On August 29, 2019, Youth Ki Awaaz won the afaqs! DigiPub Awards 2019 in two categories – Innovation in Publishing, and Best Audience Engagement. The awards were created by afaqs! to reward inspiring initiatives by websites in India across a range of effort: from great content to brand partnership to audience engagement and design.
In the category of Best Innovation in Publishing, Youth Ki Awaaz won the gold for Sansad Unplugged – a first-of-its-kind publishing platform for Members of Parliament to directly engage with young Indians (and vice versa) on crucial national issues. Launched in August 2018, this initiative, in collaboration with the amazing team at Young Leaders for Active Citizenship (YLAC) India, has seen participation from several members of Parliament and YKA users. Over a hundred YKA users have actively participated in this campaign till date and made it the only space in digital media for direct communication between decision-makers and active citizens.
For Best Audience Engagement on Site – the Youth Ki Awaaz ‘From Information to Action’ model of engagement won the silver. As an open media platform focussed on social justice issues with over 78,000 users, our unique user cultivation model ensures a personalised approach to all our users with incentives for our users that go beyond monetary gains. From our Top Users’ program to the recently launched Community Editors’ program, our users form the centre of our mission and have helped us create a high-quality, user-driven media platform that is a true representation of young India’s voice on crucial issues.
In the past year, the Youth Ki Awaaz team has worked tirelessly to enable thousands of young people to speak up and use the YKA platform to create an impact. We are extremely proud of, and humbled, by how you have responded. As a platform, we have emerged stronger than before with a cohort of diverse users from across the country not only speaking up themselves, but also enabling others around them to find their voice.
Both these awards have only been possible because of you, our community, and we are grateful for the phenomenal effort that you put into this platform every day. Here’s to the coming year and more impact!