Develop your civic partnerships strategy

If you’ve decided that your newsroom is ready to explore civic partnerships, then next you have to:

1. Decide what to offer
2. Articulate your value 
3. Set partner parameters
4. Set prices
5. Create a central calendar 
6. Develop your workflow 

Decide what to offer

Before you start pitching partnerships you should identify what strategies you’re going to lead with and what services you’ll offer. They should be things that your organization already does well.

Since it was already its primary service to the community, El Tímpano started by offering Spanish-language SMS outreach. While text messaging remains the primary means of communication, the outlet has over time incorporated the production and distribution of short videos in the Mam language. This latter service emerged to serve the specific needs of indigenous Mayan residents for whom language and literacy can be a significant barrier to accessing information.  

Consider also defining parameters such as message or video length based on your capacities, and how you’ll present the partnership to your audience. 

These initial steps can help you begin to develop a menu of options for partners that you can adjust or expand over time. Jump back to “Frequently asked questions” for other ideas.

Articulate your value 

To secure these types of partnerships, you’ll need to be able to offer a clear vision of what you bring that no one else can. 

El Tímpano recommends the following: 

• Gather data on the communities you serve, both through publicly available sources such as census data or reports from government agencies and nonprofits, and through your own surveys or focus groups. 
• Explain your organization’s expertise in reaching this audience by  detailing the information barriers they face (due to technology, language, etc.), and how  your organization is able to overcome them.
• Share metrics or testimonials that demonstrate the trust your audience has in your organization and the impact of your approach, such as engagement rates and quotes from community members.

You should use this to put together a one-pager, webpage, or slide deck that you can share with potential partners. You can see El Tímpano’s version of this on their website, and below is an example of how they describe their value in a statement of work template for partners.

Set partner parameters

Before you start prospecting, decide what types of organizations you want to work with and what types of organizations are a definite “no.” 

Go back to your mission, vision, and scope. 

• Who do you serve?
• What is your mission? 
• What are your audiences’ information needs? What do they expect from you?
• How have you instilled trust? What would undermine that trust?

These questions can guide you in shaping the parameters through which to evaluate individual partnership opportunities. For El Tímpano, the sponsored campaign must be in the public interest and relevant to the communities they serve. They make this clear on their partnerships guide page:

After you determine your partner parameters, you have to consider your sponsored content standards. Consider the following:

• What kind of information is a good fit–and what isn’t 
• What you reserve the right to do (for example, El Tímpano reserves the right to share any SMS responses publicly. They are not the property of the partner.)
• Relevance 
• How you will disclose the partner

El Tímpano also offers partners suggestions on how to strengthen sponsored messages and includes light coaching and refinement in its contracts. Like your platform and formats, this can evolve over time, but it’s important to have some parameters when you start this work. Make sure that what you outline is well within your current organizational capacity, both skills- and staffwise. It’s also important to update your statements on editorial independence so that they reflect how you navigate these partnerships. 

Set prices

This is one of the hardest steps, as anyone who has had to set ad or sponsorship prices knows. El Tímpano underpriced its work for a long time and has only recently gotten close to accurately reflecting its value in its prices. 

When setting your rates, you can start by assessing how much it will cost you to plan and conduct the proposed services and how much revenue you need to break even or make a profit. Because your proposed services include activities your organization already conducts, you should have a good understanding of the financial and human resources these require. Additional costs include partnership prospecting and management (more on what that entails below). 

Especially when getting started, you’ll want to continuously evaluate the costs in staff time and use that to adjust your pricing model. Think of your first year as a pilot. Start small, learn as you go, and don’t try to line up too many clients right away.

Below are the main costs to consider:

Tools

• If launching a civic partnerships model will require you to acquire new communication or project management tools, factor in that cost. 
• If you’re using an existing tool, as El Tímpano was with SMS messaging, then you’ll just need to consider whether using the tool more robustly—say activating new features or adding more contacts to the database—will incur any additional costs. 

Start-up costs

• One-time expenses for starting this strategy, such as developing materials to promote civic partnerships.

Ongoing staff time for partner and project management

This is not a revenue strategy that operates on autopilot. You will need to dedicate a significant portion of a staff member’s time to this work. When you’re getting started, consider factoring in 20% of your business development team’s time and salary to getting this program off the ground. 

As the program matures, consider breaking civic partnerships down by task and estimating how much time it takes to complete each task. This not only helps you reflect the effort in your prices, but also helps you accurately gauge your organization’s capacity. You can see an example of El Tímpano’s task breakdown here.

Your understanding of staff capacity will likely evolve as the project progresses and you will almost certainly underestimate the time investment needed. Don’t be afraid to raise your prices! As it generates more income, you can invest in more staff capacity to expand the program and revenue. Your prices should adjust accordingly. 

