Part I. Developing an Outreach Campaign Plan
Step 2: Identify & analyze the target audience

Analyzing the target audience

Once you've identified the target audiences you plan to focus on, you'll need to collect information on them before proceeding to the next step. First, think of the target audience as your customer. What are the needs of your customer? To change behavior, you need to spend some time considering what you can offer the customer that he or she is willing to buy into and that will achieve your goal or milestone. Since you are essentially selling your customer a product, idea or service such as voluntary behavior change, membership in your organization, or participation in a stream restoration project, you will need to find out critical information about your customers and how they make decisions.

Five types of information are needed to characterize and assess the target audience/customer:

• Demographics
• Knowledge of the issue
• Attitudes/beliefs/perceptions
• Communication channels
• Social data

How do I get information on my target audience?

You can use several different tools depending on the makeup of the target audience and your available resources (time and money). There are many different types of information that you can collect to make your plan stronger, so don't worry if you don't have access to professional market researchers or can't make your survey results statistically significant. What's important is that you collect as much as you possibly can and use it to its full advantage. Following are some of the tools that can help you gather information on your target audience:

• Demographic databases (e.g., county information systems, U.S. Census Bureau)
• Public agencies (e.g., health departments, state environmental agencies)
• Trade associations
• Surveys (e.g., mail, phone, or Internet)
• Focus groups
• Community discussions

Phone surveys are one of the best ways to collect current information from a random sample of your target audience. In a recent survey conducted by the Southwest Florida Water Management District, only 19 percent of Tampa Bay area residents knew that they lived in a watershed. The survey results validated the need for a comprehensive watershed education program. The phone survey polled 402 households in the Brooker Creek watershed at a cost of $15,000.

In a survey conducted by the New York Academy of Sciences in 2001 for the New York-New Jersey Harbor Project, 42 percent of residents of the New York-New Jersey Harbor Watershed who are interested in keeping up with issues facing the harbor mention newspapers as their source for finding out about such issues. Twenty-two percent of these residents indicate that they prefer to stay informed through mailings such as flyers or newsletters. Seventeen percent mention the Internet, and 15 percent mention television. This kind of information is extremely useful in helping to identify message formats and distribution methods later in Steps 4 and 5.

National surveys can also be useful. Results of a March 2005 poll undertaken jointly by the Luntz Research Companies, and Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates show that more than eight in 10 Americans believe that clean and safe water is a national issue that deserves federal investment. By 67 percent to 26 percent, Americans prefer spending to guarantee clean and safe water over tax cuts.

After you've collected information on the target audience, you need to analyze and understand them. What drives them to engage in the behaviors you'd like to change? What are the barriers to modifying their management practices or behaviors? Learning the answers to these questions will help you understand how your audience thinks and how you can tailor your messages to motivate changes in behavior.