Response statuses are one of the key tools in the Hearken Engagement Management System to help you organize and manage your audience submissions. Statuses are designed to create a production pipeline: Think of statuses as the steps each response takes to get from newly submitted to answered.

Every EMS comes with three pre-set statuses: New, Investigating, and Answered. Every response is automatically assigned the status New when it is submitted to your EMS. You can also create more statuses to fit your particular production flow.

This article will walk you through the various uses for response statuses, both for internal organization and for public transparency. We'll also walk you through how to change a response's status. 

Response statuses are useful tools to help you and your collaborators keep track of your production process through Hearken. For example, if someone is looking around the EMS to find story ideas, they can easily identify which responses have already been answered by checking the status.

Or, if you want an easy way to keep track of which responses have already won voting rounds and/or been assigned to reporters, you can change the status of those responses to investigating. Once you’ve done so, you can use the EMS’s search filters to only view the responses you’re investigating.

You can show the audience the status of the responses you've received using a list embed. For example, you can let your audience know what responses you’re currently working on by showcasing a list embed that only shows responses marked as investigating. This is a great way to be transparent with your audience about your process. When you display the responses you're working on, you show your audience that you really are listening and responding!

Similarly, you can use the list embed to show all your answered responses. In that case, when you change a response's status to answered you will also want to include a link to the final story. Once you have done so, each response in the list embed will be hyperlinked to the answer.

Note: List embeds automatically update, so as soon as you change a response's status to answered, it will appear in your list embed. 

To change a response's status from new (which is every response's default status), navigate to your Responses page and locate the response you wish to edit. Click on the text of the response to view its response details page. In the upper righthand corner, click edit details.

Scroll to the bottom of the edit details window to the status field. Click the dropdown arrow, select your desired status, and click save.

If you want to change your response to answered, you may also wish to include a link to the final story, especially if you are displaying your answered responses in a List embed (or if you're using the Hearken standalone site). Once you have changed the response's status to answered, navigate back to the Response details page. Scroll down to the links field, and click add link.

For the List embed to populate with a hyperlinked response, all you have to do is paste in the URL to the final story under Link. Here's how a response with an associated link looks:

If you are using a standalone site, you will also want to include some teaser text about your final story. That text will appear on the response's publicly facing page on the standalone site, and it will be hyperlinked to the story itself. 

Note: You will also be prompted to include a reporter name. This is optional and solely for internal use. Responses with an associated hyperlink, regardless of the response status, will be added to the count of answers in your EMS dashboard.

Statuses are meant to help you organize your editorial process with Hearken. But the pre-set statuses may not be exactly right for your workflow. If you would like to tweak the pre-set statuses, or add more statuses you can do so. For example, some newsrooms want the option to create a status called “Up For Assignment.” The purpose of that status is to let reporters know that a certain response is up for grabs and they can / should report on it.

If you are interested in customizing your response statuses, navigate to your Statuses page under 'Response Settings' in your EMS Team Settings. You'll see a button that says new status. You can also rename current statuses.