After reading some of my recent posts on identifying your target audience, you may be wondering: “Hey Erica, that’s great. I get that my target audience isn’t just like me and they aren’t simply defined by their demographics, but what do I do to figure out who they are?” So today, I’ll start you off with some questions that will lead you down the path of defining your audience and then later this month, I’ll be posting a bit of a deeper dive from a guest blogger who has a scrappy approach to helping organizations do this type of audience analysis.
So without further delay, here are some of those questions to ask yourself about your current and future supporters:
- For what goal am I gathering this data, e.g. donor retention, donor acquisition, volunteer recruitment, board recruitment?
- What data am I already collecting on donors and other supporters?
- When I ask our best supporters why they’re involved, what do they say? What got them excited about our organization the very first time they engaged? Why do they stay engaged?
- Where do our supporters, and supporters of organizations with similar or complementary missions, hang out both online and offline?
- Who is talking about my mission online? Who is influential?
- Why do supporters believe in our work? That early childhood education leads to lifelong success? That clean drinking water is a human right?
A little group brainstorming over cocktails can really super-charge your organization’s focus on your highest priority audiences, aka your believers.