---
# System prepended metadata

title: 'Week 4: Audience'

---

# Audience

:::info
:bulb: The following prompts are to help you in developing clear and specific ideas about who your audience/market/user base is for your project/intervention/action. By the end of the exercise, you should have a very clear and specific idea of who you are targeting. It might even be that you are trying to target specific named individuals. If not, you might end up with a specific named community or a collection of detailed personas.

Formulating your target audience requires first being clear on what you want to do and why. This will involve integrating some of the work you've done over the past couple weeks.
:::

## Objectives
- **Clarify Your Goal**: Understand what you want to achieve with your project and why.
- **Identify Your Audience**: Determine who will be most impacted or interested in your project.

## Exercise Steps

### Step 1: Issue, Objective, and Intervention
- **Issue**: Define the broad social issue you are addressing.
- **Objective**: State your specific strategic goal.
- **Intervention/Action**: Describe the specific tactic(s) you plan to use.

### Step 2: Theory of Change
- **Task**: Write 1-2 paragraphs explaining how your project objective connects to the broader social issue and justifies your intervention's effectiveness.

### Step 3: Analyzing Organizations and Individuals

 
- **Research**: Take a sample of the organisations and individuals you've found in your mapping.
- **Comparison**: Looking at an example of each of their works, what is the objective of that work? Is it the same or different from yours?  
- **Audience Identification**: Does the individual/org explicitly say who their audience/market/user base is? If not, who might you guess is their audience/market/user base?
- **Strategy Evaluation**: What do you think is the organisation/individual's strategy or theory of change in targeting this audience/market/user base towards their objectives?

### Step 4: Mapping Allies and Opposition

   
- **Identify Allies and Opponents**: Thinking about your project objective, does your map already include both potential allies and potential opposition to your efforts at achieving your objective? If your map doesn't already include both potential allies and potential opponents, consider extending your research to include at least a few examples of both.
- **Key Gatekeepers**: What institutions and specific named individuals are the key gatekeepers or decision-makers relevant to your objective?
- **Media Outlets**: What media outlets might have interest if your objective is successfully achieved?
- **Interested Demographics**: What types of people are interested in your issue and might be interested in the success of failure of your objective.


:::info
:bulb:
You should now have a list of different people, institutions, and groups/demographics in your map -- some of which are potential allies and some of which are potentially opponents. 
:::

### Step 5: Effectiveness vs. Impact Graph



- **Create a Graph**: Draw another graph of effectiveness vs impact, but this time for your potential allies/opponents. For each person/org/group in your list, how easy would might it be to influence them and how impactful might it be towards your objective?
- **Consider Interventions**: In making this graph, think about the ideas for interventions you've brainstormed so far. The effectiveness/impact of those interventions should roughly map onto this graph of specific people/orgs/groups you could target.

### Step 6: Selecting Your Target Audience

  
- **Choose**: Select one or more entities from your graph as your target audience.

:::info
:bulb:

If you choose a specific organisation or person to try to influence, you've now completed this exercise. 

If you select one or more groups/demographics, then you will have to do a little bit more in order to make sure you have a clear idea of what type of people are in those groups/demographics.
:::

- **Further definition**:
  - To do this, you can either select real named individuals that are a representative sample of the range of the group you'd like to target. If you don't have readily available a way to generate that representative sample of real individuals, you can instead follow a [persona profiling method](https://xd.adobe.com/ideas/process/user-research/putting-personas-to-work-in-ux-design/).

## :thought_balloon: :thought_balloon: :thought_balloon: :thought_balloon:
This exercise will help you gain a clear understanding of your project's target audience, ensuring that your efforts are directed effectively. Remember, the more specific you are, the better tailored your strategies can be.

