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. 
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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:  
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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.

Fact: values-driven messaging boosts engagement.

Find out what your supporters value most. Do they prioritize family and community? Are they passionate about independent artists? Do they care about money and status?

Build your messaging around these core motivations to signal that your organization shares their intrinsic values.

How to conduct audience analysis

Figuring out your target personas, finding out what they value, and determining which channels they’re paying attention to requires data. There are a few ways to gather the information you need to deeply understand your target audience. 

• ​Go through your database of current supporters. Look for common traits and themes and group similar types of people together to formulate personas.
• Take advantage of events by asking attendees to fill out surveys or provide reviews that give you an idea of who they are and why they engage with your organization. Google Forms and Survey Monkey are great tools for this. 
• Arrange interviews with supporters from different segments to discuss their values and how your organization fits into their life.
• Set up focus groups to dig into how the community perceives your organization.
• Use analytics tools on your website, social media, and email campaigns to understand your audience’s digital behaviour. 
• Dive into social media analytics to understand which types of posts your audience likes to engage with and what they’re talking about online.

Get started with audience analysis

Inspiring messaging starts with knowing your audience inside and out. Perch Communications provides in-depth audience analysis to support narrative and messaging development for your organization’s campaigns. 

Need to take audience analysis off your team’s plate? Contact Perch for a free 30-minute consultation.