Identifying your target audience is a crucial step in conducting a climate outreach campaign. Any given campaign may have multiple target audiences, but narrowing down target audiences is the most important way to ensure that the campaign you develop will provide each audience segment the information, messages and motivation they need to act.

There are three primary steps involved:

• Prioritize your target audience(s) and identify what you want them to do
• Learn as much as you can about who your audience is and how they think/feel
• Determine how likely they are to change their behavior based on their experience with the issue

IMCOOL Campaign Audience

Creators of the IMCOOL campaign have identified the primary target audience for this campaign as the “Going Greens”:  Community-minded people that are concerned about the environment and climate change.  These are people that are “going green” – they do not self-identify as environmentalists but do believe that climate change exists.  They have not yet made any significant modifications in the behaviors to help reduce their personal impact on climate change.  They do believe that individual actions can make a difference.

Among this group, this campaign targets two distinct sub-groups:

• Leaders and influencers – those that influence their peers
• Broader “going green” group

Target Audience Identification: Step-by-Step

The three steps are outlined in more detail below for those who would like to identify a different target or expand upon the one outline above.

Step 1: The Who and the What

Prioritize your target audiences and identify the desired behavior change

• Start by brainstorming all audiences
• Categorize each audiences as follows:
  • Primary (those whose behavior you are trying to change)
  • Influencer (those that can influence the primary audience to change their behavior)
  • Gatekeeper (those that can prevent or facilitate access to the primary audience)
       Note:  It is sometimes possible to have an audience fall into more than one category
• Chose your “priority” audiences – those that can most quickly and cost-effectively get you to your goal
• For each priority audience, identify the behavior you want to change

Step 2: Why They Do What They Do
Find out as much as you can about your priority audience groups:

Demographics:

Who they are, based on factors such as age, income level, gender, geography, job title? This is your audience by the numbers.

Psychographics:

What are their attitudes, values, lifestyles, and opinions? What do they do? What are their current behaviors influenced by? What do they think and feel (their attitudes)?

Using the audience profile created, determine what the barriers and potential motivations are for behavior change.  Why have they not taken action in the past?

Step 3: Where Are They?

Determine where each priority audience group is on the behavior change continuum. A few notes in using this continuum:

• Different target audiences may be at different stages of the continuum
• As a program matures, emphasis moves down the continuum but each phase remains critical
• There is overlap between the stages
• Awareness must be consistently maintained so that it is present at every stage. This is necessary to achieve long-term loyalty
• Loyal audiences are your most powerful asset and will drive awareness among others

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Target Audience Identification.pdf