Introduction

Sustaining local news has become increasingly challenging, especially for newsrooms serving low-income and immigrant audiences often neglected by mainstream English-language platforms. For the past five years, El Tímpano has developed a novel way to sustain and even expand its public-service journalism: civic partnerships. 

Through this model, nonprofits, government agencies, and other mission-aligned organizations contract El Tímpano to distribute vital information to “hard to reach” communities in the Bay Area, primarily via Spanish-language SMS (text messaging) and Mayan Mam-language videos. El Tímpano began this work in 2020 with a $6,000 grant to help with census outreach. In 2024, 18 civic partnerships brought in $300,000, making it El Tímpano’s second-largest source of revenue. 

Civic partnerships could be a revenue source for your newsroom as well if…

• Your outlet serves “hard-to-reach” or niche audiences such as immigrants, youth, elders, or rural communities.
• You can demonstrate that your outlet is seen as a trusted messenger for those audiences.
• There are agencies in your region that want to reach those communities for efforts like public health campaigns, soliciting community feedback on a proposed development, or to spread the word about a community resource.

In this playbook you’ll learn how to: 

1. Determine if civic partnerships are right for you.
2. Develop a civic partnerships strategy, including what to offer, how to set prices, and how to organize the work.
3. Find and secure partners.
4. Evaluate the success of a partnership.

What a civic partnerships strategy looks like for your organization will depend on your mission, your audiences, how your organization reaches and engages them, and your unique capabilities. We use El Tímpano’s partnerships as a reference point—which means you’ll hear a lot about their SMS-centered approach—but the advice in this playbook on finding and pitching partners, setting prices, and developing effective workflows are applicable no matter what form your partnerships take.

Our hope is to guide newsroom leaders, particularly those dedicated to reaching underserved communities, in exploring this funding model and defining an approach that makes sense for both the organization’s internal capacity and intended audience.

What is El Tímpano? 

El Tímpano is a Bay Area-based news, information, and civic engagement organization founded by Madeleine Bair in 2017. Designed with and for low-income immigrants, it uses a text message-centered approach to engage and inform its local audience. Today more than 6,000 individuals are subscribed to El Tímpano’s SMS news service. The vast majority of subscribers are Spanish speakers, while hundreds are indigenous Mayan immigrants from Guatemala who speak the Maya Mam language. And they are highly engaged—subscribers regularly text El Tímpano to ask questions, share their stories, or express gratitude for their help. 

The project started with an information needs assessment phase to understand how to best reach and serve Oakland’s Latino immigrants. Through this months-long process, it became clear that text messaging was the most accessible way to disseminate the “news-you-can-use” that community members expressed a need for. With the launch of their SMS service, El Tímpano was able to offer valuable community resources and information, steadily developing trust through an audience-feedback loop and becoming a “trusted messenger” for residents. By engaging their SMS subscribers like this, they’ve been able to elevate members’ concerns to community leaders and decision-makers. 

Over time, El Tímpano expanded its strategies and programming to include in-depth reporting, community events, disinformation-defense workshops, and more. In 2021, the organization—which already had dozens of Mam subscribers—built out a Mam-language engagement team to assess the information needs of the small but significant indigenous Mayan community concentrated in Oakland, so as to know how to best serve that particularly hard-to-reach community. 

As El Tímpano expands to serve new geographies and communities, the needs assessment process remains key to establishing relationships with new audiences, and the two-way engagement allowed by text messaging helps maintain the organization’s status as a “trusted messenger” of relevant and accessible local news.

The newsroom’s civic partnerships strategy emerged in 2019, when they received a grant from Alameda County to help with outreach for the 2020 Census. Though El Tímpano had only 400 people on their text list at the time, these subscribers were exactly the people the county’s census outreach office needed the most help reaching—those less likely to answer the door when a census worker knocked. 

That first grant demonstrated that there was a revenue model out there that aligned with the organization’s mission of serving “hard-to-reach” communities in the Bay Area, and sparked all the work you’ll read about in this playbook.

Credits & acknowledgements

The Civic Partnerships Playbook was researched and written by Ariel Zirulnick, in collaboration with El Tímpano’s Madeleine Bair, Malena Data Ernani, and Deana Balinton. The playbook was copyedited by Diana Montaño. El Tímpano is grateful to Vanan Murugesan of Sahan Journal and Mazin Sidahmed of Documented for providing peer review and feedback. The playbook was made possible thanks to the generous support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

What are civic partnerships? ➥