This document provides guidance on conducting audience research in 6 steps: 1) Define research goals and questions; 2) Identify audience and sample size; 3) Determine research method (e.g. surveys, interviews); 4) Create clear and unbiased questions; 5) Distribute questions and recruit participants; 6) Analyze and summarize responses. The goal is to better understand audiences in order to inform an organization's communication strategy and content creation through audience profiles and personas.

1. AUDIENCE
RESEARCH

2. WHAT DO AUDIENCES
"LOOK LIKE?"

6. SENTIMENTS AND FEELINGS EXPRESSED PUBLICALLY
What can you get from comments and questions?
OTHER FEEDBACK OR SURVEYS
What has your org or team done before that you can look at?
ANALYTICS
What can you see in your dashboards
STILL NEED MORE? ASK THEM!
WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT YOUR AUDIENCES?
1. WHO ARE YOUR AUDIENCES?
Your supporters, participants, partners, communities

7. STEP 1: DEFINE YOUR
PROBLEM NEEDS AND
CENTRAL QUESTION

8. 1. WRITE DOWN YOUR RESEARCH GOAL
Explore and analyse issues, behaviours, test content strategy
2. WRITE DOWN YOUR PROBLEM NEED
What you think is not working very well
3. WRITE DOWN YOUR MAIN RESEARCH QUESTION
Central question you want to ask: why do people use the app in this way? Are
people using the activities the way we hope, etc
4. UNPACK THIS INTO MORE RESEARCH QUESTIONS
Expand on the above: what else do you want to know? What are your core
question areas/ categories?

9. STEP 2: IDENTIFY YOUR
AUDIENCE AND SAMPLE

10. 1. HIGH LEVEL WHO
Whom do you want to understand better? Why?
2. WHAT DEFINES THEM?
Place, demographics, relationship to you, attitudes, knowledge, experiences
etc. Aim for variations (not everyone exactly the same)
3. HOW MANY PEOPLE MUST YOU FIND?
a smaller sample works fine for qualitative research as this is usually about
richness in detail – can be as little as 10 if you have enough variation; a bigger
sample is usually needed for quantitative research as this is usually about
scale. 100-300 (about 10% of the population for example)
4. HOW TO FIND THEM?
can you invite them to participate? do you need to recruit them? Will you put
out a call with the criteria? make sure you have as much variance as possible.

11. STEP 3: DETERMINE YOUR
QUESTIONING METHOD

12. 1.SURVEYS
Online, offline: people fill out questions (close ended or open ended)
2. INTERVIEWS (STRUCTURED AND UNSTRUCTURED, FACE TO FACE, TELEPHONE,
ONLINE)
People answer the same questions as everyone else; you do not ask extra or go
off script (structured)
You ask people questions without structure and go with the flow (unstructured)
3. FOCUS GROUPS AND WORKSHOPS
Group questions, more open ended, less predictable
4. GUERILLA QUESTIONS
On the streets, vox pops
5. USER TESTING, OBSERVATION
Observing how people use a product, asking them how they did things
SOME GOOD TYPES FOR OUR USES

13. 1. WHAT KINDS OF QUESTIONS ARE YOU ASKING?
Qualitative or quantitative? Do you want lots of rich detail or mainly
numerical data? Or a mix?
2. WHAT ARE YOUR/YOUR TEAMS SKILLS?
What will be easiest for you to do?
3. WHO ARE YOU RESEARCH PARTICIPANTS?
Think about your relationship with participants (especially if you are doing
qualitative research) and how they will respond to you and the method.
Consider if they are often consulted or surveyed and whether if could be
helpful or unhelpful to stick with their comfort zone or not.
HOW DO I CHOOSE?

14. STEP 4: CREATE YOUR
QUESTIONS

15. 1.OPEN ENDED AND CLOSE ENDED (E.G. MULTIPLE CHOICE, TICK BOXES, SCALE)
Use mainly close ended surveys with a few open ended for depth
Focus groups, workshops, and interviews tend to be open ended
Telephone interviews may be close ended for ease, depending on the situation like language or audio
quality
2. THE QUESTIONS ARE RELEVANT AND RELATIVELY ORIGINAL
They relate to your research question(s)
They will add value to your knowledge and help you solve your problem
They are original or tweaked from an open-source database
Your team can see the value and relevance of the questions
3. LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATION
Will you research be in the language of your audiences? Do you need translations?
4. SECTIONS
Reate your sections to reflect your research questions or what came out of your research questions
5. LOGIC AND FLOW
Does everyone answer all the questions?
6. OVERALL QUESTION TIME
Surveys shouldn't take more than 20 minutes, interviews, focus groups

16. 1. PHRASING IS CLEAR, SIMPLE AND SPECIFIC
You have been as specific as possible
You are only asking one question in a question
You’ve been as concise as possible
You’ve avoided using loaded language or any jargon/sector specific language
Options to choose from (e.G. Mcqs are well developed)
2. QUESTIONS ARE FRIENDLY
Your tone should be helpful, considerate
3. YOUR QUESTIONS ARE NEUTRAL
They do not lead people to answers
4. QUESTIONS HAVE A LOGIC TO THEM
5. SAVE YOUR DEMOGRAPHICS FOR LAST (MAKE THE END EASY)
QUESTION STYLE

17. STEP 5: DISTRIBUTE YOUR
QUESTIONS

18. IS YOUR QUESTIONNAIRE/ ARE YOUR QUESTIONS EDITED AND CHECKED?
HAVE YOU RECRUITED YOUR SAMPLE OR KNOW HOW TO FIND THEM?
ARE YOU DOING YOUR RESEARCH FACE TO FACE OR ONLINE, OR VIA INSTANT
MESSAGE, SMS?
DO YOUR RESPONDENTS HAVE ALL THE INFO THEY NEED TO PARTICIPATE?
ARE YOU PUTTING OUT AN OPEN CALL ON SOCIAL MEDIA, WEBSITE, OR
NEWSLETTER?
HAVE YOU GOT AN INCENTIVE FOR RESPONDENTS TO THANK THEM FOR THEIR
TIME OR USE OF DATA? LUCKY DRAW?
DO YOUR LINKS WORK?

19. STEP 6: ANALYSE YOUR
RESPONSES

20. SIT WITH YOUR DATA
Look through it, what can you see? What is expected/ unexpected? What
patterns can you see?
ORGANISE YOUR DATA
pull out the stats
pull out graphs or tables you want to keep
pull out the questions you want to keep
CODE YOUR QUALITATIVE DATA
Create columns
Allocate numbers in each column for different themes or topics in answers
SUMMARISE
Write short summaries of your theme patterns
Write short summaries on your quantitative data

21. STEP 7: PLUG THIS INTO
YOUR STRATEGY/ AND
CREATE PERSONAS

22. CHOOSE A FORMAT TO PRESENT YOUR FINDINGS
Create your audience overviews in a simple form
slides, written reports, infographics?
UPDATE YOUR COMMS STRATEGY OR CONTENT SCHEDULE
How do your findings influence how you plan your content?
how do your findings influence how you want to manage these relationships
and your goals?
How will your comms change?
CREATE A PERSONA/ PERSONAS
create an audience persona that embodies the characteristics you have seen –
you could either do simple ones or break them into more complex characters.