Determine Your
Target Audiences

Describing in detail the audience (or audiences) for your program-- who you want to reach and influence with your messages-- will help you develop relevant messages and materials and identify the channels most likely to reach them. Few messages are appropriate for everyone, given the diverse interests, needs, concerns, and priorities of different segments of the public. Trying to reach everyone with one message or strategy may dilute your message so that it appeals to few rather than many people.

Describing Your Target Audience

Try to think about all of the physical, demographic, and, perhaps, psychographic characteristics of the people you are trying to reach to help divide "the public" into more manageable groups or target audiences.

Characteristics include:

• physical-- sex, age, health history of family, and type and degree of exposure to health risks, medical conditions, disorders, and illnesses.
  
  
  
• behavioral-- media exposure, membership in organizations, health-related activities, and other lifestyle characteristics
  
  
  
• demographic-- occupation, income, educational attainment, family situation, places of residence and work, cultural characteristics
  
  
  
• psychographic-- attitudes, opinions, beliefs, values, self-appraisal and other personality traits

The more complete a profile or description you can develop of your audience, the better you will be prepared to develop a program suited to them.


"Segmenting" Target Audiences

Once you describe what you know about whom you want to reach, you should be able to "segment" or separate your target audience from the rest of the general population. You may find that you want to reach several distinct population groups.

Primary target audiences are those you want to affect in some way; you may have several primary target audiences. If so, you should set priorities among them to help order your planning and allocate your resources. Secondary target audiences are those with influence on the primary audience or those who must do something in order to help cause the change in the primary target audience.

The process of identifying and defining audiences should lead to setting audience priorities; that is deciding:

• which audience segments are most important
  
  
  
• which audiences are important but less critical because of their health status, influence, or link to the primary target audience(s) or limited program resources
  
  
  
• who will not be a target audience for the program. This decision provides valuable program direction for decisions regarding message development and dissemination, helping assure that all program resources are spent productively.

Establish Audience
Tracking System

If you are designing a major communication program that will stretch over a long time, building audience tracking into your program plans will assure that you can:

• find out what your target audience knows, thinks, and does before you begin activities (baseline data)
  
  
  
• periodically survey to assess progress and the need for modification or new activities
  
  
  
• identify the change in status among the target audience when your program is completed.
  
  
  
  
  

All too frequently, audience surveys undertaken only are during and after the program, or are inappropriately timed to occur too far after the program completion, or are sporadic or incompatible and results cannot be compared. To avoid these problems, consider whether audience tracking is appropriate for your program at this early planning stage.

Assess Resources

It is important that you assess your resources to determine what and how much you realistically will be able to accomplish. Setting realistic expectations can help you avoid the frustration of not accomplishing as much as anticipated. To set realistic objectives, think about these questions:


1. What are the greatest areas of need?


2. Which activities will contribute the most to answering these needs?


3. What resources are available? Include:

• staff and other "people" resources committee members, associates from other programs, and volunters
  
  
  
• budget--funds and in kind resources such as computer time, mailing costs, printing
  
  
  
• services available from another source; educational materials free or at cost
  
  
  
• information-- about the issue, the target audience, the community and media structures, and available educational materials
  
  
  
• time-- the number of weeks, months, or years available to complete the program.

4. What community activities, organizations, and or other contributing factors exist?


5. What barriers (such as approval obstacles, absence of funding, hard-to-reach target audience) do you face?


6. Which activities would best use the resources you have identified and best fit within the identified constraints?

Those activities identified in Question 6 should become your priorities.


Coping with Limited Resources

"Resources" include a lot more than funding, as demonstrated in Question 3 above. Sometimes you may feel so constrained by lack of funds that developing a program appears impossible. An honest assessment may lead to the conclusion that a productive program is not possible; on the other hand, sufficient intangible resources (that is, other than "hard funding") may be available to proceed.

Remember: Adequate funding alone won't guarantee program success. In addition to careful program development, you'll need the cooperation and help of your own associates and, perhaps, other organizations. That's why Questions 5 and 6 above are important to consider as you decide whether and how to develop a new health communication program.

Draft Communication
Strategies

Now that you have defined what needs to be done (goals and objectives) with whom (target audiences), it is time to design communication strategies most likely to get you there. The strategy statement begins with:

• the program objectives
  
  and
  
• the primary and secondary audiences
  
  
  and adds:
  
  
  
• the target information to be communicated
  
  and
  
• the benefit, as perceived by the audiences

The strategy statement provides all program staff, including writers and creative staff with the same direction for developing all messages and materials. It also may contain the tactics that will be used to reach target audiences with the appropriate messages.

The audience benefit-- what they will gain that they perceive as important or valuable-- may be different from your perceptions of what the benefit is (e.g., improved health) and may be different for each audience identified. Stage 3 discusses focus groups and other means to help identify what the target audience perceives as important.

The strategy statement also should describe why the audience would want the benefit, to help direct creative development.

Developing the strategy statement provides a good test of whether you have enough information to begin developing messages. You may be tempted to skip this step, but the strategy statement forms a foundation and the boundaries for all creative development. Seeking agency (and perhaps community) approval of the strategies at this early stage can make them feel informed and ease the approvals and cooperation you may need later.

Once you have decided on the communication strategies, all program elements should be compatible with these strategies-- that means every program task should contribute to the established objectives and be targeted to the identified audiences; all messages and materials should incorporate the benefits and other information in the strategy statement.

As you develop the program and learn more about the audience and their perceptions, you may need to alter or refine the strategy statement. However, it should be changed only to reflect improved information that will strengthen your capability to reach the program's goals. It should not be altered to accommodate a great idea that is "off strategy.''

Home | Stage 1 (cont')