What Your Audience Really Wants
Lessons learned from helping one of my clients reach theirs
A glee client wanted to find new ways to better reach their team of 800+ employees. To get a sense of the wants and needs of this diverse internal audience, I personally interviewed over a dozen cross-functional leaders, asking questions like:
If you could describe current internal communications you receive from [insert team name] in two words, what would they be?
What key messages/topics do you hear from [insert team name] today & what do you hope to hear from them in the future?
Of the following communication channels, which do you prefer hearing updates through? (include list)
How often do you want to hear from [insert team name]?
Meeting with key stakehlolders 1:1 helped me get a sense of where there were opportunities to improve the quality & clarity of their communications.
While everyone’s communication wants and needs are unique, the insights from each conversation ended up being worth their weight in gold. Sure, surveys are easier. Marketers send them out all the time. But there’s something incredibly valuable in terms of qualitative feedback that can only come through human-to-human interaction.
The strategy we built using this feedback not only earned this leader rave reviews and enthusiasm from their people, but it also helped grow trust and create a culture of knowledge-sharing across the organization.
When it comes to planning your next campaign – whether internal or external – knowing how to gather and leverage the right insights is critical to achieving the desired outcomes. Some of the lessons I learned were specific to this client and industry. But many speak to the broader wants and needs of the audiences you may be trying to reach right now.
“Big Picture” Takeaways
Identify and act on themes. If there’s a piece of feedback you’re hearing from your audience over and over again, it’s time to move past data capture and create an action plan to address it. For this client of mine, employees were expressing the desire for more visibility into the projects their colleagues were working on across the organization. Part of our action plan to respond included creating a content calendar and a simple process for gathering important updates and communicating them out on a regular cadence. This showed interviewed respondents that we not only heard but actually valued the feedback they shared enough to take action.
Engage the outliers. Whenever you analyze feedback – survey or interview data – you’re going to get some responses that feel like outliers. While you can’t take action on every piece of feedback all at once, it’s important to sit with even those out-of-left-field comments and simply ask: “Where does this fit into the broader puzzle?” Your audience members have reasons for feeling the way that they do, so put on your empathy cap and consider the factors that may have brought this piece of feedback (negative or positive) to the table. You’ll learn something valuable and worth leveraging as you determine a path forward.
If you do nothing else…
When in doubt, say “I’m sorry” and “Thank you.” I’m going to go out on a limb and say that most organizations would succeed in winning over their audience if they spent more time saying two simple things: “I’m sorry” and “Thank you.” Chances are, if your audience feels wronged or miscommunicated with, they want those feelings acknowledged. They want to hear that you see and understand where they’re coming from. I learned during my time at HOPE International that gratitude is probably one of the most powerful communication tools on the planet. Use it with abundance!
