‘Values and framing’ are a current obsession of forward-thinking digital charity people, and with good reason. It means finding out what your audiences’ deeply held values are in relation to your cause (e.g, do they think poverty is an inevitability of life or that it’s largely due to unfair societal structures?), and then framing your messages to appeal to those values. It’s an obsession because so many charities still make decisions about messaging based on internal stakeholder opinions and assumptions, without ever properly talking to their audiences. It’s a huge problem.
For organisations that see the importance of doing audience research to understand their values, there’s still a large hurdle in terms of the resources required. Research can be expensive, and it’s difficult to get the budget, time and permission to do anything significant. That’s why I was so pleased to see this article on ‘Audience Insight on a Budget’ from CharityComms in the UK, about how three charities have managed to carry out useful audience research on tiny budgets. There’s some great ideas there, and some useful advice about how to make research carried out like this is properly managed and weighted.
Photo by YouX Ventures on Unsplash.com