By María Méndez, Service and Engagement Reporter

At a time when there’s so much false information circulating about our election system, news and civic organizations can help by providing reliable information to the public.

That’s why in 2024 the Tribune created an initiative to share accurate, digestible information with Texans who are eligible to vote but may face barriers to participation. Our goal was to provide voting information useful to all Texans and help break down barriers. In this article, I’ll share what we did and what we learned from the process for the benefit of other news organizations or community groups considering civic information initiatives like this.


What we did

Every major state and federal election, we at The Texas Tribune produce comprehensive voter guides like this one with a lookup tool to preview what will appear on the ballot.

In 2024, my colleagues and I produced additional guides to assist voters facing specific challenges:

We took those guides, along with our lookup tool to preview the state and federal elections on the ballot, and collected them in a voting resources landing page for people to easily find and share our many voting resources.

But in addition, because we wanted to get our voting resources to Texans with limited experience engaging in politics or voting, we decided to make brief, handheld printed materials that would be easier to distribute and share than the full-size guides. So we created postcard-sized flyers with key voting deadlines and stickers with a QR code that went to our landing page, hoping people could use them to easily view and share our digital resources. 

We distributed these resources through our reporters and through people and institutions that frequently engage with communities, including public libraries, food banks and community organizers.

Through this process, we distributed 1,500 flyers and 2,000 stickers across about 15 Texas cities and towns and learned important lessons about how to effectively present voting information.

Three polaroid-style photos: 1) A table with books titled Not Done Yet, postcards, and pens. 2) A window ledge with a white orchid and stacked orange boxes. 3) A checkout counter with pastries, brochures, and a card reader.

What we learned

Leverage community partnerships mindfully. We found many community institutions, groups, and organizers were eager to share the resources we offered them whenever we reached out with clear information about our efforts and how they could help. Pitching these partnerships through trusted organizations, such as PEN America or Feeding Texas, also helped us connect with more local food banks and community organizers. 

A few libraries in major metropolitan areas told us they already had similar resources from civic engagement groups, but we found that some libraries in mid-size or smaller cities were especially appreciative and asked for more flyers or stickers to share. 

One community organizer reached out back requesting more printed materials after we had finished distributing them and had run out of copies. In that situation, we were able to offer graphics and a link to our landing page to share digitally. So, having various formats to share information further expands your reach. 

Working with community-focused organizations such as food banks allowed us to reach more communities, but we didn’t realize in advance some of the constraints of our partners. For example, in feedback we requested from distribution partners, one food bank told us it needed to get the printed resources earlier than mid-September or October to ensure it could share the resources with local partners – including some that have limited distributions and schedules. Those limitations were a factor we hadn’t anticipated.

Feedback has also helped us identify additional opportunities for partnerships beyond election season, such as conducting a joint event with a library foundation about the impact of Texas’ 2025 legislative session for Texas libraries and readers.

Internal planning and communication are key to collaboration. A project like this will be a team effort. So, we recommend initiating conversations with colleagues 3-4 months ahead of when you want to launch your project to schedule deadlines and determine when deliverables will be ready. Alerting our coworkers early helped them make time to help us design the printed materials and build the landing page, even as they juggled multiple projects. We gave them an overview of our project early on – even when we weren’t sure exactly what materials we would print and how many. In project debriefs, staff told us getting more details in advance about the type and number of materials we might produce would have helped them plan better. Next time, we’ll be clearer about scope and numbers from the beginning.

Begin the outreach and distribution early. We spent several months planning our efforts but held off on printing and offering our resources until mid-September to secure funding for the initiative. However, the printing costs were much lower than we expected – $1,040 total for the 1,500 flyers and 2,000 stickers – so that delay wasn’t necessary. We found that working with nearby printing shops can make the delivery more convenient since once we ordered them, the shops could quickly drop off the prints to our office. In hindsight, we could have budgeted for that expense and begun the printing and distribution process much earlier. We began publishing our digital voter guides in August, thinking about voters who may need extra time to vote by mail. Ideally, we could have started distributing the materials to our community partners by early August instead of September or October. 

Set clear reader expectations. As a nonpartisan organization, we don’t endorse candidates and instead focus our guides on helping people navigate voting requirements and the voting process. A few of the people who visited our voting resources expressed confusion or frustration over not finding more information about candidates. So, it’s a good idea to be clear about what kinds of voting information are, and are not, in scope for your organization to share – and why. On the plus side, emphasizing the nonpartisanship and nonprofit status of your organization (if applicable) could help build trust.

Don’t rely on QR codes to get important information to people. Through this outreach and past efforts, we found that QR codes did not get used widely. We received only 108 views from the 2,000 stickers we distributed and 36 views from the 1,500 printed guides. Although QR codes have become more common, we had noticed through past efforts that people seemed to not use them frequently, perhaps due to a lack of familiarity with how they work. And this experiment with printed voter guides and stickers confirmed that. So it’s best to treat printed materials as their own product to present key information, such as voting deadlines, without the barrier of scanning a code and going online.

Make sure your brand is recognizable to create brand awareness and trust. In our sticker and flyer designs, we focused on including essential information and didn’t make our branding significant. However, increasing the visibility of our branding a bit more could have helped us in creating more brand awareness, especially with audiences new to our work. The more you can connect your brand to a civic information campaign like this, the easier it will be in the future to initiate partnerships and distribute materials.

Final reflections

Ultimately, we found that experimenting with printed resources was an effective way to expand our voter engagement and education efforts. Even though not everything went as planned, we came away with learnings that can inform our future work and that other news organizations and community groups can learn from. 

What’s most important is to partner with the people and groups who already know and engage with the people you’re trying to reach, communicate clearly with partners and readers, begin the process early, and create standalone resources that share information directly and don’t require that extra step of going online. News organizations and other civic-minded groups do have a role to play in combating information gaps and inviting eligible citizens to participate in elections.

A flyer titled Prepare to Vote with information about voter registration for the 2024 general election in Texas. It includes important dates, a QR code for voting resources, and contact details for voter assistance.