Crowd Work: Knowing and Connecting with Your Audience

Community initiative founders know the importance of maintaining an audience. But they often wonder how best to engage with them. How do they know who to target with their ads? How can they best allocate their resources? How can they build a reliable base while also growing their reach? Today, we’re going to look at some basic steps you can take to stay current with your audience and prevent group attrition.

Define

The first step to building your audience is defining who they are. Maybe you are working on a community garden to make vegetables more accessible in Brooklyn. In that case, your intended audience might include experienced gardeners, food bank organizers, and local residents. On the other hand, you might be forming a weekly neighborhood trash cleanup in Queens, NY, meaning that your target audience could be volunteers living in that area and action organizers interested in community service. Understanding these categorizations is essential for engagement because it allows you to focus on individuals likely to participate in your initiative or be directly affected by your issue, rather than cold emailing strangers.

This becomes increasingly important as you recognize the different levels of engagement you have with your audience. Returning to our previous examples, a repeat participant in a local trash pickup would be a good potential team member. Likewise, casual participants in your community garden should be added to your event email blasts, as they are likely to bolster attendance. By segmenting your audience this way, you can also tailor specific messages to each segment based on their level of engagement with your initiative. You would likely send a targeted outreach email to a small group of potential team members rather than a general posting for the position.

Reaching Out

Once you know who you are trying to reach, you can start being selective with your advertising. This can look like flyering in the community you’re working in, posting analytics-driven ads on Google Ads, or creating an email campaign with email marketing platforms like Mailchimp. Digital marketing allows you to customize who sees your ads, including selecting or removing specific keywords, managing which geographical regions receive your ads, and when your ads are shown. Likewise, these services let you track your engagement and allow you to understand your core audience better.

Follow Up

Following up with your audience can significantly bolster your future events. Recognizing who is in attendance can allow you to add to your numbers. Following up can include writing a newsletter with organizational updates, creating an event mailing list, or keeping in touch with regular participants, among other options. Actions like this make it easy for past participants and attendees to keep coming back. This kind of scheduled communication also shows them that you are well-organized and have long-term plans for your community initiative. 

By better understanding your existing audience, you can build a wider audience while keeping your current one engaged. Regular engagement with your audience lets you create effective ad campaigns, maintain stronger ongoing outreach, and demonstrate your ongoing commitment to your project. This can be the first step to a better long-term relationship between you and your participants. 

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The art of storytelling is a powerful tool you can use to engage your audience and inspire newcomers to join you in your community action. Here are some tips for using storytelling to share your community vision.