Knowing your audience & how to reach them Laurence Janta-Lipinski Associate Director, Political and Social Research LaurenceJL@YouGov.com @jantalipinski

Agenda A brief history of social research Knowing more about your audience Segmenting the public Changing their mind

A brief history of social research

Ideas out of this world Research methods have been used by mathematicians and statisticians to understand and explain complex phenomena for centuries The physical sciences were pioneers of complex data analysis Now social sciences have taken these methods and apply them to understanding equally complex phenomena

Follow the money Advertising agencies, seeing the opportunities in understanding their customers, how to reach them and, essentially, how to sell them more things they might not need, invested a great deal of time, energy and money into incorporating research into their work.

Polling now ubiquitous

Some hiccups along the way

Knowing more about your audience

Why bother? Can use public opinion to do one of two things; Understand where public opinion is so you can develop policies that tie into it Understand how to move the public towards your opinion The Human Rights debate in the UK means that we have to focus on option two due to public hostility

Gathering existing information Desk Research Lots of data is already available and in the public domain for use in gaining an initial insight into public opinion Can be from fellow academics, human rights organisations as well as commercial companies Typically this will not be 100% relevant but provides a good starting point

Gathering existing information

Generating your own Many forms this can take Focus groups Pilot survey Seek to delve deeper into the attitudes people hold and why Can be useful to flag up issues you had not previously considered Pilot survey Start to understand the scale of the problem Identify demographic differences Can help alert you to initial differences between the population

Segmenting the public

Putting people into little boxes Once you’ve understood more about the public, you should look to identify those who will be more/ less receptive to your messaging Statistical techniques can be employed to segment the population based on their attitudinal characteristics

Who’s who For work with Equally Ours, YouGov identified four distinct groups in the population based on their overall attitudes towards Human Rights The pro The anti The apathetic The conflicted

Delving deeper Each of these four groups has different beliefs and concerns; important to tailor messages to each of them By segmenting in this way, it is also possible to understand the demographic differences of these groups You can then develop a media strategy by identifying how you reach these people and through which medium

What does an ‘anti’ look like

How does this compare with a pro

Coming back to the research Once we’ve conducted this research once, we can then build a model to automatically segment respondents at a later date This allows us to track the proportion of respondents in each group as well as identify compositional changes within groups It is also a less expensive and more efficient endeavour

Changing their mind

How we quantify effective messaging Get a baseline reading of the attitude you wish to change Provide respondents with the messages you're testing Rate persuasiveness of messages Agreement with messages Anchor with negative messages

Analytic approach Ask the attitude you wish to change again and compute a value for whether respondent’s opinion has changed Can then run analysis to see the relationship between the messages and the change in opinion recorded between the two questions (pre- and post-message attitudes)

Key Findings Impact of message types on attitudes to human rights NONE ANTI UNINTERESTED CONFLICTED PRO Understanding NONE Emotion HIGH Fairness Procedural Tradition Relevance “Human rights are a safety net to protect us all. Thank goodness most of us never have to worry about them but we’d miss them if we didn’t have them”

A guide to good messaging The public know less than you, often a lot less; don’t use jargon and avoid words not used in tabloids Keep them short and sharp; a tweet’s length is a good rule of thumb Know which attitude you want to change and develop messages to change that primarily If possible, test your messages in a focus group before fielding a survey