By Massarah Mikati

Every election season, Santa Cruz Local has one big product that serves as the core of their election coverage: the People’s Agenda. Like many other election guides, the People’s Agenda covers local races, ballot measures and candidate positions. But unlike other election guides, Santa Cruz Local’s election guide is almost entirely based on community resident input — the issues and concerns identified as top priorities by community members, which the newsroom learned through numerous community engagement initiatives.

Approach

To gather community input for their election guide, Santa Cruz Local pursued three types of engagement strategies with varying levels of in-depth involvement:

1. Surveys
2. In-person interviews
3. Community listening sessions

Surveys and In-Person Interviews

The online surveys reached about 600 residents over two distribution rounds in 2023 and one in 2024. The newsroom then moved on to brief, in-person interviews in the summer and fall of 2023, conducting roughly 100 through spot canvassing at farmers markets, festivals, coffee shops and other community events.

Through both engagement initiatives, Santa Cruz Local asked questions such as: 

• What are your top issues right now?
• What’s hard about where you live? What do you wish elected officials would do about it? 
• What questions do you have for candidates that are competing for your vote? 

They then organized and coded the feedback they received in Airtable, using data visualization to identify trends across communities. 

Combining the two engagement strategies allowed the newsroom to strike a balance between wider reach with the surveys, and deeper conversations and relationship-building through the in-person interviews. They ended up learning about a broad range of voter concerns, including issues related to infrastructure, wildfire recovery, housing and government responsiveness. 

Community Listening Sessions

The listening sessions were hosted across Santa Cruz County, focusing on areas with contested elections. Formatted as small group discussions, the sessions were attended by anywhere from two to 20 participants, who were recruited through readership and community partners. In total, the sessions attracted 60 participants. With their limited budget, Santa Cruz Local chose to host the listening sessions, which lasted an hour and half, at public free libraries. They also received in-kind food donations to serve at the sessions.

Santa Cruz Local set an agenda for the sessions and made sure to facilitate the discussions to focus on solution-building, allowing for actionable ideas instead of just problem identification. The solution-building, community engagement manager Jay Leedy said, was often attendees’ favorite part of the listening sessions. Reporters in the newsroom were also required to attend at least one listening session so they could build relationships with and learn more about community members. This ensured that engagement would be efficiently integrated across the entire newsroom’s workflow, instead of siloing it to one person or team.

Youth Engagement

In addition to the community listening sessions, Santa Cruz Local staff held a workshop at Cabrillo Community College’s journalism department to engage Gen Z voters. Understanding the information the students wanted helped shape the newsroom’s Instagram Election Guide for Students.

They also conducted 40 interviews with community college students over the course of two months, asking questions to learn about their information consumption habits and desires, whether they wanted local news, what their top issues were and whether they wanted to be civically engaged in their communities. These interviews also shaped their Instagram Election Guide for Students, which they shaped to focus on elections in areas students were most likely to live.

Several weeks before the election, Santa Cruz Local then partnered with CalMatters to co-host an on-campus event for students to better understand statewide ballot initiatives and local elections. 

Voter Guide Distribution

Santa Cruz Local wanted to make sure they weren’t leaving out Spanish speakers who make up a significant portion of their community. After completing their election guide, they translated it to Spanish and tailored it to focus on elections in areas with the highest Spanish-speaking populations. They printed out and distributed about 3,000 copies of the guide in-person to local businesses and community groups. Their Spanish-language reporter also attended community festivals, such as a Dia de Los Muertos event, to speak with hundreds of residents about how to participate in the local election. 

Results

• Widespread voter engagement: Three out of five voters in Santa Cruz County read Santa Cruz Local’s election guide, underscoring its impact. And when the newsroom sent out a feedback survey for their election guide, respondents overwhelmingly said the guide helped them better understand the issues at hand and how to vote.
• Youth civic engagement: The newsroom’s Instagram Election Guide for Students reached 7,000 users a day, and community college staff reported that the election information event co-hosted by Santa Cruz Local and CalMatters was the “highest attendance event on campus in recent memory.” Students also overwhelmingly provided feedback saying the event helped them understand their ballot, feel more excited to vote and feel inspired to be more involved in local politics and civic life.
• Positive resident feedback: Post-event surveys showed that residents’ favorite aspect of the listening sessions was the solutions-based discussion with other community members.
• Greater community trust: The sessions strengthened relationships between Santa Cruz Local and the community, leading to increased engagement and ongoing conversations beyond the election cycle.

• Inspired civic engagement: The listening sessions spurred community action, with some attendees taking direct steps to address local issues post-discussion such as forming citizen groups to advocate for improved infrastructure and communication with government officials.

• Increased accountability: The newsroom is planning a follow-up event in 2025, where newly elected officials will participate in a “reverse town hall” to report back on their progress addressing residents’ concerns.
• Expanded story development: Reporters who attended the listening sessions had a much better understanding of their communities, more relationships and sources, and identified new angles and sources for election-related stories, deepening the quality of local political coverage.

Lessons learned

• Balance your workload: Organizing listening sessions was resource-intensive, requiring two months of planning and significant staff time — Leedy said it took up half or more of their workload, plus the newsroom hired a contractor for five to 10 hours a week. In the future, Leedy said, they may pursue deeper partnerships with community organizations to share the workload.
• Reach diverse audiences: While surveys reached a broad audience, listening sessions tended to attract more affluent and retired residents that weren’t representative of the county as a whole. Moving forward, Leedy wants to start promoting the listening sessions well in advance of the events, and formalize partnerships with community organizations to extend their reach beyond the newsroom’s readership. 
• Integrate engagement into newsroom workflow: Community engagement was embedded in the story assignment process, ensuring reporters considered resident input when developing their coverage. Requiring reporters to attend at least one listening session also ensured engagement was widely implemented across the newsroom.
• Explore new distribution methods: With their Spanish-language print version of the election guide and Instagram-based election guide for college students, Santa Cruz Local demonstrated the rewarding impact of meeting community members where they are. 
• Experiment with different forms of community engagement: “I think we will continue to do multiple forms of engagement, principally because it allows us to reach the greatest number of people and the greatest diversity of people in our county,” Leedy said.