vote on questions they would like your organization to answer.

In the EMS valuable insights and data are organized, exportable, and ready for action.

Your team can easily get in touch with the public directly, and staff responsible for audience growth love that the public can opt-into newsletters and deeper relationships with the newsroom.

The EMS helps newsrooms shift away from a traditional engagement approach, with minimal communication between the newsroom and communities, to a more collaborative approach, where community members share their insights and questions directly with the newsroom.

Hearken's EMS question embed

Foster a Culture of Engagement

The EMS empowers organizations to generate actionable insights from the public to create more relevant, representative and original content and services.

The platform helps organizations translate into reality the move from the legacy “inside-out” public engagement approach towards an “outside-in” engagement process, by bringing audience inputs further upstream into content production or service design.

The EMS helps staff keep engagement organized, facilitates efficiencies in workflows and allows the organization to gather audience data to enrich its existing analytics. Created by a journalist and originally made for journalists, the platform now serves more than 150 partners from newsrooms to public government and civic engagement organizations.

Consistently Outperform

Hearken generated the #1 top-performing story to date for the following newsroom websites: WBEZ, WUWM, KRCC. These newsrooms have had some of their biggest website and social media hits of all time because of Hearken: WESA, NHPR, VPR, AL.com, and Lancaster Online.

Hearken-powered journalism has won the most prestigious awards in the industry, including the Edward R. Murrow Awards, PRNDI Awards, and Associated Press Awards.

A year-long, independent study revealed that readers who engaged with Hearken were between 2–5x more likely to convert to paying supporters.

A data study of organizations using Hearken showed that 56% of those who submitted questions through the Hearken EMS also subscribed to their newsletters.

Hearken's EMS question embed

Client Testimonials – Hearken’s Engagement Management System

Hearken’s public-powered model and technology has proven to be a foolproof way to identify story ideas that are basically guaranteed to connect with readers. Nearly every time we do a Hearken-based story, it soars to the top of our analytics.

Andi McDaniel, CEO, WBEZ – Chicago Public Radio

Hearken helps us understand what our communities care about, gives us award-winning story leads, and helps us foster productive relationships with our listeners that lead to real-life impact.

Marfa Public Radio

The average time-on-page for Hearken-powered stories was 5 minutes and 25 seconds, which is about four times higher than the average for WPR.org.

Wisconsin Public Radio

Interested in using the EMS at your organization?