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FreshSpectrum Information Design
On a mission to make research and evaluation more accessible.
Chapter 2: Finding Your Audience
Who is in your audience?
First question, who is in your audience? Now for a few follow-ups:
- Are they really in your audience?
- Do you have a way to reach these people?
- Will they actually hear what you have to say?
A theoretical audience is not an audience. Listing types of people that may or may not have the potential to be interested in what you have to say, is not an audience.
Real audiences are tangible. They are the people standing in the auditorium when you walk up to the podium. They are the list of 300 email addresses collected from past program participants. They are the unique pageviews that show up in Google Analytics.
Live in a room (and sometimes in a webinar) we get to see real live people. But even digital audiences that visit your website leave some kind of trace. If you look, there is always at least some evidence when an audience exists.
Unfortunately we rarely look. Maybe because we already know what we would find, or rather, not find.
In order to report in the modern world, you first need access to a real audience. And if you don’t have access to a real audience, you either need to borrow an audience or spend some time building one.
Activity: Naming your Audience
Often when we discuss our audience we talk through the generic groups of people we want to reach. But I don’t want you to do that kind of naming.
Think about the audience for something you’ve written in the past. It could be a report, a blog post, a journal article, or pretty much anything else.
Now try to name 5 people who read that thing. Their actual names.
If 5 was easy, try to name 10 people or 20 people. If 5 was hard, just try to name 1 or 2.
When we come up with generic audience groupings our audiences become fiction. Real audience members are human beings with names, personality traits, preferences, needs, and quirks. The more that you can picture the real people in your audience, the better your reporting.
Your Big 3 Audiences.
So every person in your audience is unique. But unless you have unlimited time, you can’t tailor your report format for every single person.
In the evaluation world there is an often shared reporting convention that can be traced back to a 2001 brief by the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation. It goes something like this, “1 page brief, 3 page executive summary, 25 page report.”
It’s not a bad convention, each of the three report types appeal to people with different levels of interest. But let’s take that idea one step further. Instead of sticking to prescribed page lengths let’s think about the audience that each report type is designed to serve.
Who is your 25 page report audience?
This is likely your client, boss, or whomever commissioned your work. It might also be really engaged program staff or other stakeholders who have a high level of interest in your work.
In the digital world, these are the people who subscribe to your newsletter and regularly read most things you share.
Who is your 3 page executive summary audience?
These are the people who feel compelled to read your work, but don’t want 25 pages. They might be non-profit board members, partners, and other people who have a medium interest in your work.
In the digital world, these are the people who follow you from a distance on social media. Sometimes they read what you share, or like what you post, but only if it shows up in their feed.
Who is your 1 page audience?
These are people who might not know much about your work and just have a casual interest. It could also be the audiences that are only interested in one very small piece of your work.
In the digital world, these are the people who find something you have shared through Google. Or perhaps they have seen one of your social media posts through a friend’s retweet or through a hashtag they follow.
Activity: Three Bucket Audience
Go back to people you picked in the audience naming activity or choose a small group of individuals that might be interested in a report you hope to share in the future.
Classify each person by the interest level they would have in your work. And be honest, just because you wish your client or boss would be very interested in the report you are writing does not make it so.
The three buckets are:
Low Interest (i.e. your 1 pager crowd)
Medium Interest (i.e. your executive summary crowd)
High Interest (i.e. your full report crowd)
The Audience Growth Saturation Point
Do you have a close-ended or an open-ended audience? In other words, is your audience limited to a specific number of individuals?
I support a Community of Practice for one of my consulting clients. The audience includes evaluators who get funding through a very specific CDC program. The total audience size hovers around 200 people. There is no expectation that our audience is going to grow, at least not considerably.
I have emails for what is likely 90% of the potential audience. Meaning I don’t have to worry about growing the audience. I can focus directly on communication products designed to serve existing audience members.
Now let’s look at the audience I try to reach through my blog and other personal digital projects. My primary goal is to serve the global evaluation community.
To guess the total number we can look at the size of different evaluation professional organizations and LinkedIn group memberships. We can also estimate based on the number of large nonprofits, NGOs, Universities, and government programs that likely have evaluators working within. It’s going to be a hard number to pin down, but it’s at least 100,000 and likely much higher.
