Discover: Understand the problem your audience faces. The aim of this step is to paint a clear picture of who your end users are, what challenges they face, and what needs and expectations must be met. Based on that, you can define a clear human-centred problem statement, focused on your users' needs.
Who are you talking to? It may seem like a simple question, but it is one of the questions many communicators struggle to answer. Campaigners and NGOs will often say “everyone” or spin out a very broad target audience statement.
Knowing who your target audience is, is key to be able to successfully achieve your intended results. Gaining a deep understanding of young people is the first step to youth-centred design, which is the underlying principle that should guide the design of your interventions for young people.
Broad target audiences have been a staple of media and communications for decades. Broadcasters use these to segment their shows, publications and articles. Typically, a broad target audience is based on demographic and geographic information. We can tell a great deal about a person simply by examining the demographic data about their life – their age, income level, education, occupation – but by itself, this data is only of limited use. It tells us nothing about their aspirations, their beliefs, their attitudes, or any other subjective psychological measure. Defining your broad target audience is the starting point. It is your first distillation of your audience.
Typically, a broad target audience is based on demographic and geographic information:
Demographic Information (I) | Demographic Information (II) | Geographic Information |
Age | Occupation | Resources |
Gender | Religion | Cultures |
Ethnicity | Nationality | Neighbourhoods |
Income | Lifecycle | City |
Qualification | Language | Region |
Marital Status | Race | Countries |
Sexuality | Media Use |
Although it is widely accepted that youth should always be engaged in the design of programmes and interventions intended for them, there are various terms that are used interchangeably that refer to different ways or levels of youth engagement. The following table from Y-labs describes the differences between Youth-Led, Youth-Driven, and Youth-Centred design.
There are several resources that can help develop your meaningful youth engagement approach:
How can you determine on which channels you can find your target audience? Social listening tools can help you gain key insights into for example the gender, age and location of your social media audiences.
INDIVIDUAL LEVEL – DIGITAL CHANNELS
Source: WHO, “Youth-centred digital health interventions, A Framework for Planning, Developing and Implementing Youth-Targeted Digital Health Interventions”, 2020
Questions:
In order to determine through which channel you can best reach your target audience, you need to research your channels, and find out key information about your channels including demographics and psychographics of the typical users. Different channels appeal to different types of audiences.
Questions:
Personas focus mostly on psychographic and behavioural information. A persona represents different characteristics of similar people (behaviour, motivation, goals and frustrations) into one fictional character through which a group can be understood. You can create multiple personas, to describe different target (sub)groups. However, start with developing 1-2 personas, and try to keep your personas to a maximum of 6. Too many personas will result in a lack of focus and not help you and your team to create targeted, persona-specific content. Choose your most important distinctive personas, to be targeted in your activities.
Making a fictional persona can help you to get in the mindset of your target audience. It forces you to step into their shoes and think about the things he or she encounters in his or her day-to-day life. It also helps to create a visualisation and common understanding of your target audience, which makes it easier to relate to.
Tip! The YCD Toolkit contains a complete set of resources to conduct a “build personas” workshop! It will help you build personas that are relevant to your organisation, service or program from real information and data.
Although a persona is a fictional character, they should be realistic and based on research, perhaps one of the young people you interviewed comes to mind? In order to create a persona, you want to provide a clear picture on what the persona thinks, sees, hears and does.
Ask the following questions:
A persona should be realistic. In order for a persona to be useful and easy to relate to, avoid creating stereotypical users and create a persona based on research data. You will therefore need to: get data, find patterns in the data & create personas based on those patterns.
There are many tools available that can help you find the kind of information needed to be able to create a persona. You can use social media analytics, focus groups, baseline research, surveys, Google Trends, interviews, etc.
Be very clear about exactly what it is that you are trying to change – this step is an essential part of finding the right solution.Answer the questions:
You can use the 3 tools below to help you with problem discovery:
AIM OF THE TOOL
HOW?
AIM OF THE TOOL
HOW?
AIM OF THE TOOL
HOW?