Using audience insight to create more impact

The Bumblebee Conservation Trust

The Bumblebee Conservation Trust is a dynamic, growing wildlife charity. They have a new strategic aim to expand and diversify their audiences and a grant from The Heritage Lottery Fund’s ‘Resilient Heritage’ scheme gave them the funds to commission their first, comprehensive piece of audience research.

By investing time at project development stage, we were able to work with the Trust’s in-house team to review the brief, stretch the research budget to include existing and potential audiences, and use online research approaches to ensure maximum reach and value.

The final project included:

• An insight into existing supporter/follower behaviours via web and social analytics

• Quantitative research to give the Trust a deeper understanding of the values and triggers for engagement among existing supporters/followers

• Quantitative research with a nationally representative sample of the UK public to identify audiences with the greatest potential for future engagement with the Trust

• Supporting the Trust to agree a set of priority audience groups on which to focus (those with the greatest potential to take action, volunteer or donate)

• Online focus groups with those priority audiences to develop communications that align with their values and interests

By the end of the project, the team had a clear sense of the existing and new audiences to focus on, the triggers and barriers to their engagement, and the most effective messaging and channels to reach them.

We also worked with the in-house team to spread and embed the results– helping the wider organisation understand how to practically apply and gain impact from the project. A series of interactive briefing workshops, Q&A sessions, audience persona materials and messaging guidance were just some of the outputs used.