Why is understanding audiences important?
Developing audiences is vital to maintaining and growing your service. Without a source of new users your existing audience cannot be sustained. You may also wish to diversify the people who engage with you to broaden your appeal and potentially grow your user base. To do this effectively you need to improve your understanding of your audience:
- who are they?
- what are their motivations for using the service?
- how often do they engage with you – and in what form?
- what would encourage them to engage more deeply?
- what stops them from doing this now?
If you can gather these insights and respond to them through the delivery and development of your service, you will be able to operate more effectively.
Understanding your audiences equips you with evidence to make better business decisions and be more sustainable long-term.
By building an understanding of your audience you are also able to be more focused and targeted with your resources.
A target audience of ‘the general public’ or ‘all local people’ is not achievable (or realistic) – where do you start, and how do you allocate your time and budgets to find this group? Setting unrealistic targets is often a reason for services not succeeding in developing new audiences.
By building your understanding you will be able to be more focused and nuanced in your work, and more successful.
What do we mean by understanding audiences?
Gaining an understanding of your audience will help you to know:
- what will encourage them to engage with your service
- what might stop them from engaging
- which elements or programmes of your service they might use
- what might encourage them to engage more deeply, be more regular users, advocates and supporters
All of these factors will help you to make decisions about your future service.
Gaining this understanding takes time and is an ongoing process. It means embedding these ideas in your work long-term.
Central to this is asking questions, gathering answers, listening carefully, identifying what’s useful to you to form insights and then acting upon these in your service provision and planning.
Critical success factors
Before embarking on a journey to better understanding your audiences there are a number of factors that will be critical to your success.
Clarity about timescale
Developing audiences and your understanding of them takes time. It’s an on-going process, not a one-off task.
Relationship-building
This work is all about building relationships with groups, individuals, partners. This takes time and it needs to be long-term – consider how you are going to retain current audiences when fostering relationships with new ones.
Taking an organisation-wide approach
This shouldn’t be a task or programme that is confined to one staff member. You might identify a lead person, but the insights you gain from this work will have implications for the whole organisation so everyone needs to be on board.
Be proportionate and realistic
Every organisation can better understand their audiences and develop new ones, but it’s important to be realistic about what you can achieve or you can become frustrated. Start small, test things out, find what works for you and then build on this. Don’t be over-ambitious – be proportionate to your resource.
Planning
To be successful it’s crucial to have a plan. This is going to help you with all the points above – you can consider your timescale, involve others and make sure you’re being realistic about what you can achieve.
A plan doesn’t have to be a huge wordy document. It needs to have the key elements in there – what, who, when, costs – and it needs to show the process you’re going to deliver.
An outline of the process you might follow to understand your audiences is shown here:
Your starting point is the plan where you will identify your audiences and outline your consultation plan. Then you will move to collecting your data, analysing it, reporting and acting upon it. It is important to then review the programme so you can make improvements in your next cycle of planning – and then the process is repeated.
Who are my audiences?
This is the obvious question to start with. What do you know about the people who already use your service? ‘Gut instincts’ can be useful here, but evidence is key. It is important to consider what data you collect about them. Some examples of what you might already know about your audience are shown below:
Numerical data
The number of people through the door, making enquiries, using your website, engaging with you on social media, booking events, coming in groups.
Demographics
Do you split your numerical data down further to help you get more detail of who your users are, for example:
- what age are most of your users
- what proportion are White British?
- How many class themselves as having a disability?
Location
Do you know where they are based, what proportion are local (you need to decide what ‘local’ means to you)?
Usage data
Do you collect data that supports you to understand what services people use and how regularly they use them? Are you able to say what proportion of your users are first-time users, or are users of your reading room, or represent school visits?
Motivations
You might have asked users about their reasons for engaging with you and be able to list these different motivations or know the proportions they represent among your total audience (e.g. 30% are using the service for family history research, 10% for school studies, 15% for business purposes etc.).
The data you already have may back up any assumptions you already had you may be surprised. Considering the split of your audience can be illuminating – perhaps your school visits make up a higher or lower proportion of your total than you expected, or the home base of your users may challenge your expectations.
Many of you will be confronted with gaps in this information. Your first action in this process could be to change that and to review your existing data collection process to enable you to make more informed decisions. Decide on the data you feel would be most useful to you and which is feasible to collect from most users. Postcodes can give you a lot of data in return for a small request from your users so would be a good starting point. Your data should support you to measure your progress in your audience development plans – so if you decide you want to address the age profile of your users you need to collect this data.
Regular snapshot surveys of users are better than no data at all – but make them regular (monthly would be good to overcome any seasonal differences) and on different times of day and days of the week to give you a representative sample. Be proportionate in this – if you are a small team you can’t achieve the same as a large organisation who may decide to commission external support for this task. Talk to other organisations about how they gather user data, do your research, test things out, review and try again.
Who isn’t using your service?
By gathering as much information as you can about your current users you can build a picture of who they are as well as starting to identify who is not using your service.
You could compare your user data to the population of your area or catchment to see how the demographics compare. How representative of your catchment (or potential user base) is your existing audience? Most archives tend towards an older, white, well-educated user base. You might want to consider developing new audiences from beyond this traditional base.