Understanding Your Value Through Audience Insights
- Shannon Bailey
- Apr 1
- 3 min read
Understanding how your audiences experience your organization, and their perception of the value you offer, is fundamental to success. Your value is what your audiences believe it to be. Organizations that understand this best, embrace it. They continually listen and use audience insights to reinforce and amplify their strongest attributes. Teams and resources align around a shared understanding of why they are valuable and how best to live up to that value.
Addressing the Status Quo
Organizations often assume they understand their value and the feeling people seek to feel when interacting with your brand. Marketing copy regurgitates the technical aspects of the organization: mission and vision statements, program metrics, lists of statistics related to the number of events hosted or audience size. Consider how many institutions continue to highlight their historical significance while failing to demonstrate how their mission creates tangible impact in a rapidly changing world with evolving priorities and perspectives.
Messaging is on autopilot assuming the value of the organization today holds the same value as years past. Further disrupting marketing and communication efforts,
the tactics that were once sufficient to move people to act have lost their impact.
First… What Makes Something Valuable?
Value is the quality of being useful or important. Simple enough. Let’s take a step back, however, and consider the key factors contributing to value:
Utility: How effectively your services address needs and create meaningful change.
Rarity: The unique position your organization fills, addressing the needs and solving problems for constituents.
Quality: The excellence and professionalism in program and service delivery.
Condition: The organizational health and sustainability, including governance structures and financial stability.
Market Demand: The demonstrated need for your services within your community, backed by data and stakeholder feedback.
Emotional Value: The meaningful connections and trust built with the you audiences serve: donors, volunteers, the broader community, etc.
In an effort to understand value as your audience perceives it, Emotional Value is most important while the others certainly contribute. When a donor supports a nonprofit, for example, they're often investing in how that contribution makes them feel and the connection to something larger than themselves. The true measure of an organization's worth often lies in the unspoken emotional connections, personal motivations, and deeply felt needs of the audience. This requires organization to proactively solicit feedback. The brands that seek and apply this input have the most success connecting messages to the audience.
Listening is Critical
Value is established by solving problems and alleviating pain points. Individuals make decisions based on emotions and validate those decisions with logic. When you take the time to listen, you develop a nuanced understanding that goes beyond just positive feedback.
True audience empathy requires exploring both what people love about your organization and their concerns and anxieties. The most powerful insights often emerge when you delve into the audience's fears and challenges. By listening deeply, you learn:
Why people trust your organization
What makes you credible
Motivations for continued use or support of your services
The unique aspects of your services or community that resonate most
The emotional underpinnings of your audience's connection to your work
How your organization directly addresses their concerns and anxieties
The mechanisms for soliciting feedback from your community can be accomplished many different ways: informational interviews, surveys, focus groups, etc. This qualitative insight often reveals that your true value might be different from what you initially assumed. By hearing directly from your audience, you can discover the authentic connection between your organization and their needs—both spoken and unspoken.
Communicate Your Value
Regardless of your organization's tenure, listening to your key audiences—customers, donors, users—helps you craft messages that emotionally connect with their expectations of your brand. The words of your audiences are the most resonant, and adopting the language of your brand advocates creates immediate authenticity. By reinforcing their perception of what you do and how you do it, you build brand equity that translates directly to growth and impact. Organizations that implement regular feedback sessions or simple follow-up surveys often discover messaging insights that traditional market research misses.
Your audience has the ultimate say on your value. Whether you're a Fortune 500 company or a local nonprofit, taking the time to understand your audience's perspectives, needs, and fears will help you build stronger, more authentic connections with the people you serve. Your organization's value isn't just about what you do – it's about how your work resonates with and impacts your audience. The only way to truly understand this is to listen.