Building your Hearken landing page

Creating a centralized landing page for Hearken is a core technique for ensuring success and ongoing engagement. 

A successful Hearken project creates a feedback loop over time. The more you publish stories with the Hearken model, the more your audience will want to engage with you. But that feedback loop only works if the audience understands the Hearken process and how they can be involved. They need to see every piece of the Hearken process in action. A centralized landing page is valuable because it allows you to do exactly that. 

Your landing page gives you space to introduce and explain the Hearken process to your audience. In addition, this page can serve as a host for both your engagement embeds  and the stories you report with the Hearken process. By connecting those two pieces of the process in one place, you can show (rather than tell) your audience how their responses really do lead to great stories. Finally, the landing page provides you with a single location you can drive traffic to from social media, newsletters, and wherever else you promote your Hearken project. All these factors make your engagement narrative consistent and easy to follow for your audience, which is crucial for sustained engagement. 

A good landing page typically includes the following elements (often in this order):

Your landing page should begin with a short paragraph to introduce your Hearken project and to explain how the audience can participate. Make sure to explain each step of the Hearken process so your audience understands how their responses will lead to stories. An example of a clear, friendly explanation of process comes from Curious Texas's landing page (and a fun process cartoon).

Learn more about introducing and explaining the Hearken process.

Submitting responses is the first step in the Hearken process, so typically our newsrooms place the form embed first on the page. 

Once you have enough good responses to run a voting round, you can add the poll embed to your landing page. If you're planning to run regular voting rounds, you can leave it embedded permanently. Or you can choose to only embed it there while you're running a round.

Learn more about configuring a poll embed and curating voting rounds.

You can use a list embed to show your audience what their peers are asking and give them inspiration to come up with questions of their own. Vermont Public Radio's landing page features a great example of a list embed. You can also use the question display to show which responses you’re currently investigating. 

Learn more about list embeds.

As you publish stories with the Hearken model, you should add links to those stories at the foot of your landing page in a story stream. This way, your audience can see how every step of the Hearken process connects, from response submission to final story. You can also display answered questions with their links using a list embed.