Getting to know your audience beyond demographics
In the Margareting Model, the ‘know’ stage is the first step where people recognise they could use some support. For us in community services, it’s where we aim to understand what that experience is like for the people we want to reach. But first, we need to understand who the people we aim to help are… If your organisation usually defines this by demographics, this post is for you.
Who are you aiming to support?
It sounds like an easy question, but there are a few different ways community services describe who they’re aiming to support, and they vary in how helpful they are as a starting point for your Margareting.
Which of these sounds more like the way your service describes people?
Demographic - “We’re a service for children aged 5 - 18, diagnosed with a mental health condition, living in the local area”
Provision - “We’re a service for people who need expert help and guidance on financial and legal issues”
Situation - “We’re a service for people experiencing domestic abuse”
At first glance, the most specific and accurate description might sound like the demographics. I’ve worked in a few services with such specific eligibility criteria that we thought we knew our audience inside out. We knew all sorts of facts and figures, right down to where they live - we could knock on their door. In a couple of services, we actually did! So why weren’t we seeing an increase in people using the service?
Well, just because you see that someone could benefit from your service, doesn’t mean they can!
“older people’s services” are the worst offender for putting demographics front and centre in their promotion, and then wonder why people don’t want to engage?
It’s a bit like that party game, “who am I?” where someone puts a celebrity name on a post-it on your head and you have to guess who you are. Demographics could help you go out and pop a post-it on the forehead of everyone you’ve identified as part of your target audience, it’s wonderfully accurate that way, but then what?
You also need to be able to help people identify themselves, in a way that’s meaningful to them.
In the game, it works best if you choose a name that means something to the person who has to guess - that they definitely know who they are, they know enough about the person to figure it out, and they’ll enjoy finding out they’re this person. It’s no fun to spend ages guessing, and it turns out to be someone you’ve never heard of, or that you’re someone you really dislike.
In a similar way, if the reason people need to use your service carries any level of stigma, it’s not going to be nice having that post-it put on their head.
So demographics can be part of your market research if it needs to be, but it shouldn’t be part of your promotion and comms.
But everyone else uses demographics?
Sure, defining your audience by demographic is fairly standard practice, and used by some of the most successful businesses in the world. But there are a lot of things that work for commercial businesses that aren’t right for our sector and this is one of them.
Marketing in a commercial business is a numbers game. For them, the priority is identifying who’s likely to spend more money and cost less to reach. They don’t need to identify exactly who’s going to buy their product. They don’t need to serve the community equitably and fairly. If a business targets female homeowners aged 35 - 64 with a cleaning product, but finds it’s actually being bought by teachers to use as a childrens’ toy, that’s not a problem, profit is profit! But in community services, we need to be more accurate. Not just because we often have restrictions on who can use our services and would have to turn the ‘wrong’ people away, but because if we’re not accurately reaching the people who need our support that means they’re struggling alone.
This stage of Margareting is about knowing exactly who needs us, so we can find them at the start of the journey and pave the way to get to our support.
What situation are people in when they need your support?
Feeling overwhelmed by bills and mounting debt
What everyone you want to reach will have in common is that they need your support, right?
So I find it most helpful to think about the situation people are in - why do they need your support?
Just setting aside the way the service usually describes itself, or any eligibility criteria for now, think about any average person… what would need to be happening in their life for them to find your service helpful?
Is it something in their health, housing, finances, family life…?
Try to put yourself in their shoes and think about it from their perspective - what do they notice, what would they say is going on?
Everyone’s different, so there won’t just be one situation for everyone you support, but I find it helps to start by brainstorming potential themes.
What opportunities might you have to reach them?
The next step is to think about how that situation changes for people over time. What could happen to prompt someone in that situation to seek help?
As humans, we’re very adaptable, and many of the challenges that community services aim to help with can creep up gradually. It can be like the boiling frog, that we don’t realise how bad things are getting at first, and we can find ourselves in crisis before we realise it.
And the key thing for Margareting is that there will often be moments along the way where people consider seeking support, but decide against it for all sorts of reasons. Your challenge is to find them, and see how you can reach out in those moments.
For example, if you’re offering help with debt you might want to speak to people about when they first started to notice a problem, and what it’s been like since then. Perhaps you find more people contact you at the end of each month when bills are coming in, and particularly at the end of longer months when the money is getting stretched further, so you hold events or drop-ins at those times to help people find you. But then as you speak to more people, perhaps you learn that in the early days they used to feel more optimistic about paying off their debts and would start each month determined to get back on track, looking for money saving tips and cheap batch-cooking recipes… that could be your opportunity to reach people earlier.
The key is to be there when people are looking for support, offering the support they’re looking for.
It can take some creative thinking, and it might not be easy to convince management to invest in ads about meal planning instead of budgeting, but start small while you test the water and see what works, and you can build from there.
Consider eligibility last
If your service has an eligibility criteria, the last step is to bring it back into the mix.
After all, the eligibility criteria isn’t really there to describe who could benefit from the service, is it? It’s there to set boundaries, so that funds aren’t wasted on people who can’t benefit from the service.
NHS Talking Therapies aren’t allowed to help outside their clinical remit, and often had to turn away people needing support with addiction, bereavement or severe and complex mental health conditions. They used the back of their flyer to signpost to other services.
But to be applied fairly and consistently, it needs to use verifiable and measurable ways of deciding who can and can’t use the service. Which means it usually relies on demographics. In figuring out the best ways to describe wonderfully complex and diverse humans in the limited palette that facts and figures provides, sometimes the Venn Diagram of who can benefit and who is eligible aren’t quite the same circle.
Older people’s services are the perfect example of this - most services aiming to support people in later life often use “over 65” as their eligibility criteria because you have to draw the line somewhere, but obviously the problems they support with don’t turn up with the cake on your 65th birthday!
So if you do have a demographic eligibility criteria, there’s two things:
Consider it last, when you’re working to understand your audience. In my experience being conscious of the eligibility criteria can prime us to look at who we’re aiming to reach through that restrictive demographic lens. We might find it difficult to think outside the box and overlook people, and sometimes we can be influenced by stereotypes and misconceptions around those demographic groups.
Don’t focus on demographics in your promotion. Focus on the need, add the eligibility criteria as information about which people with that need you can help, and include pointers to other services for the people you can’t help. If every service did that, we’d all be better off as a community - that wherever you turned for support, you’d get pointed in the right direction. Because every time someone contacts a service and gets turned away with “sorry, we can’t help you if you’re X, Y, Z” they’re a little less likely to try again - not just for that issue, but any other time they need support. And then we call them “hard to reach”.
