Communicating Audience Research: Bridging the gap within and beyond your organization
by Aldana Vales, Stephanie Ho, and Carla Nudel
When we conduct audience research, our primary goal is to understand people’s behavior and represent their voices, motivations, and needs while working with our newsroom and product partners. However, presenting our findings and recommendations can be a challenge for both formal research practitioners and for those who incorporate research activities within their given product or editorial role.
As part of the 2023 NPA Summit, we led a workshop where we explored best practices for communicating audience research, making product recommendations based on audience insights, and sharing lessons learned beyond the organization.
Here’s a recap of the most important tips.
1. Socializing your results
It might feel daunting to turn your attention to telling the story behind your data. But there are some tips and tricks you can follow:
Lead with the “Cherry on top”
In newsroom parlance, this is our way of saying “don’t bury the lede.” Show your audience that you value their time by getting straight to the most important learnings. Then, work backwards from the key insights and spend some time on how you put together those findings.
Anticipate your internal audience’s questions
If you’re holding a research readout to debrief on your study, you save time towards the end for questions. As you sketch out an outline of your report and how you want to structure the meeting, try to anticipate what each stakeholder will find most important and factor that into your narrative. This way, some of that Q&A time can be dedicated to discussion as well as other clarifying questions your partners might have for you.
Create an “insights sandwich”
This can take on different forms, but the main ingredients should be “what we learned” + “why it matters” + “how we’ll use this finding.” Make it easy for your colleagues to act on your insights and know the “why” behind what you learned!
Explore different ways of presenting your research
Your deliverable doesn’t always have to be a slide deck. Experiment with what works best for different audiences. Maybe it’s daily bulleted Slack updates sent to certain channels or groups, or perhaps it’s a one-pager executive summary. You should find which format makes it easiest for your teammates to access, understand, and put your results into action. Even better if it can be repeated over time and easily located in some form of internal repository!
Make findings relatable
Consider each of your stakeholders, the disciplines they represent, the actions they need to take based on your research, and build those into how you write your results.
For example, a designer teammate may be looking for directional findings to guide visual explorations that meet customer goals and needs. That can be as tactical as helping them answer the question “What do I need to change in the design?” but could also be broader insights about behavior that your colleague can keep in mind as they iterate on their work.
2. Communicating the need for audience research
Now you know how to communicate your findings effectively... But, what if you still need to get buy-in to carry out audience research projects in the first place? This is a common struggle, since research can be expensive or time consuming and the benefits of doing it are not necessarily straightforward to key decision makers in our organizations. Here are some tips to have in mind to effectively show the need for doing research:
Connect audience research to key decisions
When running research projects, we tend to capture as much data as we can without anticipating what we’re going to use it for. This is a problem because we end up spending valuable time on knowledge that doesn’t lead to useful takeaways, which might be frustrating and lead to the perception that it’s not worth doing research again. To prevent this from happening, make the case by connecting it to the areas your news organization lacks information on to make key decisions. For example, is it going to inform a homepage redesign, or will it allow you to decide on the length and format of your new podcast?
If you use that decision-based framework from the beginning, you’ll be able to make research questions that will lead to more actionable insights and –therefore– help you get buy-in to do other research projects.
Explain the cost of not doing audience research
Like any other job, research takes time and resources, especially to do right. That cost, however, might be small compared to the opportunities we lose by not doing that research.
Here are some strategies you can implement to surface the long-term costs of not conducting audience research before launching.
First, keep an internal research backlog with ideas for projects to be prioritized based on their expected cost and value.
Whenever you come up with a question that can be answered with audience insights, it’s a good practice to add it to a spreadsheet where you can evaluate and prioritize the need for that research with the guidance of other relevant stakeholders.
You won’t ever have enough resources to answer all of your audience questions at the same time, so using a framework, like this template, can help you and your team have a clear research roadmap based on expected costs and benefits.
You can access and make a copy and use this template here.
Second, use an internal impact tracker to document the outcomes of your research.
As Caitlin Sullivan suggests in her template, this can include many different types of impact, such as stakeholders saying that they were able to make an important decision thanks to the research, improve workflows or inspire a new project by a specific team.
If you want to be even more specific, you can include the scale of the impact, and which organizational level it affected.
3. Sharing your research across the industry
Not only can your research findings influence your own internal strategy but they might also have an impact on the industry as a whole. Sharing your lessons learned, however, might also be intimidating, especially if you don’t know where to begin.
The NPA Slack space is a good place to start. There are some channels for sharing case studies or your recent launches. Or you can find other spaces to showcase your experience too. Some companies follow the blog post format. Regardless of the surface or platform you choose, here are some elements you should consider.
Provide context. You might know all the details about your research project but people outside of your organization don’t. When you share your insights, try to answer these questions:
What did you do? This is probably the most important one because it sets the theme of what you’ll talk about.
How did you do it? This allows people to follow your process.
What were the results of this specific project?
Share your lessons. Think of what you learned from this experience that others might find valuable. What should they know before embarking into something similar?
Tell us about the future. What are your plans for these insights? Where do you expect to move on from those results that you got? Sometimes, you don’t know where your findings will lead but if you do, it’s great to share it to give a sense of the impact.
Author’s bios
Stephanie Ho
Stephanie Ho is a user experience researcher based in New York, most recently focusing on product research in the digital news space.
Carla Nudel
Carla Nudel is an Argentinian journalist and Fulbright scholar based in New York, currently working in the intersection of product management, audience research and innovation.
Aldana Vales
Aldana Vales is a DC-based journalist focusing on audience research and development.