The Audience Engagement badge encourages staffs to utilize interactive tools and work to drive traffic to the site. There are two areas our reviewers look at for sites to earn this badge in 2026-2027:
- Interactivity - Provide links to three different fully-developed stories, each featuring a different interactive element (e.g. polls, tests, quizzes, ImageLinks, timelines, forms, etc.).
- Note: While the Site Booster offers many interactive elements that can be built directly on the site, it is not required to earn this badge. It is possible to use sites like ThingLink, Genially, Knightlab Timeline, and many other tools to create interactive elements, which can be placed into your story page by obtaining the embed code and using the Generic Embed SNO Story Element. We are just looking for some sort of element placed into the story that is clickable, making the piece more interactive for the reader. We will also consider a story with an active comment section (5+ comments from at least 3 different commenters) as interactive.
- Since photo galleries and video/audio embeds are required for the Multimedia badge, they do not qualify as interactive for the purpose of this badge. An audio playlist from a service like Spotify that includes multiple songs and allows the reader to click and scroll would qualify.
- Analytics - Provide a date range within the current school year where your site received at least 1,000 total visitors and 5,000 story views, as shown in SNO Analytics.