The audience research phase: When, why and how to start.

Conducting audience research enables you to understand your intended audience, build empathy with them, explore the diversity within your audience group, and most important: identify information needs that you can fulfill.

At Gazzetta, in our work researching civic media opportunities in restricted contexts, we conduct audience research with a small, distributed, remote team navigating access barriers and risks to our intended audiences.

We are sharing our process and methods in hopes of making audience research practices more accessible for all newsrooms and information creators working in any context. Our goal is to support people in media and information to produce information that is more relevant to their intended audiences, which starts with seeking to understand the information they need.

Jump: WHEN to do research / HOW to do research / WHAT we did / HOW to move forward

Traditional audience research typically follows a linear process: researchers identify an intended group of people, design a survey instrument, distribute it widely, and analyze the resulting data. Researchers can generate valuable statistics from this approach, but it frequently fails to show them the deeper motivations, contextual factors, and behavioral nuances that shape how communities actually engage with information.

It’s great for evaluative research, which assesses the performance and impact of news coverage, but fails in providing concrete information on how newsrooms can design and disseminate information that would perform well in the first place.

In our generative research, we see several limitations of purely quantitative approaches:

• Survey responses in restricted information environments can be significantly distorted by factors including fear, cultural norms, and concerns about potential repercussions.
• Numerical data can effectively show what happens, but it rarely explains why people behave as they do.
• Quantitative measurements struggle to capture the values, trust dynamics, and contextual influences that shape people’s behavior with information.
• Getting a representative sample size becomes extraordinarily challenging when working with populations that are difficult to access.

At Gazzetta, we intentionally step away from prescribed methodologies to focus instead on clarity about the information we need to gather.

We do this by:

• Remaining method-agnostic: We select the techniques that will most effectively answer our questions within each focus area. We have to take this approach because the standard practices are not always feasible in our operating environments, so we need to get creative and work a little harder.
• Assigning confidence levels: We maintain flexibility with rigor, and we keep research integrity by assigning confidence levels to each insight based on the strength of our evidence at every step of our process.

This adaptable framework allows us to conduct meaningful audience research in virtually any geography, domain or context, while being mindful of the shortcomings of the approach we pursue.

Whether working in open information environments or highly restricted ones, these fundamental approaches remain consistent; what changes is simply the confidence level we can assign to our findings.

Below are some suggestions on getting started using this framework in your own work, based on our experience implementing projects in difficult contexts.

Conduct audience research when things start or change, but remember it’s an ongoing process.

Audience research can be conducted at any time.

We recommend starting research for new beginnings or changes, like when launching a new media initiative or newsroom, establishing a new topic area or news desk, or expanding coverage. Audience research findings will inform your approach to the project.

Likewise, it’s also useful to conduct audience research when significant changes, like political or social shifts, affect your intended audience. The research will allow you to learn more about the effects on your intended audience and how you can serve them during the shift.

But you don’t have to wait for an event or new project to start audience research. It can be embedded in the work you’re already doing. In one of our projects at Gazzetta, we used audience research about a broad group of people to identify which subset of that group would be the audience of our future reporting.

After specifying that intended audience, we continued audience research practices throughout the project to ensure we were meeting their needs.

Audience research is especially necessary when working in restrictive contexts and with limited access to our intended audiences. This is because we have fewer channels to more organically learn about these audiences, such as living and working among them or being able to freely share thoughts and feelings.

In environments where information is more strictly controlled, it is also more difficult to understand how audiences respond to official information sources, misinformation tactics, or campaigns, etc. Therefore, our assumptions about our audience and their needs may be biased, incorrect, or misaligned, since we cannot rely on our own experience or ask them more directly.

Identify feasible audience research goals that keep in mind varying confidence levels.

Meaningful audience research results start with having clear, achievable research goals with your current resources and capabilities. At Gazzetta, we believe that even the smallest teams working with little to no resources can conduct meaningful audience research that informs their approach, and that doing so is all the more necessary when working in difficult contexts.

But meaningful research requires us to assess and be honest about the reliability of the data we collect to understand the weight it should be given as we move forward with the project.

Determining reliability factors in confidence levels.

At Gazzetta, we conduct both qualitative research and quantitative research, assigning confidence levels to our findings based on:

• Data quality, including source reliability, sample representativeness, and methodological soundness. Studies with large sample sizes consisting primarily of your intended audience are more reliable than an expert’s estimate during an interview.
• Consistency across multiple sources. If academic research, those working for NGOs, and data you collect yourself all point to the same conclusion, you can have higher confidence in this finding.
• Contextual validity. If different sources have different findings or conclusions, those sharing a context more closely resembling that of your intended audience can result in a higher confidence level in one source over another in a different context.
• Potential biases or limitations. Studies limited to one geographic area, one demographic within your intended audience, or the inability of the researcher to carry out part of their project could lead to lower confidence levels.

The goal of the audience research phase is not to have 100% certainty in any one finding or data point. Rather, it is to gather information that informs the decisions about your reporting such that you have confidence in the direction and goals of your work.

How research methods inform confidence levels.

