Building effective audience journeys as the pathway to digital change

Audience-centricity is a constant throughout my work with charities and non-profits. It’s a transformational mindset shift that delivers huge benefits for your whole organisation: fundraising, campaigns, audience and supporter engagement and digital teams. It’s the focal point of every client conversation, every decision, because it’s a goal we all share. Something we can all get behind.

More specifically, audience-centric journey design breaks down the task of digital change as your organisation becomes truly audience-centric. To make transformation more manageable and efficient, I divide change into stages. First, adapt a few journey designs. Train your teams and adjust your processes, technology and data accordingly. Learn what works and what doesn’t, then use this data to tweak, optimise and replace more journey designs.

So how does this work in practice? Here are a few models I’ve developed over the years working with clients on audience journey design.

What is audience-centric journey design?

First, let’s talk about what we mean by audience-centric journey design. It means creating audience journeys that centre around the question:

'How will your audience help you achieve your organisation’s mission?’

Your mission might be supporting people living with a health condition or creating change by mobilising citizens to donate, volunteer or fundraise. Naturally, you live and breathe this mission. So it can be tempting to design your audience journeys around achieving it.

With audience-centric journey design, you operate in the middle of this Venn diagram. Your mission as an organisation overlaps with the needs of your audience. To do this, you need to ask yourself what your audience’s need is – what task they are trying to complete – and where this overlaps with your own objectives.

Why does audience-centric journey design matter?

Here’s an example. How often have decisions about your organisation’s website prioritised stakeholders’ opinions over those of the actual users, your audience? Even today, we see charity websites designed to mirror organisational structure instead of reflecting user need or experience. With audience-centric journey design, there’s no more hierarchical or ‘loudest voice wins’ decision-making. Instead, you make decisions based on user data. This makes implementing change easier. It also lays the groundwork for continuous improvement: performance data on the current iteration informs the next.

With this new way of planning and prioritising your digital activities, everyone involved can share their audience or product expertise. And both the process and the team benefit.

How to build audience-centric journeys

So we know what audience-centric journeys are and why they matter. But what does building audience-centric journeys actually look like? Let’s explore.

1. Create audience profiles

The first thing you’ll need is a set of audience profiles. But don’t panic, you can do a lot with what you already have. A good place to start is your recent digital reports, research or strategies.

Strengthen existing data with user surveys or market research to make sure your understanding is as rich as possible. It’s all about getting crystal clear on the audience need side of your Venn diagram so that you can accurately identify that sweet spot.

2. Start at the beginning (it’s earlier than you think)

Now you’ve gathered your data, the next step is to change how you use it. Because no audience journey ever starts with your website. Your audience will almost certainly start their journey on a search engine, meaning your first focus needs to be paid ads, organic search and SEO.

The key is to use those audience profiles to understand searcher intent. Are they visiting because they’re worried about symptoms they’re experiencing? Or have they seen something on social media or the news that’s prompted them to want to donate?

Their intent (what they want to achieve) will dictate which search terms you target. If someone is worrying about their health, they might search the name of a condition or a specific symptom. Whereas someone looking to donate to your appeal might simply search the name of your charity.

3. Meet each user’s specific need

The next challenge is to provide the right type of content to help your audience achieve their goal. If someone is ready to get fit while supporting a good cause, show them a list of events they can attend. If a searcher wants to take action on an issue that matters to them, land them on a page where they can write to their MP or sign a petition.

So far, we’ve talked about broad audience intentions, but you need to get as specific as possible. For example, there’s a difference between someone who wants information about a particular issue and someone who’s ready to take action. Make sure your content caters for every specific stage on their journey. Otherwise, you lose engagement because your audience is lost in pages and pages of content, unable to complete the task they had in mind. And, the good news is, once you’ve designed journeys in detail, you will notice that some are very similar. Often, one journey design can work for more than one audience journey.

4. Always tell a story

Now you have a clear idea of how you’re meeting every different audience need, it’s time to factor in the importance of storytelling.

So far, we’ve considered the stages of the audience journey on a micro level. Now, we want to view the audience journey as a whole, not as a series of individual interactions. That means making sure that every time you interact with your audiences, they understand the context, the meaning.

So when they buy from your online shop they understand how their money supports your important cause. And whilst learning about their condition, they find out about events they can attend.

5. Plan the next step

The final step is mapping out what happens once they’ve ticked off their task. Because without this, the interaction ends. Yes, they’ve reached your landing page, but what do they need next to stay engaged over time? It might be a social share, email sign up or link to donate. You’ll learn which action works best for your engagement objective. Follow up with a welcome email series to guide them, with the least possible friction, to keep on engaging.

If you’d like training on journey design or support in designing them, get in touch!