Bringing your community into your news processes can be rewarding -- and very labor intensive. Hearken, a platform for integrating audience engagement into news websites, can simplify this, even for small community sites.

Hearken emerged from Curious City. This project, which began in 2012 at WBEZ in Chicago, forged a more collaborative relationship between journalists and audiences. Listeners were invited to submit their questions about Chicago and vote for which ones they'd like answered. Winning contributors got the chance to work with reporters to develop those stories.

Looking for a way to scale up this approach to offer it to more news outlets of all sizes, Curious City founder Jennifer Brandel launched Hearken, a platform that expands upon engagement tools originally developed for Curious City.

Currently, Hearken includes a curiosity module, where people can suggest questions for journalists to investigate; and a voting module, where website visitors can view suggested questions and vote for the ones they would like to investigate. Hearken is also preparing an interactive reporter's notebook module (to be released later this year), which will enable journalists to share what they learn over time on the topics that they cover. These modules can be embedded as widgets on an existing website, or Hearken can be used to create a separate engagement-focused website.

So far most of Hearken's 44 partners have been state or regional public broadcasting outlets, but Brandel explains that Hearken can also work well for smaller community-level news or engagement outlets.

"For a really small newsroom, it's about quality, not quantity," said Brandel. "Just gathering 12 questions can easily yield a really great, original community story. It's about giving your audience a meaningful influence from the point of story creation."

What kinds of questions? One way to start, which can hold substantial appeal for a community website, is to solicit people's questions about a community and its history -- such as "What have you always wondered about this place?"

"That can lead to great place explainer stories that give context and meaning," said Brandel. "Plus it's evergreen content that tends to perform well over time."

Or if there's a pressing local issue, Hearken can be used to get community input on how to approach followup reporting. For instance, Michigan Radio used Hearken to collect community questions about how to follow up on the Flint, Mich. water crises. Questions suggested by community members included:

• How many more communities have underlying water infrastructure problems that require water to be treated with anti-corrosive agents, and what are the health impacts of that?
• Is the water infrastructure at prisons, schools, and other local institutions also being investigated?

Gathering community questions also can involve face-to-face interactions with community members. For instance, as reporters talk to community members in the course of their work or at events, they can ask people what questions they have about their community, and then later input those questions into Hearken so people can consider and vote on them.

This sort of question-collecting and community voting can be supported to some extent through Facebook and other social media, but that process is more manual.

"At the end of the day, we want newsrooms to own their relationship with their community," said Brandel. "If you rely on Facebook or other social media, your ability to make these kinds of connections is mitigated by the permissions set by the platform. If you want to get in touch with someone who leaves a great comment on your Facebook page, their privacy settings may make that hard."

Hearken is not free; the lowest subscription cost available is $5000 per year. However, they currently have a limited number of subsidies available for small news outlets, and they offer a two month free trial.

To make the most of the free trial, Brandel suggests using the curiosity module to collect a dozen or so community questions, and commit to reporting a few. Track the metrics -- Brandel notes that at KQED in San Francisco, Hearken stories performed 4-20 times better than conventionally generated news coverage, based on page views, time on site, social sharing and other key metrics. Also, Hearken supports subscriptions to e-mail newsletters, which supports ongoing engagement and can be especially important to membership-based organizations. .

Using Hearken or other tools for this style of community engagement can be a game changer. "It's one thing to tell your community you're interested in what they say; and another to give them a direct voice in your story creation process, to validate their ideas," said Brandel.