Audience insight for development communications
From understanding your audience to communication that connects.
Why an audience path?
Development communications often has to connect programme evidence, institutional priorities and people’s lived realities. Yet your teams may be working from broad audience labels, separate channel reports, or assumptions that have not been checked with the people they are meant to reach.
That can make it difficult to answer six key practical questions:
- Who needs to understand, trust or do something differently?
- What matters to them, and what gets in their way?
- Who influences their choices or helps them act?
- Where do they find information, online and offline?
- Which messages and touchpoints are useful, and which create friction?
- How will we know whether communication is helping?
The Manjano Path helps you answer these questions in a deliberate sequence.
- Understand – context, evidence, programme goals, risks and audiences.
- Find – the central story, audience need and communication opportunity.
- Shape – strategy, messages, narrative and channel choices.
- Connect – engagement, partnerships, participation and distribution.
- Learn – measurement, feedback and adaptation.
The result is an audience-informed plan that can guide communication decisions and adapt as information needs change.
The Manjano Path connects five stages: Understand, Find, Shape, Connect and Learn, with learning informing the next cycle
The five stages
Start with the programme, the decision and the evidence already available.
We review the communication objective, programme plans, existing research, feedback, content, channel data and operating context. We identify what is known, what is assumed and what still needs to be learned.
This stage can help you: clarify the decision, find evidence gaps and understand the information environment around your issue.
Identify the audiences whose understanding, trust or actions matter to the objective.
That may include people who use a service, the people who influence them, delivery partners, frontline teams, funders, policymakers, media or other decision-makers. We prioritize audiences based on the objective and the evidence — not reach alone — and look for meaningful differences in needs, motivations, barriers, trust and access.
This stage can help you: focus effort on priority audiences and build useful, evidence-aware audience profiles.
Turn audience insight into a communications strategy people can use.
We connect audience needs to messages, proof points, messengers, formats, channels and calls to action. We identify what to keep, revise, retire, create or test, and check that communication promises match what the programme can deliver.
This stage can help you: realign content and channel choices with audience needs and programme realities.
Make the next step clear and achievable across relevant touchpoints.
We examine how people encounter information and move from interest to action. This can include digital channels as well as radio, print, community meetings, partner networks, service points, SMS and interpersonal communication. We look for gaps in access, unclear calls to action, broken referrals and slow or missing responses.
This stage can help you: reduce friction, strengthen engagement and make communication handoffs work.
Measure what matters, listen to feedback and adapt.
We agree how to assess progress, using measures suited to the objective. Depending on the engagement, this may include reach among priority audiences, comprehension, trust, meaningful engagement, completed actions, referral quality, response times or audience feedback.
This stage can help you: learn what is working, identify what needs to change and carry that learning into the next cycle.