Make Sure It Is Targeted

If you don’t know what you’re aiming at, you’re unlikely to hit it.

Targeting your communication efforts involves understanding:

• Who your audience is
• What your key messages are
• How you’re going to get the message out

IDENTIFY YOUR AUDIENCE

WHAT? Every organisation has both internal and external audiences.

INTERNAL: Internal audiences are often more likely to be stakeholders than audiences in the true sense of the word, but it is important to recognise that these stakeholders will be affected by—and can affect—your message. Who within your organisation will be affected by, have an opinion about or have influence over your message? What concerns and issues do they bring to the table? While you may not necessarily list them in your communications documents, it is important to be aware of their concerns and potential influence, and to seek their support where feasible and necessary.

EXTERNAL: As you consider who your primary audience is, ask yourself whose knowledge, attitudes or behaviour must be changed to meet your goals. Your primary audiences are those you are seeking to inform, transform or motivate to act in order to achieve your communication objectives. If you achieve your objectives, your primary audiences will be changed: they will be more knowledgeable about your issue, they will have changed their attitudes or behaviours and/or they will have taken some specific action at your direction.

Your secondary audience will be those who may also be affected by your goals, but who are not the primary targets of change. So, for instance, if you are lobbying for improved access to information legislation, one of your primary audiences may be the general public, who you want to be better informed about the need for access to information and who you want to join an email campaign to target legislators. Another primary audience may be legislators, who you want to vote for a particular piece of legislation. Your secondary audience may be journalists, who are already informed about the legislation but whose work could be positively affected should improved legislation be passed. While you may not explicitly direct messages to your secondary audiences, you should be aware of them and their concerns so that your messages to your primary audience do not strike a negative chord with secondary audiences or erode your credibility with secondary audiences.

WHY? Your audience is made up of the people you want to inform, transform or motivate to act.

HOW? Identify the characteristics of your primary (and to a lesser degree, secondary) audiences. What is their gender, ethnicity, income level, education level, language? What kinds of professions/jobs do they have? Who influences them? What makes new information credible to them?

What do they think and do now? What are their current knowledge, attitudes and behaviours regarding your issue?

What would motivate them to learn, change or act? What’s in it for them? Why would they support—or oppose—your goal? How can you align your objectives or messages to resonate with what matters to them?

CASE STUDY:

IFEX

When IFEX embarked on a re-examination of its communication platforms and efforts in 2011, it worked with a communications consultant who, among other efforts, pushed the team to clearly describe its key audiences. During this discussion, it became clear that IFEX had for some time considered its key audience to be IFEX members, when in fact IFEX members were a secondary audience and/or stakeholders in IFEX communication efforts. Further discussion led to an understanding that IFEX’s key audiences are:

1. Media. Desired Action: To amplify IFEX’s message through publication or social media.
2. Concerned citizens and organisations. Desired Action: To act on specific calls to action (petitions, letters) and to share and amplify IFEX’s message (primarily through social media)
3. Influencers (legislators, bureaucrats, diplomats, etc). Desired Action: To initiate policy and legislative change, to exert pressure on other parties and to prompt action through that pressure
4. Academics. Desired Action: To synthesize and build knowledge base

In determining how best to communicate with its audiences, the IFEX team asked itself the question “What do IFEX’s audience want from IFEX?” This led to the following articulation of audience needs:

1. Prioritisation: Tell me what’s important
2. Crystallisation: Help me get a snapshot of the most important facts and figures
3. Contextualisation: Tell me what it means
4. Access: Help me find what I’m looking for quickly and easily, organised based on my needs rather than your internal structures
5. Voice: Tell me who you are—communicate IFEX’s values through the way you present information

This refined understanding of audience and needs enabled the team to redesign and relaunch the IFEX website and e-newsletters with a clarity of purpose and desired outcome that had been lacking until then. As the team articulated it, at each step, they asked themselves:What is the goal for each tool?

1. Who is the audience for each tool?
2. How does the tool equip and prompt the audience to IFEX’s desired action?
3. How do we embed IFEX’s communication values within each tool?
4. How do we use staff time and technology appropriately to deliver these tools effectively?
5. How do we evaluate the effectiveness of these tools?

The result was a communications plan focused on creating a “smart hub,” with IFEX’s website at the centre of the hub, drawing traffic in with the strategic deployment of information (rather than firehosing email); targeting audiences with communication tools and strategies built to meet their needs; and a focus on continually creating context.

