Audience Research for Member Organizations: What you can start doing right now and when to hire out
By William Fritzberg, Senior Consultant, LX LabsIn March, Onlea’s engagement research and communications consultancy, LX Labs turned 5. With that milestone, we reflected on our experiences helping leaders and teams navigate change in all its forms and the kinds of challenges they hire us for.
The biggest challenge organizations share with us
One particular problem stands out and continues to come up more often than not across our client base:
‘Our numbers are down and we don’t know why… our old way of doing things is no longer working’
–Most common problem statement from LX Labs consulting clients
Every organization serves an audience–whether you are a member-based association, regulator, work in healthcare promotion or in charge of your employees’ professional development and growth. Delivering tangible value to your audience is key to sustainable growth and results. Membership organizations in particular are devoted to creating value for their audiences in a mutually beneficial exchange, trading their time and PD budgets for networking and career support, a professional affiliation or licensure to practice.
For organizations, developing strong relationships with audiences is often tied to program delivery and performance, educational mandates, funding and budgeting, progress on strategic goals, team development and service delivery. Having a clear idea of what audiences need also informs technology choices and engagement modalities. For audiences, their needs and preferences are constantly changing and there can be many factors driving their needs.
Across client research projects with LX Labs we’ve seen the following patterns drive changes in engagement behaviour:
| Emerging Modalities | Changes in Desires | Audience Need for Relevance | Return on Dwindling Time |
|---|---|---|---|
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Complicating audience and organizational relationships are additional factors like intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation. Are audiences self-motivated to engage with your programs or are they required to participate? These factors can alter audience organization perception and impact whether audiences engage freely and do so for their own benefit. In many ways, organizations where audiences are required to engage have it easier than organizations where audiences are considering where they spend their time amongst different organizations serving similar content.
The Solution – How you can keep up with your audiences
You may have heard phrases like ‘we're living in an age of big data,’ ‘we need an evidence-based strategy,’ or ‘human centred design.” What all of these phrases have in common is effective and consistent research helps organizations track the performance of their initiatives and create solutions their audiences will adopt. Ignoring research when developing a new program or solving an unclear challenge poses many risks including focusing on the wrong audience or a not so important problem they have.
So how can you improve your audience engagement with research?
Define Your Audience
You can start by identifying or revising the demographic information or characteristics that define your audience e.g. age, location, life experience, goals and challenges, supports and experience with technology. Do you have existing data about your audience? What patterns are present? Can you segment your audience—are there themes that connect members of your audience in a certain way?
Establish Metrics to Track Performance
What are some ways you are currently providing value to your audience? Do you run campaigns, put on events, webinars, write articles, produce a podcast, newsletter, videos, create resources, courses or maintain a website? What does success look like for your organization? How do those activities support your programming and strategic mandates? Are visitors coming to your website? Do you have Google Analytics set up or a dashboard where you can monitor activity? What insights can you infer from your existing data about your audiences’ engagement with your organization?
Create Audience Feedback Opportunities
Beyond collecting direct quantitative data about your audiences’ activity with your programs and activities, another level is to regularly conduct surveys, interviews or focus groups and create feedback collection opportunities on new or existing initiatives. You can formalize your research gathering process by establishing set intervals like annually or every 6 months. You can even identify in new projects key points where audience feedback can help you validate an idea early. Some organizations even create audience panels where a pre-recruited group of people can be tapped at short notice to give their feedback. By operationalizing your audience research collection processes, you can know what works, more clearly define your teams’ roles and optimize where effort is spent.
When to do audience research yourself and when to hire out
Audience research is never done, therefore it is operational in nature. Finding ways to continuously improve will help you maximize your time and your staffs’ efforts. Big research projects usually stem from industry changes in regulation, downward engagement trends, onboarding a new audience or adopting a new technology. Reviewing your existing data is a good place to start. On your own or with your team you can start anytime and see what’s working or not working, try small experiments and make adjustments as you go.
Hiring an external audience research partner might be a good investment when you:
- Want to hear what your audience is thinking but don't want to bias their answers.
- Are uncertain what the problem or solution is.
- Technology is involved.
- There's an emerging technology people in your sector are excited about but you're not sure if you should adopt it.
- You're not seeing the uptake you expect from a new program or offering.
- You don't know which modality is right for your audience.
- You're not sure if you are solving the right problem for your audience.
- Budgets are due and you need data to make an argument of how funds get used.
- You need buy-in from your board.
- You're wondering where you should place your efforts.
- You have a new idea, pilot or initiative and you want to get early feedback or validation before building it out further.
- You’re adding to or expanding your team and want to provide them with an evidence-backed strategy or direction.
- You’re rebranding and want to know if the new design will resonate with your audience.
It should be noted that getting feedback from your audience alone is not enough to create positive and sustainable engagement. Research can help us understand audience behavior, their sentiment and how they perceive their own needs. However, creating engaging programs and content is often a result of synthesizing those needs into an experience or product they themselves have not found, otherwise, they would go elsewhere. Interpreting what audiences truly need—beyond what they say—requires creativity and intuition on the part of researchers and organizations. This is where design thinking thrives: making imaginative leaps from incomplete or indirect data to craft experiences that feel intuitive, even personal. You’ve likely felt this yourself when a product seems to anticipate your needs before you voice them. Talented creatives and designers excel at transforming these insights into innovative, human-centered solutions that meet your audiences’ most pressing challenges.
How Can Onlea Help You?
Download our FREE Audience Research Starter Checklist and get started today on improving your engagement in small and measurable ways:
Hire our experienced audience engagement researchers to get answers to your biggest questions and the evidence to drive support for your next initiative, organizational strategy or big move.