Better your Engagement Practice

This session will introduce you to our definition on best engagement practices. The workshop will contain valuable learnings, skills and examples from our previous work with partners, who exceeds at engaging with their audience and members.

In this workshop, we take a deeper look into our perception of engagement, which defines engagement as a mutually beneficial relationship that develops over time. With this as a starting point, we make a thorough best practice recommendation for your engagement strategy by diving into the five parameters that turn your engagement to the max.
The workshop starts by analyzing your current engagement practice by looking into the mindset of your newsroom, metrics, KPIs, methodology, and editorial strategy. The workshop is organized as a presentation interspersed with exercises. Participants are encouraged to share their own experiences, combined with best practice examples from all over the world. The workshop will result in a best-practice roadmap with clear metrics and workflows within your team.


Our method is about developing strategies to engage users in the editorial process to provide value for journalism, users and to benefit the business. Our main message is that the true value of deep user engagement is not found in algorithms, but in how to plan, articulate and present invitations to users to engage and build beneficial relationships.

Hearken is a journalistic tech and consulting house that since 2015 has helped hundreds of newsrooms in the United States, Europe, and Australia – including The New York Times, BBC, ABC, and The Boston Globe – develop user engagement strategies. Our method is called Public-Powered Journalism and is about developing strategies to engage users into the editorial process to provide value for journalism, users, and benefits the business. Our main message is that the true value of deep user engagement is not found in algorithms, but in how to plan, articulate and realize its invitation to users and build relationships.

Christian Hougaard is Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) at Hearken Northern Europe. He is former CMO at Benjamin Media (Denmark) and has 9 years of experience as a consultant in the media industry. Christian’s core competencies are media strategy, revenue streams and marketing/sales.