Quizzes
Now that you’ve identified what you’re trying to accomplish through your signs (and figured out where you’re going to look for indicators of success), the next big question is:
Who do you need to reach with your messages in order to meet your goals?
Audience segmentation: the core ideas
In the past, you may have been in the habit of referring to “the public” or “the general public”, and not thought too much further than that. In this course, we’re going to go a bit deeper; we have to. Interpretive signs are a difficult communications medium: they’re highly site-specific (and somewhat inflexible from that point of view) and they are heavily constrained by word count—there just isn’t enough room to take any kind of a shotgun approach to your communications.
Targeted Communications vs “Spray and Pray”
Interpretive signs need to have laser focus in what they say, whom they reach, and which responses you want to evoke from those people. To that end, the more you can understand about your potential readers, the better your chance of…
- Placing your signs in spots they will actually visit
- Illustrating with imagery that will resonate with them
- Using language they relate to
- Crafting calls to action that inspire them without alienating them
Things you need to know:
- Who is our ideal audience?
- What are their habits? How do they travel; how do they consume information?
- What do they know or believe about our subject right now?
- What do we want them to know or believe?
- What is the way to their heart?
Looking at little deeper, let’s break it down into the components of an audience profile.
Geography
Where will you connect with your readers? Where is the best intersection of their itinerary and your subject? Where do these naturally cross? For example, if you want to connect your family visitors with wetland invertebrates and you know you’ve got a picnic spot near a wetland, boom. There’s your spot.
Is a sign the right medium for your target audience? What if the geography doesn’t match up?
Alternately, if you know you need to reach urban New Canadians with a message about global warming—and you have zero evidence that this audiences actually visits your sites—then don’t waste your money on interpretive signs. Invest in outreach, either online or in-person in the cities.
So early in your planning process, look at the geography of your site, and look at your goals. Now, dive into your audience research about your site’s visitation. Who are the people who visit you, or are likely to visit you in the near future? Can you identify two or three types of people within your data?
If your organization doesn’t gather enough visitor data (and you really should gather as much as you can), contact your partner agencies, your destination marketing organizations, your local chamber of commerce, and your local municipalities. Dig into the Canada census, too. Try to understand who is out there, and make sure you have a potential win-win relationship with them.
Keep yourself open to the idea that an interpretive sign may not be the best medium for your message. Resist the urge to “jump to the tool” before you’ve done your research: “We really want to do a sign! Now, what are we trying to accomplish?” AKA cart, meet horse.
Once you’ve identified a target audience or two, and decided that there is potential for them to connect with your messages, dive in a little further.
Group Dynamic and Travel Patterns
Think of what you’re trying to accomplish with your sign project, and visualize the top audience type you need to reach to meet your goals. Do they travel in families? Couples? Groups of friends? Organized tour groups? On bicycles? On off-highway-vehicles? How much time do they have to stop and look at signs?
If your target audience is families, providing things of interest to children might ensure the whole family stops—even if your priority audience is actually the parents. If you have cyclists, you can assume they won’t want to stop as often as those out for a leisurely stroll—but might be happy to take a rest and read a sign at the top of a particularly hard grind.
Basic audience research like this can save you time and money down the line. Before you start designing a sign, it is imperative that you stop and do a reality check: who do we need to reach? Do we have a potential touch point with them? Can we work our way into their day, even for a few moments, to establish a win-win relationship with them?
What’s their MAKE?
Before you write and design a sign, you need to know a few things about your audiences, and you can remember these under the acronym MAKE: misconceptions, attitudes, knowledge, and expectations.
Let’s start with knowledge. How much do your target audience know about your subject now? Do they speak your jargon? Do they know basic biology or history? Are they from here? Do they know your geography?
Be as thorough as you can with your research and planning here. The biggest mistake you can make in writing a sign is assuming a level of knowledge and commitment to your subject that they just don’t have. We see this all the time in interpretive signs: jargon that only a scientist would understand; three-letter acronyms that nobody outside the industry would have a hope of recognizing; references to local places and local events that people from outside the region (who might be an important audience) don’t know at all.
Throughout your sign-making project, you need to be able to put on your “audience goggles” and see what you’re doing through their eyes.
Expectations
What is your target audience hoping to accomplish on their day out in your area? What do they expect from an organization like yours? Often we assume they want to learn, which is, well, not always true. For most audiences, their top priority is having a nice day with their friend, spouse, date, children, whatever. They want to have a nice time, and if you can help facilitate that, you’ll be getting closer to your win-win relationship with your audience.
Alternately, maybe they expect you to keep them from getting lost. Staying oriented on a new trail is their top priority, and you can help them with that through your interpretive signs. Or: maybe they really need you to help them teach their children. Or keep their in-laws occupied for two hours. Or help them find a great photo-op for their social media account.
We call this kind of thinking “problem-space” analysis. What are their real-world problems, agendas and needs? The better you can understand them, the more likely they are to attend to and appreciate what you have to say.
Misconceptions
Do you know what your audience believes erroneously about your subject? Are there misconceptions you need to counter with your messages? Can you do so in a positive way, without doing a lot of “well actually” explaining? Many people carry baggage with them (metaphorical baggage, not knapsacks) around things like climate change, Indigenous history, wildlife behaviour, and many other areas. You should know what kind of baggage your audiences are carrying before you start writing. Which brings us to the most important part of the MAKE equation:
Attitudes
How do your audiences feel about your subject? How do they feel about your agency? How do they feel about scientists and historians in general? Are they a friendly audience or a skeptical one? You really need to know this up front.
For example: say your goal is to increase compliance with off-highway vehicle drivers—you really need to convince them to stay on the trail. That’s actually a pretty tough nut to crack. First, go back to geography: if they roar around off-trail, where will you put your sign?
If they are part of an identity group that is on the defensive around environmentalists and scientists, will they read your sign? Will they believe it? We’ll talk more about this in the next sections.
How can you place, write, and illustrate your sign in such a way that you reach the people you need to reach in the right way (and not waste your time preaching to the choir?) In other words, what is the way to your audience’s heart?
What if you don’t know these things?
Sometimes when we start our planning we realize just how little we know about our audiences. With a little luck, we can round out our knowledge by getting access to data from our regional agencies and partners, as mentioned above. But sometimes we need to do original research before we start our project. In the interpretive media business, we call that front-end evaluation. It usually involves surveying your target audiences with a set of questions that helps us understand that audience’s MAKE. This kind of surveying can be done online, or ideally, it involves somebody (a contractor, a paid intern, one of your staff) actually stopping and chatting with those people in the field. We call these intercept surveys.
When all else fails, a day or two spent out on the trails informally chatting with your visitors, asking all kinds of open-ended questions, can help you flesh out your understanding of your markets. This can be the most rewarding kind of research of all.
