Finding Your Target Audience with Audience Analysis
By Keagan Perlette
Non-profit and charitable organizations often depend on lean teams and volunteers who juggle competing priorities on tight timelines. Focus is essential when you’re looking to attract and engage a community of supporters through fundraising and public relations campaigns.
Finding your target audience—your ideal supporters—enables you to narrow the scope of your campaigns so you can maximize their impact while minimizing the strain on your team’s capacity.
Finding your target audience—your ideal supporters—enables you to narrow the scope of your campaigns so you can maximize their impact while minimizing the strain on your team’s capacity.
How to find your target audience
To determine who your target audience is and what they want, you need to conduct audience analysis. Audience analysis provides data that will give you insights into who your ideal supporters are, including what they’re interested in, what they’re driven by, and what would make them more likely to support your cause.
Know your target audience
One of the main benefits of audience analysis is that it reveals the information you need to craft communications messaging that resonates with your community of supporters. Here are the three key components of effective audience analysis:
1. Define and segment your target personas
Audience personas are “characters” who represent the major segments of your audience. Personas typically include demographic information like age, gender, ethnicity, geographic location, income, and education level. The most effective personas also communicate psychographic information such as interests, values, and lifestyle.
2. Find out what matters to them
Understanding what really matters to your target audience is the cornerstone of persuasive messaging. When you have a solid idea of the desires and values behind supporters’ decision-making, you can develop a strong communications plan that caters to them.
3. Determine where they get their information or entertainment
Know where your audience reads the news, which social media platforms they use, whether they engage with traditional broadcast media like TV and radio. Meet your audience where they’re already at. You don’t have to use every platform or outlet to get great campaign results. In fact, the more strategic you are about which distribution channels you’re using, the more engaged your audience will be.
1. Define and segment your target personas
Audience personas are “characters” who represent the major segments of your audience. Personas typically include demographic information like age, gender, ethnicity, geographic location, income, and education level. The most effective personas also communicate psychographic information such as interests, values, and lifestyle.
2. Find out what matters to them
Understanding what really matters to your target audience is the cornerstone of persuasive messaging. When you have a solid idea of the desires and values behind supporters’ decision-making, you can develop a strong communications plan that caters to them.
3. Determine where they get their information or entertainment
Know where your audience reads the news, which social media platforms they use, whether they engage with traditional broadcast media like TV and radio. Meet your audience where they’re already at. You don’t have to use every platform or outlet to get great campaign results. In fact, the more strategic you are about which distribution channels you’re using, the more engaged your audience will be.
