How to make audience-first a reality at your nonprofit
What do nonprofits like Samaritans, Save the Children and Greenpeace have in common with Amazon?
They put their audience first.
At Amazon, that looks like “customer obsession”, a value that drives them to create quicker, easier and more intuitive customer experiences. Why? Because it helps them reach their ultimate goal - to increase profits and market penetration.
Charities also need to think audience-first if they want to achieve their vision. Whether this is through signing petitions, emailing MPs, donating, volunteering or fundraising, nonprofits need their audiences to take action so they can fulfil their purpose.
When Samaritans realised that people don’t make phone calls the way they used to, they developed a chat and email service to fill that gap. That’s thinking audience-first. At Greenpeace, every part of a digital journey is optimised, from the landing page all the way through to the thank you page. Experimenting with different words, images and layout to see which one will engage a higher percentage of people is a lot of work, but it ensures that what you already do works really hard for you. It’s what makes Greenpeace’s campaigning content so effective. And, you guessed it, that’s audience-first.
The clue is in the name – being audience-first means being led by the people who make up your audience. It entails deep listening, collecting qualitative and quantitative data, challenging internal assumptions, letting go of organisational ego and basing your decisions on what you learn about your audience’s behaviours, rather than what you’d like them to do.
Why is audience-first transformative?
Audience-first can be transformative.
If you want to test out its potential power at your organisation, start with a pilot project. It’s best to pilot this approach on projects when teams naturally work more together than in silos, for example, in the run-up to Christmas.
Pilot projects usually bring good lessons that we can use for future planning. But they also show us that, to work in audience-first silo-free way all the time, some (significant) changes to how your team, department or division work will be needed.
Shift your mindset
An audience-first approach isn’t going to work if you try to keep the same processes in place, with just a few tweaks. If you recruit new supporters for your charity through Facebook advertising, for example, you can’t just put them on your existing communications schedule and expect amazing results. To get the best out of those audiences you have to learn more about them. Once you know who your audience is and what they care about, then you can start to deliver a tailored approach to suit their needs.
It’s a conversation, not a broadcast
When we’re being audience-first, we don’t start from an assumption like, “I want to tell you about this because I want you to know more/change your mind about it.” Instead, we start by analysing how that audience can help us achieve our aims, then telling them about it in the way that speaks to them where they are. This means talking in language which that audience is likely to understand, telling stories and using data that will really resonate with them.
Instead of trying to create things to push on your supporters, you start to see them as collaborators. You and your supporters work together to achieve a shared vision, and your role is to find ways to keep them engaged and invested in that vision.
Audience-first is for everyone
An audience-first approach benefits everyone. It’s particularly important for sustainable fundraising. I’ve seen heads of fundraising lead the way in becoming audience-first, because they’ve seen that their income projections are going down due to generational shifts. Without a new approach, their organisations’ income would have been scuppered.
Audience-first shifts fundraising work from thinking purely in terms of funds raised, towards thinking in terms of engagement. Instead of focusing on a single direct marketing campaign, fundraisers create longer term, more tailored engagement strategies. That might mean shifting from designing a one-off campaign with a £100k target, to a series of activations with an engagement target (like numbers of email opens or social media interactions) as well as an income target.
Whether you’re a fundraiser, campaigner, customer engagement or digital lead, there are countless reasons to go audience first. Here are three simple ways to make it a reality:
1. Look at the data
You already have access to rich information about your audience. That might include email open, click-through and conversion rates, your Google Analytics goals or your social media engagement statistics including likes, follows, shares.
When you put all this data together you will notice some trends. You might see what interests certain audiences (by looking at the most popular content on the website, open and click rates for emails), or where people come from when they land on your website (this shows you which channels other than Google work), or be surprised by who your audiences are when you look at the demographics data (you’ll need to switch this on in Google Analytics first).
Block out a chunk of time to dig into your audience data. When you notice something unexpected, ask yourself what might be behind that. For example, if you have a lot of visits from one particular country, is there an ad or campaign that it might link to? What can you learn from the success of that particular activation, and what might you do differently next time?
2. Ask people via a survey
In-house audience surveys are often dismissed because the results will be biased towards audiences who already know you. But the information you get is still valuable as it helps you build a better picture of people’s understanding of the work you do. More often than not, the results of the survey will bring more colour to what website and email stats are telling you. If something truly unusual comes out, you may need to do further research to see if it’s really applicable to your wider audiences.
A simple survey with a free platform like Surveymonkey or Typeform can give you revealing answers. But take the results with a pinch of salt, as your survey will be self-selecting. You’ll hear back from people with extremely positive and negative views, and won’t tend to hear from those in the middle. So, again, if there is something unusual that keeps coming out, dig a bit deeper to understand if this, indeed, applies to your wider audience.
3. Commission market research
To really understand your audiences, you can always commission formal market research. It doesn’t have to be expensive, if you start with something simple like omnibus opinion polls or tracker surveys which track people’s attitude towards the issues which matter to you for example. You will get a wealth of information about your current and potential audiences’ habits and behaviours, opinions and attitudes and, where you can find them. This information is gold dust. It helps you develop journeys which will engage your current and potential audiences, so you can achieve your shared vision.
Start today
Audience-first thinking is non-negotiable, in my opinion. If you’re not doing it already, you need to. You can start simple: look at the basic data you have and develop some audience profiles. Then, start designing one or two journeys. This will show you what you can and can’t do with your resources and help you identify areas where you need to make a change.
To make effective changes, I always advise people to start with low-hanging fruit. Find allies within your organisation, and recruit them to help you in your audience-first mission. Make it quick, easy and appealing to make the change. There will be more to do in future, but for now you can start with one simple action. What action will you take today?
