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Understanding audiences
When undertaking any community engagement project it is important to know who your target audience is. This will have an impact on the type of activities you design and enable you to be prepared when opportunities present themselves.
Are you looking to enhance the experience of existing users? Though your current users may be a broad audience, it is likely you will have an understanding of their needs. If you are not clear, then a simple survey either within your library or online may elicit useful information. It is always important to evaluate any activity through customer feedback, either through formal questionnaires or more informally through fun ways for people to let you know how they have responded to your event. This audience is also easier to market your activities to, but be aware of GDPR regulations and ensure you have secured permission to directly contact them – it is worth building this into any membership or event booking form. It is likely that there are some key local or family history groups that are current or potential audiences for your activities.
Some Local Studies services have created user forums that have provided ways of engaging the community, giving feedback on activities and influencing the direction of services provided.
By their very nature non-users are much harder to engage and at first might seem out of reach, but there are some ways to overcome this:
- Identify the gaps, for example is it a specific age range or a disadvantaged group or community?
- Make contact with local community organisations – these might include groups who are already booking meeting spaces in your library or other buildings. If they visit the building why have they not taken the extra step to use the Local Studies collection?
- Be prepared to network within your wider organisation, colleagues in other teams will have good community contacts and may also be aware and be able to identify different levels of need within a community. For example, during the Covid pandemic various local government services and voluntary organisations identified the issue of digital exclusion that made it harder for some to engage with their community and services during lockdown. Therefore, is it possible to design local studies activities that also provide soft IT skills and promote digital inclusion; and is there a known audience for this activity?
Audience identification:
When thinking about activity planning it is also important to consider why people participate in local studies related activities, rather than simply consider the types of activities they have participated in. Using audience data and anecdotal evidence it is possible to characterise our audiences. For example, you might consider characterising audiences in the following way:
Work related interest – people who use archives for professional and other work activity. These may be regular visitors or one-off users, who need to drill down into detailed information.
Active leisure interest – customers who have a prior knowledge and a desire to find out more, are often regular visitors and make use of the widest range of research aids and resources available to them.
Educational visits – Young people visiting as part of school or college groups, or individually for homework. This group also includes teachers preparing classroom activities. These groups often visit again for informal educational events targeted at young people and families.
Academic interest – university researchers and undergraduates undertaking detailed research. Their interests are subject specific and they tend to visit regularly over a short period of time.
Families – tend to visit just for family events such as heritage open days or family learning activities.
Inspired visits – People who have an immediate, one-off interest in finding out more about a place or subject, such as the history of their house. They are often open to repeat visits to discover more.
Need to know visit – people who require a particular piece of information that is relevant to their lives, such as rights of way, local authority records; this tends to be their only visit.
Lifelong learners – people who attend lectures and workshops to enhance their knowledge, but not necessarily interested in related Local Studies or Archive resources. They may be open to expanding their interest and may also use Local Studies and Archives elsewhere in the UK.
The National Archives produces a collection of case studies on audience development.
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Read the next section of the toolkit: partnership working in a large project
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