How creator collaborations can help increase civic engagement during low-interest, local elections

This is a series on Better News highlighting replicable strategies from the American Press Institute’s 2025 Influencers Learning Cohort, designed to help local and community media deepen engagement with the communities they serve through new experiments with creators and trusted messengers.

 This win comes from Diana Riojas, audience manager of engagement and distribution, and Rachel Holliday Smith, managing editor, at THE CITY.

More on creator collaborations:

• API’s guide to influencer collaborations
• Countering disinformation by training Latino content creators
• How building a local creator map can lead to stronger community connections

THE CITY is a nonprofit news organization serving New Yorkers across all five boroughs. Ahead of the 2025 June primary elections, the audience team set out to build on the success of our first influencer project during the 2024 general election by reaching more voters with our civic education service journalism. Our goal was to help them better understand the election process and campaign tactics. To do so, THE CITY focused on creating three shorter videos to see if our newsroom could extend the reach and engagement of our civic journalism.

The problem we were looking to solve

Voter turnout in New York City is one of the lowest in the country. A study from the University of California San Diego compared presidential and mayoral election turnout in the 50 biggest cities across the U.S. New York City ranked 49 out of 50 in the 2024 presidential election. In 2021, the first year ranked-choice voting was implemented for city offices, only 23% of eligible voters cast ballots for mayor.

For this year’s project, we created a three-part series to educate voters about campaign tactics and what they should have a clear understanding of before Primary Day. The project aimed to encourage and equip more voters to cast their ballots.

Once again, we collaborated with Gerrie Lim — a comedian and host of “The Pigeon Post,” a video series on TikTok and Instagram that showcases local headlines and news with a comedic delivery — as our trusted messenger.

In 2024, we collaborated with Lim to create a video on the six ballot proposals New Yorkers would see in the general election. We encouraged The Pigeon Post to create a video in their own comedic styling while also ensuring the facts in the video were correct. That 2024 video received nearly 50,000 views, and many of them were new to our journalism and audience; 83% of those viewers were not already following @THECITYNY’s Instagram account.

Prior to collaborating with Lim, THE CITY produced 15 videos in 2024. For this case study we’ll use it as our baseline on how our collaboration with Lim performed. We used six key performance indicators, views, likes, comments in which users say our video was helpful or informative to them (“helpful comments”), overall comments, shares and bookmarks.

In our latest series with The Pigeon Post, we worked to see whether we could outperform our 2024 average (which did not include our prior collaboration with Lim) and to see if THE CITY could increase each KPI by 20%. We also wanted to see if our series could reach more New Yorkers before Primary Day in June.

Our 2024 baseline

How we did it

Before we reached out to The Pigeon Post, THE CITY’s audience team first outlined which of our civic explainers we wanted to replicate in 90-second videos. We also wanted to include advice that is applicable to a wide swath of voters, as opposed to tips relevant to a certain election district, neighborhood or demographic.

We landed on creating four videos:

• An explainer breaking down the six ballot measures New Yorkers would see in the 2024 election
• How ranked choice voting works
• How polling works and why voters may be receiving an uptick in election-related text messages
• What independent expenditures are, i.e., special interest election spending groups

From there, we reached out to The Pigeon Post to see if they were available for the project. We asked them whether:

1. They would be available to produce the videos within our set timeline of roughly three weeks
2. They were comfortable explaining these topics to their followers and were willing to cross-post the content with our accounts
3. They were still comfortable with our audience team editing their script before filming to ensure what they wrote was factually correct and within the bounds of our ethical standards

Once they agreed, we sent over the social video contract, which outlined draft, final and posting deadlines. We kept in touch with The Pigeon Post’s progress each week via email to ensure they felt confident in meeting these deadlines.

Each week, Lim would send us the draft of their script for our audience team to review, ensuring it was factually correct and without bias. We would typically return our edits within 24 hours, allowing Lim ample time to film and edit.

Lim then would send the final edit along with a caption that had already been edited during the script phase for the audience team to schedule.

Our impact

The main objective of our collaboration was to encourage users to share our journalism. We wanted more voters to feel well-informed and equipped for the June 2025 primaries. And sharing these video explainers helped us reach a larger audience. In 2024, before the collaboration, our average reach was 11,528. The average reach of our four videos was 28,459 — an increase of 147%.

When we measure across all six KPI’s, THE CITY saw similar exceptional growth. The average views of our collaboration was 42,033 — a 115% increase compared to our 2024 performance prior to Lim.

For average likes, shares and bookmarks, THE CITY saw a 223%, 322%, and 434% increase respectively compared to our 2024 baseline. Comments saw a 71% increase, and while our “helpful comments” did see an increase from 0, we also used the sentiments as a way to gauge if viewers found our series useful.

KPI Performance of videos with The Pigeon Post

Not only did we receive praise for our explainers, we saw IG Stories from viewers sharing our series, saying it was as digestible as it was comedic. It signaled to our newsroom that creating a multi-video civic curriculum series is a worthwhile endeavor, as it allowed us to reach users that may know THE CITY provided service journalism.

Below are some examples of the kind of messaging we received:

Screenshots of Instagram stories show the feedback that accompanied people sharing Lim’s Reel on ranked choice voting

We also paid Instagram $240 to “boost” the final video, which garnered about 3,000 website clicks to our Meet Your Mayor quiz, mentioned in the latter half of the explainer. With an 8-cent cost per click, we think it’s worth boosting other videos where we mention a tool users can try.

How to put this into practice for yourself

Finding the right trusted messenger might be the longest aspect of this project. Remember, they should be just as collaborative as they are entertaining for the partnership to succeed. Here are some tips to keep in mind:

• Treat an influencer’s platform as a kind of resume. Finding the right influencer can be daunting, especially when focusing on follower counts. But look more closely at how they use the platform. If they consistently post and engage with the fans they’ve cultivated, that’s a great sign they’ll be good to work with.
• Your influencer probably knows the internet better than you do. The tone of your newsroom and the influencer may differ significantly. But as long as the script they present to you is factually correct and sits right with your newsroom’s ethics, allow them to make the jokes or commentary that may be slightly more spicy than your newsroom’s voice. Our audience team noticed an uptick in likes correlated to when Lim would land a joke in our videos!

This screenshot from Instagram shows when users liked a reel, with a peak when the creator, Gerrie Lim, landed a joke.

• If you do decide to boost… Be sure to give your video enough time to receive all the engagement it would’ve gained organically. Typically, by the third or fourth day since publishing, we saw our videos have reached their maximum. Afterward, feel free to pay for the “boost.” Just know it can take Meta up to 48 hours to approve your ad. Ours took 24 hours.
• Take the time to curate your thumbnail. Two videos that received extra attention to the thumbnail performed better. So it may be worthwhile to work with your trusted messenger on creating a quippy headline and interesting thumbnail.