IDENTIFY YOUR KEY MESSAGES

WHAT? If your audience is made up of the people who you want to inform, transform or motivate to act, then your key messages need to push your audiences to think, feel or act.

WHY? Key messages can:

• Show the importance, urgency or magnitude of an issue
• Show the relevance of an issue
• Put a human face on or attach a human story to an issue

Key messages should:

• Be targeted to specific audience
• Resonate with audience values, beliefs or interests
• Reflect an understanding of what would motivate that specific audience to think, feel or act
• Be culturally relevant and sensitive
• Be memorable

HOW? Outline your key messages by specific primary audience. Don’t worry about developing slogans or catch-phrases. At this stage, you simply want to develop clear underlying themes that can be used as the foundation for talking points, slogans and campaigns.

With each key message, ask yourself:

• Is this message geared to increasing my audience’s knowledge (informing/thinking)?
• Is this key message changing attitudes (transforming/feeling)?
• Is this key message changing behaviour (motivating/acting)?

Some messages may do all three.

Make your messages more effective by following these guidelines:

• Be clear: Avoid jargon, insider or bureaucratic language.
• Be consistent: Make sure your message is consistent across your organisation’s efforts. Also, if your message is one that audiences are hearing from more than one source, it will be more resonant. Can you amplify your message by having partners echo it?
• Be focused: Stress your main points and where possible, repeat them.
• Use an appropriate tone: Do you want your message to alarm? Challenge? Enrage? Reassure? Choose the tone that is appropriate to the message, audience and desired outcome.
• Be truthful and as complete as possible: Lying to or misleading your audience erodes your relationship with your audience, and makes it unlikely they will respond to your message the next time.
• Be credible and transparent: The source and spokesperson should be trustworthy. Be clear about what you know—and be just as clear about what you don’t know or areas where information is incomplete. Be transparent about relationships between your organisation and any other key players on the issue.
• Understand your audience: Why does your audience need or want to know what you’re telling them? Take their needs and wants into consideration as you craft your message.
• Test your messages: How do your internal audiences respond to your messages? Are you able to pretest messages with primary external audiences on a small scale before launch? Both will help you ensure that you are communicating what you intend to communicate and that you are provoking the response you intend to provoke.

IDENTIFY YOUR COMMUNICATION TOOLS/CHANNELS AND APPROPRIATE CONTENT MIX

WHAT? Your communication tools or channels may include:

• Your website
• E-newsletters
• PSAs in print, on radio, television or online
• Articles in mass or specialised media
• Transit advertising
• Public events
• Social media channels
• Conferences
• Press conferences

WHY? Some channels are better suited to particular audiences or to delivering particular types of content. You want to select channels that match both who you want to reach and the type of content you will use to convey that information. For instance, some channels are better at delivering contextual information—long-form articles, background information—than others. Some channels require the production of multimedia content. For others, infographics will deliver more value than articles, or photographs may be essential to getting your message noticed.

HOW? Identify what channels match the audiences you are trying to reach. Do you need to develop additional channels beyond the ones you already have?

Consider the type of content you will deploy on those channels. Conduct a PAC analysis:

• Platform: Is there data available that can tell me what type of information is most effective on this platform? What have others had success with on this platform? If I plan to share this content on multiple platforms, is there value in adjusting the way it is packaged from one platform to the next?
• Audience: What do I know about my audience that can help me determine how best to package this information?
• Capacity: What skills and tools do my content creators have at their disposal? What time, resource and other barriers do we face?

CASE STUDY:

CENTER FOR MEDIA FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY

When the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility (CMFR) in the Philippines reviewed the effectiveness of its website, it determined that new types of content were required to effectively share its information and to increase its website traffic and use. Specifically, CMFR determined that better use of multimedia content, including interactive maps and infographics would assist it in gaining traction with its desired audiences. With the assistance of an IFEX grant, CMFR embarked on staff training to review the content options and tools available, and improved its capacity through the purchase of appropriate hardware and software. Following this, CMFR increased its development of data visualisations, including maps of killings of journalists, a timeline of FOI legislation, the development of a World Press Freedom Day page and a Freedom of Information page. As a result of these efforts, CMFR saw its web hits and visits more than double year over year from July 2011 to July 2012.