Find and secure partners

Once you’ve made those decisions and put those processes in place, you’re ready to recruit your first partners. 

Build your pipeline

When building your pipeline, El Tímpano recommends looking for: 

• Agencies with new programs or initiatives that are designed for or require outreach to hard-to-reach communities, such as the 2020 census outreach that led to El Tímpano’s first civic partnership 
• Agencies and organizations running community surveys, especially those that may require outreach to a specific audience, such as when a municipality’s capital-improvement project needs community feedback to be approved.

You can involve your editorial team in this step. Your newsroom inbox is likely full of press releases and newsletters from these types of projects and entities. Ask editorial staff to forward these to your civic partnerships lead. 

You can also reach out to your editorial team to find out what cyclical events are on their radar, e.g. the start of school, flu season, or summer-camp registration. These annual occurrences are often accompanied by free or reduced-cost services that need to be advertised to hard-to-reach communities. 

For example, when El Tímpano’s utility journalism team decided to write a guide to free summer-camp options, their partnerships lead actively reached out to organizations running these camps to see if they needed help getting the word out. 

El Tímpano’s partnerships are one of two types:

• Fee-for-service contracts
• Grants, either from government agencies or nonprofit organizations, usually in response to a request for proposals (commonly referred to as an RFP, more on this below)

El Tímpano cautions against targeting cash-strapped agencies or those with a lot of red tape, and to swiftly move on if a prospect doesn’t seem interested. Pay attention to what types of organizations are responding and double down on those, at least when you’re getting started. Remember that at this stage your capacity is limited, and you want to work with what you have rather than force something that may stretch you thin or wear you out before you’ve begun.  

Turn missed opportunities into future leads 

Sometimes a member of the El Tímpano team will see a great opportunity for a civic partnership with too tight a turnaround to secure. If the message could still be very useful for their audience, El Tímpano will often send it anyway and then use the success of that message to start a conversation with the potential partner about a larger engagement.

Evergreen messages, such as reminders about services to help pay utility bills or discounted programs, are another good way to generate impact that can be leveraged for civic partnerships. 

What to know about grants from government agencies

Government RFPs can be sizeable. El Tímpano’s first was a six-figure grant. But they’re also complicated, often requiring significant staff resources to submit a cumbersome application, track the budget, and report back to the partner on a regular basis. It’s advisable for news organizations to start civic partnerships with fee-for-service contracts. 

Once you feel there’s potential and capacity for sustained success and are ready to apply for government grants, here’s what you need to know:

Receiving a government grant can also be onerous, and fulfilling it can really stretch your team’s capacity. Government grants often come with substantial reporting requirements, including very detailed financial reporting that can take up a lot of your team’s time and the potential for heavy auditing. A one-year project with the Alameda County Public Health Department involved monthly reporting and invoicing, monthly meetings, and strict tracking of all of their expenses. In order to comply with the requirements, El Tímpano allocated a line item of the grant to help hire a new staff member responsible for managing civic partnerships. Some contracts may require that you carry a certain type of insurance or offer accessible facilities. 

Government funding is extremely restricted. The funds received can only be used to fulfill grant deliverables. You can’t make a profit from the grant. (In contrast, any money you earn from a fee-for-service contract can be used to invest in other areas of your work.) That means if a government grant is going to help move you toward sustainability, you need to find a way for the grant deliverables to further your long-term goals or organizational capacity. For example, El Timpano’s government grants often include funding for community outreach. The people the organization adds to its SMS list through that government-supported outreach remain subscribers after the partnership wraps up, as does the knowledge El Tímpano gained about how to reach and serve that community. This is why it’s so important to always keep your organizational mission and priorities in sharp focus.  

There’s little flexibility to change the plan once you receive the grant. For example, if you realize during the project that it would be useful to implement a different strategy, you may not be able to allocate any of the grant funding toward that.

Your organization might need to be in a list of pre-approved, minority-owned, or locally-owned vendors, which can be challenging for small organizations and those that are fiscally sponsored. It can be easier to get your foot in the door if you have already had some impact through smaller fee-for-service contracts with government agencies (likely through their communications or outreach departments) or through contracts with nonprofits, and are able to tap into those established connections and organizational relationships.

Be sure to factor all of this in when you assess bandwidth and expenses. If government RFPs seem too big or complicated, you can identify nonprofits that already receive government grants (this should be publicly available information) and reach out to see if you can provide outreach and awareness support for their work. In this way, you can tap the same funding pool without the administrative burden. These government contractors often provide sub-grants to smaller or more focused service providers to support the various activities involved in a large project. 

Evaluate a potential contract or grant

If you already took time to develop standards for who you would partner with and how, you have most of what you need for this step. If you haven’t, now is the time to go back and do that.

Once you’ve determined that a potential partner meets your standards, it’s time to assess their specific request.

1. Is their message or service relevant to the communities you serve? Is it about an issue that they have voiced as a priority, will it impact them, and/or does it address a commonly asked question?
2. Does the message the partner wants to send or the service they want to promote meet your standards for public service?
3. Can you reach the community that they want to reach?
4. Is the deliverable reasonable considering both your team’s capacity and your audience’s interests and needs?
5. Is the turnaround time reasonable? 

Before fully committing, take time to consider the possible implications of the partnership:

• When you are a trusted messenger, sending a message over your platform can be seen as an endorsement. Are you comfortable being perceived as endorsing whatever you are promoting in the sponsored message? 
• Are you comfortable having a public partnership relationship with this particular government entity? (Some highly policed communities, for example, may feel uncomfortable with a trusted messenger collaborating with law enforcement.) 
• If it involves a series of messages, what will it feel like to your audience to receive those for several weeks or months? Will it be an abrupt shift from your current communications? 

Your potential partner will also be evaluating you during this process. You should be prepared to set expectations with partners. El Tímpano brings strengths to the table that might be unfamiliar to partners and can require some additional explanation. You might find the same. 

1. Reaching the right people, not the most people: The number of people receiving a sponsored message from El Tímpano might seem low to a partner accustomed to working with marketing firms that define success through the breadth of their audience reach. What El Tímpano offers is depth of reach. The organization’s existing assets, like geographic or demographic data collected through audience-building, or language and technical skills honed to meet community information needs, offer partners the kind of meaningful community engagement only possible through time-tested, trust-based, and relevant public service. This quality of reach can often be much more valuable to partners than numbers, especially with information that may then be spread via word of mouth by community members who’ve received the information. Prepare for this step by asking yourself, “What do I have to explain most often about how my organization works or what makes us different from others?” Make sure you have a concise and authoritative explanation of that on hand.
2. Knowing what will resonate: El Tímpano has been sending service-oriented messages to Bay Area Spanish-speaking audiences since its inception. This has brought learned expertise about what works and what doesn’t; expertise that helps shape the messages developed with and for partners. However, new collaborators are not always prepared for the sometimes time-consuming process of developing an effective message that meets all parties’ needs, capacities, and priorities. To avoid miscommunication or bottlenecks, it can be helpful to outline ahead of time what this process of collaborative feedback and revision looks like under a civic partnership model.

Evaluate the success of a civic partnership ➥