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

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

3. A brief history of social research

4. 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

5. 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.

6. Polling now ubiquitous

7. Some hiccups along the way

8. Knowing more about your audience

9. 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

10. 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

11. Gathering existing information

12. 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

13. Segmenting the public

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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

17. What does an ‘anti’ look like

18. How does this compare with a pro

19. 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

20. Changing their mind

21. 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

22. 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)

23. 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”

24. 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