Our research process has included traditional desk research, interviews, surveys, and other creative processes, such as mapping out the daily life of someone in our intended audience to identify information opportunities.

Combined approaches allow us to clearly communicate the strength of our evidence while acknowledging areas of uncertainty. For instance, quantitative findings from large, representative surveys might carry high confidence, while insights from smaller qualitative studies might receive moderate confidence ratings.

This can also inform how to cascade research methods to develop stronger confidence levels throughout an ongoing research process.

For example, instead of creating a survey that asks respondents broad and vague questions such as, “What information do you find lacking in the information sources available to you?” try starting with desk research and interviews to better understand your intended audience.

After learning about their daily lives, motivations, and information channels, ask more specific and meaningful questions that help answer your research questions, such as, “On a scale from 1 to 5, how useful is the available information about educational opportunities for your children?”

By focusing on information needs rather than methodological requirements, we gain the flexibility to adapt our approaches to various contexts while maintaining transparency about the limitations of our findings.

Our three research focus areas: Background, information needs, distribution methods.

Gazzetta’s research process involves several stages of research questions. First, we use quantitative and qualitative data sources to investigate our preliminary questions.

Then, we build on these questions as “focus areas” to help us effectively design interview questions, survey questions, and other audience research methods that continually inform our original research questions or modify them into new questions based on what we have learned.

Use research questions about a population’s background to prompt discovery.

Our first research focus area involves questions related to demographic data, historical context, life of community members, community formation and identity, and stakeholders influences.

We use these to gather essential background information on our intended audience’s information needs, and we have achieved moderate to high confidence levels based on the consistency of evidence across multiple sources.

Some sample research questions for this focus area are:

• What historical events have shaped this community's formation and identity?
• What brings joy and pride to members of this community?
• What social bonds and shared values create solidarity within this group?
• Which organizations or institutions exert significant influence over community members?

Using questions like this prompted us to discover in one of our projects that housing insecurity is a pervasive challenge for our intended audience because of changes in urban planning. We learned that individuals in this group maintained powerful symbolic connections to their places of origin, long after relocating.

We also found that online spaces were a primary site for their social connections during physical isolation, and identified generational divides, with younger community members showing stronger desires for skill development and urban integration than older ones.

Home in on areas for information opportunities among intended audiences.

Our second research focus area involves identifying and validating the community's most significant information needs through a structured, evidence-based approach.

This focus area has helped us to feel confident in abandoning some initial ideas we had about our report and move forward confidently in a new direction. Through triangulation across multiple data sources, including surveys, interviews, and existing research findings, we ended up with high confidence levels in our findings.

Some sample research questions we’ve used for this research area are:

• Based on the challenges we've identified, what information might help community members navigate them more effectively?
• What does existing research tell us about information needs in similar communities?
• How prevalent is this information need across different segments of the community?
• To what extent are current information sources addressing this need adequately?

For our intended audience, this focus helped identify that legal information is a high priority for them. We also found that job opportunities and skills development information showed generational variation, with younger community members more focused on upskilling compared to older counterparts.

Our intended audience also demonstrated a need for information about educational opportunities for children but were largely satisfied with the information available to them.

Narrow in on information distribution methods, including restrictions.

Our third research focus area investigates the channels, patterns, and obstacles that shape information movement within the community. It can’t be overstated that different information travels differently, so we need to think about dissemination methods at the same time as content.

In this stage, our confidence levels for these findings have varied based on data sources, with channel preferences carrying high confidence due to robust survey data, while deeper behavioral patterns carried moderate confidence due to the challenges of direct observation.

Some sample research questions we’ve used for this research area are:

• Which communication channels do different segments of the community prefer for specific types of information?
• What factors prevent community members from accessing or trusting available information?
• How do information-sharing behaviors differ across demographic or psychographic segments?
• What role do trusted intermediaries play in information validation and distribution?

For our intended audience, investigating these questions revealed significant generational differences, with older community members relying more heavily on family networks while younger workers favored digital platforms.

We found that information barriers remained consistent across different types of information, with time constraints, reliability concerns, and comprehension difficulties emerging as primary obstacles for how information reached our intended audience.

Social isolation significantly impacted our intended audience’s information access, with many individuals confined to narrow information networks that reinforced their existing perspectives.

Apply findings to inform direction of further research and dissemination.

Once you’ve finished aggregating and analyzing your findings from your audience research, the next step is to apply them. Perhaps you uncovered new information needs during your research, which guides your newsroom to pivot from planned coverage and use resources instead on a new topic area to meet this need.

Or you may have discovered that your audience prefers a particular information channel, such as YouTube, and your team decides to expand to video coverage rather than web and text-based social media presence.

Conducting audience research continuously, or again in the future, will guide your understanding of how to serve your audience, especially as their context and needs are likely to change over time, including as a result of your work.

Future audience research phases can be even more fruitful if building on existing research, prior coverage, and habituated audiences.

Join us on our process in the audience research phase and beyond. If you haven’t already, sign up to our newsletter so you don’t miss out.

If you have feedback or questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch at hello@gazzetta.xyz