How to do nonprofit market research (for free)
It’s crucial for a nonprofit to realize they have multiple different audiences. Some people are interested in your nonprofit because they believe in a particular staff person. Others are constituents receiving services from your nonprofit. Some are interested because they care about a very specific aspect of the mission, while others care about a different aspect of the mission.
When I was Director of Operations for an international NGO, I was surprised to hear how differently supporters would describe our mission. I thought of our organization as fighting extreme global poverty, while many donors were most interested in the particular industry our clients worked in. People care about different things, and we only have some control over that.
It’s crucial that your nonprofit knows why different groups of people are interested in your organization.
You need to take 3 steps:
Research your audiences (more on that below)
Take that research and organize your varied audiences into “segments.”
Create brief audience profiles for each segment.
If you can do these three things with focus and careful attention, you will see substantial improvements in your communications, given a bit of time.
Ok, so how do we research our audiences?
Granted, there are specialists that you can hire to do this robustly, using complicated statistics and a lot of tools that are beyond most of us. I’m confident their results are very helpful.
But we can get quite a lot of results for free. Here’s what you do:
First, Talk to your audiences! At first, do this informally. When you get a few seconds to chat with various people connected to your nonprofit, ask them why they are engaged with you. This simple question will help you quickly learn.
Second, take that information, and begin tentatively organizing responses into groups. Before doing this, you want to have chatted with as many people as possible, though lightly. Broad, but shallow. You’ve asked almost anyone who will answer, “what is it about ACME Community Center that you care about? There are a lot of things happening here…what is it specifically, for you?”
Organize those responses into a few tentative categories. Aim for somewhere between three and eight categories. These are the beginnings of your Segments.
Third, when you have tentative categories, think about the people you’ve placed in these different Segments. Try to think of a handful (4-8, ideally, but take what you can get) who are particularly insightful or clear communicators. You want people who notice their own thoughts and feelings, and can then express those thoughts and feelings.
Fourth, Simply invite those people to a conversation about your organization. Tell them it will help your organization (supporters are probably looking for ways to help).. What you’re really doing is creating focus groups. I suggest doing this on Zoom, if possible, to lower the time commitment.
When you meet, for 45 minutes, ask them a few basic questions about “what is it about our nonprofit that you care about? Why do you care about that? Does it resonate with something about you, or your own life?” Put some time into thinking about good questions here. Let the participants engage with one another.
That’s it. That’s basic market research for your nonprofit, and it’s free.
If you follow through on this, you’ll be able to write up 200-word audience profiles. Create 2 or 3 of those for each audience Segment based on the interviews you conducted. These profiles should help you envision the entire broader audience segment. It’s not important that any one profile accurately represents any specific individual. It is important that your 2-3 audience profiles, collectively, help you envision the entire audience segment.
That’s it.
Now, when you’re communicating, or creating content, or planning communications strategy, use these audience profiles. Write to these audience profiles, for the relevant audience segment.
We love this stuff at Capital Hope Media, and we’d love to help your nonprofit communicate more effectively with your various audiences. Schedule a meeting with us, and let’s identify ways we can help improve your results!
