El Tímpano—a civic media organization designed with and for the Bay Area’s Latino and Mayan immigrants—submits for consideration our strategy of Civic Partnerships, which aligns the organization’s mission of addressing gaps in equitable civic engagement and information access with the need for revenue diversification and sustainability.
In the past four years, El Tímpano has grown from an organization of one full-time employee to a staff of 15. This growth is the result of a focus on sustainability and the development of a novel revenue strategy of Civic Partnerships, in which we partner with government and nonprofit agencies who seek to reach the immigrant communities El Tímpano serves with relevant information, resources, or community engagement opportunities.
While the traditional advertisement model of local news puts a value on reaching mass audiences, and the sponsorship model puts a value on reaching wealthy or “influential” audiences, the Civic Partnerships strategy puts a premium on El Tímpano’s strength in overcoming barriers of language, technology, and trust to reach Latino and Mayan immigrants—communities often described as “hard to reach.” Through this strategy we have connected Latino and Mayan immigrants to dozens of local resources, opportunities, and service providers, ranging from community health clinics to a hate crime hotline, immigration forums, and opportunities to share their opinions with policymakers. Our policies and standards ensure that such partnerships are clearly understood as such by our audience and in no way influence our independent journalism.
In practice, Civic Partnerships generally involve a sponsored text message to El Tímpano’s Spanish-speaking SMS subscribers or a sponsored Mam-language video shared with our indigenous Maya Mam audience. Both of these distribution strategies emerged from El Tímpano’s in-depth listening and co-design processes to understand how to best reach Latino and Mayan immigrants with the news and information they want and need. As El Tímpano’s audience has grown to include immigrants from 60+ municipalities across the Bay Area, we often geo-target this messaging by subscriber zip code. This ensures the sponsored content only reaches those for whom it is relevant, and opens up opportunities for partnerships with agencies of various sizes and geographic service areas, from city and county departments to school districts, regional transit agencies, and local nonprofits.
El Tímpano’s Civic Partnerships strategy has not only fueled the organization’s growth. It is also mission-aligned, advancing El Tímpano’s mission of fostering a more connected, informed, equitable, and engaged community. A common desire we heard from immigrants who participated in El Tímpano’s participatory design process seven years ago was that they wanted news that informed them of how they could access local resources. One indication of the impact of the Civic Partnerships strategy in addressing this need is the fact that our sponsored messages often have just as much engagement, if not more, than our non-sponsored content. A recent sponsored message from the City of Oakland’s waste service agency about how to request a free bulk waste pickup, for example, received more than two dozen versions of “muchas gracias”—or “many thanks”—from subscribers.
