It would be hard to examine the progressive social change landscape and not come to the conclusion that we have work to do in the battle for meaning-making.
While polls show strong support for the causes we hold dear—from abortion rights and immigration justice to clean energy and land and water protection—our opponents continue to blatantly undermine everything from our constitutional protections to the basic regulatory framework that protects the health and welfare of our communities.
As we unravel the many factors that contribute to our lost ground, it becomes clear that the digital information ecosystem, which occupies so much of our collective attention and focus, is one that our opponents continually master. While nonprofits are doing an admirable job leveraging digital tools to advance our goals, it’s clear that increasingly sophisticated approaches are needed to really move the needle.
For nonprofits, that means fighting a David-versus-Goliath battle. Our opponents have far more money and resources than we do, and they have a head start. That means we need to be smart and fully leverage the tools at our disposal.
At Resource Media, this has meant investing in more robust audience engagement capabilities, doubling down on data-informed research and approaches, and designing ways to more effectively measure impact across our campaigns and initiatives.
Targeting audiences online should be simple, right? It is true that platforms like Meta and LinkedIn collect reams of data about their users, but, unfortunately, they hold that data close to their chests and don’t make it available to people like you and me. Instead, they ask us to trust them to find specific target audiences. In a campaign context, that means operating in a fog of insufficient data, hindering our ability to engage the audiences we need to reach and engage.
To address this gap, Resource Media is excited to be a member of The Movement Cooperative, which provides access to very robust, deeply refined audience data. We use that data to help our partners build persona profiles that blend traditional demographic characteristics like race, education, or income, with real-world behaviors and values, like how people voted in past elections, or what policies and civic actions they support. We are using this data to build audiences with the core values and precise characteristics our partners and campaigns need to make progress.
For example, in a recent campaign, it was crucial for our partners to zero in on and engage low-income communities of color in specific states. We successfully identified a segment using regional voting behavior and demographics that matched these exact characteristics. For another campaign, we needed to find an audience within the Latine community or among immigrants in low-income neighborhoods, and this approach enabled us to build a values-based audience with these specific characteristics.
Finding these specific audiences using social media platforms is simply not possible, but we can do it with smart, strategic use of other data sources, including voting behavior and associated values.
Just as having more sophisticated audience-building capabilities can help us reach the right people, so can testing ensure our messages and visuals are effective. Our team employs multiple testing methods to determine which messages and visuals are most persuasive and engaging to a given audience. Combined with our audience targeting capabilities, we help our partners get laser-focused on strategies that work.
For a recent campaign, we utilized an online testing platform to evaluate 10 creative messaging strategies, using the results to design a digital campaign that distributed the winning messages. Subsequent digital outreach, combined with A/B testing, enabled us to identify which of our top-rated messages were most effective at securing engagement from our audience. This two-phase testing strategy, persuasion plus “in the wild” engagement testing, gives us a more robust perspective on what works, informed by data at key points along the way.
Measuring impact has always been part of our communications practice at Resource Media. We routinely establish and track key impact metrics, including engagement, sign-ups, donations, press hits, and more. But measuring long-term narrative shift is and has always been a challenge for our organization and our movements. At the end of each year, when all of our campaigns have launched and ended, how do we know and measure whether the whole of our combined efforts are moving the needle?
To address this considerable challenge, we are introducing a new approach. First, we gather engagement data for every campaign to measure the specific impact of each one. Second, we have developed a data architecture to aggregate and store engagement data across all campaigns, enabling us to measure our combined impact. And third, we are partnering with the sharp folks at The Movement Cooperative to develop a methodology for measuring our narrative impact across this aggregated data, focusing on metrics like stickiness, transmission, amplification, and reflection of our messages.
The digital landscape is constantly evolving, and we as nonprofit advocates are evolving with it. We no longer have to blast-cast messages we hope will work to audiences we hope will receive them. With current tools and technologies, we can pinpoint the most effective messages and visuals, and use our limited resources to deliver them surgically to the specific audiences we know we need to reach. We also have more robust tools to continually measure our progress and adapt our strategies to have real impact over time.
Resource Media is lucky to be in community with many sharp, committed folks. We never stop learning from our colleagues at organizations like The Movement Cooperative, Climate Advocacy Lab, and so many others. In our quest to identify the most strategic ways to make progress, we welcome your insights, ideas, and learnings as well – we are all in this together!