Ongoing staff time to develop and sustain engagement with “hard to reach” audiences

Don’t forget to factor in all the work you’ve already done to effectively serve “hard to reach” communities. 

For El Tímpano, each subscriber involves hours of staff time to obtain and retain. If the community you’re communicating with on behalf of partners is considered “hard to reach,” the access that you’re providing to this audience is of great value—and you don’t want to underestimate that when calculating your costs. 

You could factor this into your programmatic costs estimate by factoring in a percentage of the time spent by salaried staff to build these relationships. Another option is to factor it in at the contract stage, essentially as an overhead fee. For example, if you set your “overhead” at 10% and you’ve set a fee-for-service contract price at $5,000, then you would add another $500 to the price. 

Then, as each contract comes up, you can factor in the following quantifiers to a final price: 

• How many people will you reach for them?
• How many messages are you being asked to send?
• How much time will it take to craft the messaging? 
• How much time will it take to deliver the campaign and engage subscribers?

Best practices for local newsletter advertising and native advertising on other platforms can provide guidance for developing your pricing model. Here are some vetted resources that can help with that:

• Inbox Collective: Understanding 5 different ad pricing models
• Inbox Collective: How to monetize your newsletter with ads
• Broadstreet Ads: How Magazine and Hyperlocal News Publishers Will Win
• Broadstreet Ads: How to Package and Price Digital Ads and Sponsored Content 
• Google News Initiative: Advertising Revenue Playbook (Chapter 3)

El Tímpano sets rates based on a price per message, multiplied by the number of people in their database who will receive the message. The benefit of that approach is that the revenue from each contract goes up as the list grows without El Tímpano needing to revise its rates. 

Create a central calendar

Balancing partnership campaigns with each other and with in-house editorial priorities requires the ability to see all ongoing publishing commitments in one place.

Without that, you risk bombarding your audience with too many messages, potentially prompting people to ignore important information or unsubscribe altogether from your service. 

As you build the calendar, consider how audience segmentation affects the number of messages you can send in a period of time. For instance, if you have three SMS campaigns targeted at three different audiences—say, parents with young children, seniors, and residents of a specific neighborhood—then there’s less chance of overlap. But if they all go to your general audience, you may have to space them out so as not to overwhelm subscribers. 

You also might want to keep a balance between editorial and sponsored content. El Tímpano aims for no more than 50% sponsored messages. When taking on larger contracts, one thing to consider is how it will feel to your audience to keep getting messages on the same topic for weeks or months. The last thing you want is information fatigue. 

You shouldn’t need to acquire any new tools for this. Whatever your newsroom is already using to manage your editorial calendar will be just fine. This asset-based approach allows you to build new collaborations from existing capacities and organizational workflows without detracting from your organization’s core mission. 

Develop your workflow

Partnerships are born from a variety of situations and contexts, and it’s good to be ready to assess their viability as opportunities arise. Sometimes you will be approached; other times you’ll be the one reaching out to promising partners. Either way, it’s important to steer the partnership process in an efficient and mutually beneficial way from the start. Below is the workflow El Tímpano uses when launching a new partnership. You can use it as a starting point for designing a process that makes sense for your organization’s established roles, technical capacities, and editorial priorities. 

When following this process, it takes El Tímpano about four weeks to move from the introductory stage to the point of hitting “send” on the first sponsored SMS message. El Tímpano currently has a dedicated civic partnerships manager to oversee this process, though when starting out it was the responsibility of a staff member who split her time between this and other responsibilities.

1. Send a proposal

After an initial conversation or email correspondence, El Tímpano sends an initial proposal that outlines how their existing services could fulfill their partner’s outreach needs and communication priorities. It is good to end this email with the actionable step of scheduling a kick-off call. It’s OK to be proactive here if you’re feeling optimistic about the partnership prospect. If the possibility came up in an informal conversation, use this as an opportunity to follow up and express your continued interest in collaborating. 

2. Kick-off call

Use this call to gather key information such as:

• Who the organization wants to reach
• What information they want to convey or what action they hope to prompt
• Their deadline

3. Create a statement of work

Based on the kick-off discussion, your statement of work should cover items such as: 

• The partner’s goals 
• A summary of what you’ll provide
• Key dates
• Opportunities for feedback and adjustments 
• Cost
• Terms and conditions, including what data they will get access to and what they won’t

Find El Tímpano’s statement of work template here.

4. Plan and launch agreed-upon activities 

During this stage, be sure to honor the commitments you made in the statement of work about deadlines and opportunities for partner feedback and approval. 

5. Report back and invoice

Report back to the partner on the impact of the engagement. We’ll have more details on this step later in the playbook. 

Find and secure partners ➥