The Civic Partnerships Playbook
A guide for generating revenue and impact through partnerships
Are civic partnerships right for you?
Based on its experience, El Tímpano believes there are a few things that any organization needs to have in place to be able to develop a successful civic partnerships strategy:
- A strong relationship with a target audience that is hard to reach through traditional advertising methods or outreach campaigns.
- Data about the audience you serve that allows you to demonstrate to potential partners who you can reach.
- Strategies, tools, and systems that allow you to communicate directly to your target audience and keep track of those interactions.
Do you have an effective strategy to engage communities considered “hard to reach”?
Government agencies and nonprofits want to partner with El Tímpano because of the organization’s unique capacity to reach, engage, and serve Spanish- and Mam-speaking immigrants—the result of years of trust- and relationship-building. This meaningful engagement simply cannot be duplicated by having outsiders “parachute” into communities that might be distrustful of or historically neglected by the very agencies seeking to reach them. Demonstrating your organization’s strength in this area could include things like:
- Being able to reach an audience that others struggle to reach, typically because of barriers related to language, geography, trust, or digital access
- High engagement in the form of responses, low unsubscribe rates, and regular feedback
A newsroom could pursue a civic partnership strategy with an audience that isn’t considered hard to reach, but given that those audiences can be reached by more traditional outreach methods, you’re unlikely to secure grants and fee-for-service contracts with nonprofits and government agencies for these efforts.
TIP
Can’t answer “yes” to this question? Use this worksheet to define your target audience and identify what you need to know about them to make a civic partnership strategy work.
Develop strategies to serve a “hard to reach” audience by conducting an information needs assessment in your community. Listening Post Collective’s Civic Media Playbook can guide you through the process.
Your assessment should help you understand what engagement strategies would be most effective. Journalism support organizations like Gather, Hearken, and Listening Post Collective offer case studies and training on how to engage communities effectively.
Do you have data about the communities that you serve?
At the very least you need to be able to tell partners how big the community you serve is and how many people within that community you’re reaching. For example, El Tímpano notes on its website that they reach 15% of Spanish-speaking households in Oakland.
You can assess the size of the community from the latest census data.
How much of the community you reach is harder to assess unless you’ve built your audience on a platform that gives you access to individual data, such as SMS. When a potential partner approaches El Tímpano, they’re able to tell the partner exactly how many people they can reach in a particular zip code and they often know additional information such as whether someone is a parent and what languages they speak.
Well-defined audience demographics are valuable because they allow for directed, tailored messaging, avoiding blanket information blasts that may be irrelevant to many—something that can lead to disengagement and subscription cancellations.
If you rely solely on social media or platforms like WhatsApp, you may not be able to conduct a highly detailed audience-reach analysis, but if you’ve made engagement central to your work, there are many ways to gauge the quality of your connection to your audience. Your metrics can be as unique as your model, as long as they capture your organization’s value as an outreach partner.
In 2025 El Tímpano conducted a survey of their SMS subscribers to develop a more comprehensive understanding of its audience. The resulting report reveals the sort of rich data that can be presented to potential partners to demonstrate that El Tímpano is the right channel for reaching target communities.
A note about protecting community data:
Many of El Tímpano’s SMS subscribers are members of marginalized or disenfranchised communities, such as undocumented immigrants, so they are thoughtful about the data they do and don’t collect, and how to safeguard it. For instance, while it is valuable to collect subscribers’ zip codes, it is not important to have their full names or addresses. As El Tímpano tells subscribers when they first sign up, the organization never shares personal information with partners without their subscribers’ consent. If you are going to pursue this type of work, consider engaging a digital security expert to ensure you are taking proper measures to protect your audience members’ personal information.
Do you have the right strategies, tools and systems?
Text messaging is El Tímpano’s primary channel of Spanish-language distribution and communication, but you don’t need to use text messaging to develop civic partnerships. You could also make this work with email, in-person events, or even WhatsApp. The key is being able to:
- Demonstrate to partners that you can reach a particular community.
- Demonstrate that you are a trusted messenger for that community.
- Capture some basic data to know who you are reaching.
If you reach people primarily through events, this could be something as simple as having participants sign in, and transferring those community contacts onto a central spreadsheet that you keep updated with key information.
El Tímpano uses third-party tools to facilitate SMS delivery, track SMS outreach and engagement, and manage client relationships.
The Playbook