My professional email list at the moment includes around 3,000 emails, many of the people on this list are evaluators. But even if I assume that I reach 2,000 evaluators, that’s out of a low estimate of 100,000 global evaluators. So I’m only reaching 2%. That means, if I intend to reach more of that larger audience, I need to work on audience building as well as audience serving.
The way you approach reporting needs to account for the number of people in your potential audience that you currently reach. The higher the saturation the less you need to focus on things like social media.
If you have someone’s email, email them. They are much more likely to read that email than see your social media post. If you don’t have their email, or know how to find them through other channels, social media offers a potential avenue.
Audience Reach Splash Model
Businesses on the web tend to design their communications around a sales funnel. A sales funnel is just a strategy for how you might turn strangers into customers. At the top of the funnel you cast a wide net, then the funnel gets narrower and narrower as you approach the paying customer at the bottom.
Reporting is not selling, it’s serving. While you likely have different audiences, there isn’t the same kind of hierarchy and flow. It’s possible you might want to reach a casual audience because you have information they need to know, not because you are trying to turn them into a higher interest audience. As such, the traditional funnel approach doesn’t really apply
So instead I use what I call a splash model, which is just three concentric circles. The center circle is your high interest audience, the second circle is your medium interest audience, and the outer circle is your low interest/casual audience. Occasionally I’ll add a fourth circle to represent the potential audience not yet reached.
I call it a splash model because the goal is to first serve the audience in the middle, and in doing so try to make a big enough splash to reach the others as well.
Let’s say you create a big report to serve your highest interest audiences. You might even launch that report with a webinar discussion series with co-authors and partners. This is the rock that triggers the splash.
To make a bigger splash you adapt the big report into smaller executive summaries and infographics. This will push your ideas out towards the medium and casual interest audiences. You can also adapt the webinar recording into short social videos.
Measuring Your Audience
Now that we have the theory out of the way, let’s make everything a little more measurable. In order to define our digital audience in a way that we can count, let’s use a few imperfect proxies.
We will consider your highest interest audience as all the people who have willingly shared their email address with you.
Your medium interest audience had at one time or another clicked a follow button on Twitter, a like button on Facebook, a subscribe button on YouTube, or whatever else they needed to do to follow you on another channel.
Your casual interest audience includes all the people who visit your website and see your social content, but don’t follow you directly.
And finally, your potential audience includes the overall number of people you estimate might be considered part of your audience.
So starting from the center of the model we have:
High Interest Audience: Number of people on your email list.
Medium Interest Audience: Number of people who follow you on social media (across all active channels)
Casual Audience: Social Media Impressions (followers across all active social channels) + Website Visitors (unique visitors).
Potential Audience: Estimate this. If you were to serve every single person in your audience, this would be the total number served.
Audience Building or Serving?
Generally it takes more work to build an audience than to serve an audience. But not all of the content you create needs to help you build your audience. Like I mentioned previously, if you are already reaching a high percentage of your potential audience you don’t have to put much effort into audience building. And even if that’s not the case, sometimes just serving the audience you currently reach is enough.
But if you do want to build your audience, how you go about it depends on which audience you would like to build.
High Interest Audience: To grow this audience you need to create the kind of content that someone would be willing to give you their email address to get. Content in this category might include digital summits, webinars, eBooks, toolkits, online communities, eCourses, whitepapers, and, occasionally, long PDF reports.
Medium Interest Audience: Growing a social media following is less about individual content or events and more about providing consistent value over time. Audience building at this level is a marathon, not a sprint. Focus on writing regular blog posts, posting consistently, and engaging potential audience members in digital conversations.
Casual Audience: With social media you reach other audiences by having other people or organizations share your work. You can do this intentionally through direct collaboration, strategic mentions, hashtags, and viral content. You can also grow your website’s reach through search engine optimization (SEO) and well-designed content strategy.
As for serving an audience, just focus on delivering a variety of content based on the audience’s interest level. Also, try to reduce friction as much as possible. When you are not building an audience, don’t worry about collecting email addresses and try not to create something so complicated that it makes it harder for the audience to access.