Audience Research for Activists

What is Audience Research?

Once we are clear about the goal we want to achieve with our work as activists and organizations striving for social change, it is essential to know and understand whom we have to address with our communications in order to achieve it. The groups of people with whom we interact through the different channels are known as audiences.

Audience research is a process of collecting data and analyzing information about the people we seek to impact through our campaigns and communication strategies. We aim to go beyond our intuition -sometimes biased or incomplete- and answer questions such as: What are their demographic characteristics? or What are their values?

These processes can be as simple or complex as we need and it is not necessary to have sophisticated data or financial resources to begin researching. We can take the first step intuitively, by observing, conducting informal surveys or interviewing people close to us who resemble our target audience. The key is to collect evidence gradually and compare it with the initial observations, keeping a record of our inquiries over time.

At Inspiratorio we work to ensure that social justice movements can access specialized data through the creation and publication of audience research along with Sensata UX. Our studies allow us to better understand different audiences throughout Latin America and are available to activists and organizations for consultation and use in their communication strategies. Click here to learn about some of them.

Now we begin the learning process by discovering some of the most common methods or techniques for conducting audience research as well as some recommendations discovered through our experience with Sensata to create stories and messages that transcend intuition and connect with the right people to achieve social change.

Methods or Techniques for Conducting Audience Research:

Understanding Our Audiences

In the context of social change, we know that our movements will be successful if our communications manage to activate supporters for our causes, attract a flexible audience and neutralize antagonistic messages. But what does this mean?

It is key to share the long-term vision that we want to achieve with the rest of the movement, but it is also essential that organizations and activists understand how they could  contribute in order to diversify tactics and assign our roles so that collectively we can cover all fronts.

Scroll through each image to discover the characteristics of the three audience groups mentioned above and some recommendations to put into practice within our movements:

An Audience to Discover: Flexible People

We have already seen the three types of key audiences for our communication strategies. However, we want to delve deeper into a category that is commonly forgotten by social movements: flexible audiences.

These are presented as an opportunity to focus our communication objectives, since they are usually between 40% and 50% of the population of all Latin American countries: millions of people who can potentially become allies of our organizations and activism. To strengthen the impact of our movements and turn history around, understanding and empathizing with flexible audiences is not only a fundamental component to move forward with human rights causes, it is also one of the most strategic actions in the search for common sense.

Exercise: Mark true or false in each sentence as appropriate.

Let's Promote Cultural Change through Research

Researching our audiences is a strategic tool because it allows us to be more effective with our communications. Sometimes it is assumed that the goal of activism is to get people to change their minds about a problem or a cause. Often, the communication work of organizations and activists focuses on promoting debate, confrontation, or standing against injustices and human rights violations. While all of these actions are fundamental within our movements, limiting ourselves to these methods can be pointless to some audiences, who instead of getting closer to our purpose, end up distancing themselves because despite having agreements, they feel disconnected from our communication styles.

If you want to go deeper, we invite you to learn more in module 2: Turning the Apocalypse into Hope.

We must understand that in order to promote cultural changes, we need to go much further in our communication efforts that usually focus on changing people's opinions on a topic. We must transform common sense, redefining what an important portion of society considers desirable, good and valuable.

Let's look at this example:

Cultural opinions and practices are like an iceberg. At the tip, on the surface, we only see people's actions, for example: the causes they support, the causes they don’t support, and those that are indifferent to them; however, beneath the surface is their entire system of beliefs, often unconscious, that sustain and influence the thoughts and actions of people and society as a whole.

The audience research carried out by Sensata along with El Inspiratorio, is then a useful tool to investigate what is beneath the surface of these "cultural icebergs", allowing us to understand these deep values: beliefs, social norms, expectations and attitudes that determine people's perceptions, actions and behaviors, and providing us with a comprehensive view of those aspects that need to be challenged or changed through narrative work.

We invite you to learn more about the perceptions of Latin American audiences regarding migration here.

The Call to Build Bridges

Through our communication work as activists, we not only seek to inform and learn collectively, but also to connect on an emotional and human level with our audiences. This process of 'building bridges' is essential for effective communication and lasting narrative change.For this mission, we need to understand the full picture of our audiences in the first place. Each group of people has its own "cultural iceberg": its own values ​​that drive its actions. In this sense, it is important not only to understand the actions that are visible on the surface (such as their position on equal rights and LGBTI+, for example), but also what is beneath the surface: in this case, their religious beliefs, their fears and prejudices, their gender norms and their knowledge or lack of information on certain topics.By understanding these factors, we can identify the elements that threaten what people value and, consequently, cause resistance to change. Knowing this, we can look for a common ground. This common ground may not be directly related to the main cause of our activisms or organizations, but it is essential to create a common foundation to start the dialogue. These bridges do not aim to change people's deep-rooted beliefs overnight, but rather to open spaces for dialogue, empathy, and understanding. The goal is to build a common ground to begin to collectively draw that world we dream of.

Examples:

Love, Respect and Dignity Bridge

If the denial of some rights is fueled by certain religious beliefs, a bridge can be built to promote love, respect and dignity, values ​​that are often core to many religions. It could show how respecting everyone’s rights is compatible with these values.

Future and Safety Bridge

If you work in environmental activism and find that your audience values their family above all else, but considers the energy transition costly and difficult, you could build stories around the idea that actions to mitigate the climate crisis are essential to ensure a healthy and sustainable planet for their children, grandchildren, and future generations.

Finally, we invite you to reflect and respond individually or together with your activist community:

• In your activism, what evidence do you currently have about the deep values ​​of your main audience?

• What are the deep values ​​that seem to cause resistance to change in these audiences and, based on these, how could we build bridges with them, recognizing and respecting these values, but at the same time encouraging other perspectives?

• What kind of content can you create in this sense?