Introduction
In our approach to evaluating digital experiences, there are three broad areas to consider when you decide how to evaluate a digital project:
- The outcomes of your work for the people who engage with it: your audiences
- The outcomes for you and your team as creators or producers of the work
- The outcomes of your project for the wider world, in addition to you and your audiences
This article focuses on the first of these three areas. In it, we offer a simple framework to think through your audience-related goals and how you might measure the related outcomes. Please note, when we talk about ‘audiences’ we’re including visitors, users, participants and any other groups of people who may be engaging with the digital experiences you are creating.
Three ways to think about audiences
If you are thinking about how to evaluate audiences for digital experiences, there are probably three categories of questions that you are trying to answer:
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Who are you reaching and engaging?
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How are they finding and interacting with your work?
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What is their subjective experience?
Depending on your intended impacts, the relevance of each category will vary along with the types of questions your evaluation is aiming to answer. You also need to consider the gap between what you would ideally like to know and what it is practical to measure. The latter will be restricted by your time/resource and the data collection tools available to you. With this in mind, let’s look at each of the three categories in turn.
1. Who are you reaching and engaging?
A well-designed evaluation can help you understand the types of audience engaging
2. How are audiences finding and interacting with your work?
Here’s a simple framework for considering audience behaviour to help you to focus your marketing efforts
Illustrations by Jazz Rumsey
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