A conversation with Gabrielle Contesti

NowKalamazoo is a nonprofit community news service that serves Kalamazoo County in Michigan. Since its founding in 2019, the news organization has experimented with different innovative strategies to involve the community in their reporting, as well as interactive ways to learn about civics and media literacy. 

This has included:

• Field trips to different public meetings with explanations of what the meetings would include, tips on how to voice concerns during the meetings and a question/answer session afterwards. 
• Annual Sunshine Week, where they hosted FOIA workshops.
• A partnership with a neighborhood coffee shop to produce branded coffee sleeves with a QR code to local election information.
• A local bookstore shelf with a NowKalamazoo curated booklist dedicated to highlighting local Michigan authors, as well as informational books about freedom of speech, freedom of press, misinformation and disinformation. An event featuring the shelf was followed by a coffee and cocktail hour that allowed donors and community members to interact with the organization more. 
• Film screenings that revolve around journalism and freedom of the press and include discussions with freelancers, journalists and publishers at the end to answer questions.
• A ‘Fact or Fable’ brochure designed to educate parents of young children on media literacy.

Gabrielle Contesti works with local partnerships and donor relations, selling sponsorships for NowKalamazoo’s newsletter and stewarding donors of The Local Journalism Foundation. Innovation in Focus student staffer Ishrat Madiha spoke with Contesti about ways NowKalamazoo works to both involve and serve the Kalamazoo community. 

Madiha: Why is community engagement a large part of NowKalmazoo’s mission? 

Contesti: NowKalamazoo not only serves our community, but we like to consider ourselves a news concierge service. We like to be in constant conversation with our community and our neighbors, so if there is any discussion or questions about a story in NowKalamazoo, we welcome our audience to email us directly, ask more questions. 

We are proud to not only serve the community, but to be owned by the community. We’re not beholden to any shareholders. We’re not beholden to a hedge fund, anything like that, because of the nonprofit that powers our news, we are truly owned by the community.

Madiha: In your experience with local audience engagement strategies, what proves to be most successful? 

Contesti: Our success really is just being able to be in this spot in the community that no one else is serving. So there’s really nobody else who’s hosting FOIA workshops, for example. 

I say success is relative because we’ve had six people attend a field trip. We’ve had two. We’ve had 12. You know, in the film screening, I think the largest crowd we had was under 40. But really no one else is serving this civic engagement need in the community.

Madiha: You often collaborate with small businesses or other nonprofits in your community on these strategies. What makes those collaborations successful? 

Contesti: We always want our community partnerships to be mutually beneficial. So we offer free advertising or sponsorships in our newsletter to those community partners. We have created a voter’s guide that was available in the library. For the children’s room at the library, we created a brochure – which we had actually created for a parade in a separate event – for parents on how to educate their kids on mis- and disinformation, how to spot it, what questions to ask your child, things like that. It was all under this theme of Chicken Little and The Boy Who Cried Wolf, so those are two classic fairy tales that really deal in mis and disinformation, right? So we kind of connected the dots there. 

We’re creating community resources for these community partners, offering free sponsorships, and they’re helping us get our name out there and get more subscribers. I think that our most successful events are always when we’ve partnered with someone else.

Madiha: What practical tips would you give to other small newsrooms wanting to do something similar with community engagement or partnership projects? 

Contesti: I think an honest, transparent conversation about what would be the most beneficial to that organization, understanding their audience, understanding their needs. I really like to put myself on the other side of the table. Just think about, how can we best serve what you’re after? Because really for us, any kind of brand association with these known, trusted community partners is beneficial to us. So, if the Kalamazoo Public Library, which is an award-winning community library system, is promoting NowKalamazoo, we just get that implicit trust that comes with their brand to their audience

I’m really looking at: what do we offer? What talents do we have, what products do we have, what ability do we have to uniquely serve this community partner that others cannot? Because a lot of people have advertising, and they can offer free advertising on a billboard and magazine, but we have this highly engaged, niche audience right now of 14,000 subscribers.

Madiha: When you have big ideas, how do you break them down into something that you can work with within your budget and resources? 

Contesti: I think it’s just, ‘hey, I would love to have a donor dinner where we’re all wining and dining and learning and discussing, and it’s beautiful, and it’s grand and it’s somewhere nice. And then we’re like, hey, what if we just invited six to 12 people to come into our newsroom. We have some wine, we have a charcuterie board, but it’s kind of billed as an opportunity to tour our new newsroom. We just moved in November. Go to our new space downtown, meet the team, meet the publisher and come by for charcuterie and wine. It can be impactful.

Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

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Cite this article

Madiha, Ishrat (2026, March 4). Creative in-person ideas to increase audience engagement. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/creative-in-person-ideas-to-increase-audience-engagement/