Hearken

Hearken operates as a social impact consultancy, providing a blend of technology and advisory services to help organizations foster engagement with their communities. The company was founded in 2015 by Jennifer Brandel, an award-winning journalist, who was later joined by technical co-founder Corey Haines. Brandel’s background in public radio, particularly her work on the audience-first series "Curious City" at WBEZ Chicago, directly informed Hearken's mission to reshape how institutions listen and respond to their stakeholders. This experience led her to question traditional, top-down decision-making processes and champion a model where audience curiosity drives content and strategy.

The firm's business model is built on providing a proprietary software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, the Engagement Management System (EMS), alongside consulting, training, and workshops. This dual offering helps clients embed participatory processes into their workflows. The EMS platform enables organizations to solicit, organize, and manage public input, turning audience questions and ideas into actionable insights and content. Clients, which primarily include newsrooms, public government bodies, and civic engagement organizations, use the platform to generate more relevant and original content, which has been shown to increase audience loyalty and create new revenue opportunities. Revenue is generated through platform subscriptions, which are priced on a sliding scale based on the client's size, and fees for consulting services.

In 2020, Hearken merged with Switchboard, a company founded by Mara Zepeda that developed a community management platform based on an "asks and offers" framework. This merger expanded Hearken's product suite to include the Switchboard platform, catering to higher education institutions and membership organizations by facilitating internal community connections. The company identifies as a "zebra company," prioritizing sustainable prosperity and social purpose over exponential growth, a philosophy championed by co-founders Brandel and Zepeda who also co-founded the Zebras Unite movement. Hearken is not venture-capital funded, instead relying on angel investors, strategic investors, and customer revenue.