Know Your Audience - Improve Your Radio

"...community-based action learning program for radio, that teaches and supports you to learn from and about your audience, listeners and stakeholders."

Stem van Afrika, a Dutch organisation working to support the organisational development of community radio stations in Africa, has piloted an online course, with offline components, for radio stations in Kenya and Uganda to learn from and about their audiences and to gauge the extent to which their audiences are satisfied with the programmes they listen to. Stem van Afrika hopes to extend the platform to other Eastern/Southern African countries in the future. The ultimate goal is to enable radio stations to be able to make decisions in all areas, including programming, and to become truly audience driven, thereby increasing their audience, boosting their income and access to resources, improving community respect, and building a stronger brand.

The course was launched in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. As Stem van Afrika explains, "At a time when many radio stations have had to change their schedule and programming in response to the pandemic-related need of their audiences, there are many questions that need to be addressed: Should the new programmes be continued or should the cancelled ones be aired again? Which programmes are still missing? Some stations may have strengthened their relationship with the listeners - how can this be adequately appreciated and leveraged? How can advertisers and sponsors be persuaded to return?" The research carried out within the framework of this course is designed to help answer these questions and show a path forward - through the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

The course combines, in a participatory manner, online and offline training elements in the form of what are meant to be easy-to-use and modifiable learning modules with tools and templates, physical on-site visits by mentors allocated to each station, and peer-based learning. Each of the modules in the course is intended to solve a problem or need at the radio station, with one or more research-based methodologies that can be applied to meet a learner's objectives. These problems or needs can include:

• Understanding a station's audience: what they are like, interested in, and prefer - including exploring new prospective audiences;
• Measuring your audience, how many you have, and who they are, including interpreting third-party reports;
• Evaluating radio programmes and resolving what needs to be added, changed, and removed;
• Improving radio performance, appreciating how the station (and brand) is performing for its stakeholders, and identifying what it needs to do internally and externally to improve delivery;
• Generating content for radio programmes, ideas, themes, and topics to be canvassed to interest and engage audiences;
• Measuring advertising effectiveness, how well the ads/messages have worked, and reporting to your advertisers and sponsors;
• Developing/choosing a new radio programme and engaging audiences to understand and develop new radio shows and segments;
• Research for strategic planning: what you need to know to review and improve your roadmap as a station and reach where you want to be; and
• Understanding staff / internal stakeholders: how to learn and better leverage and support a key asset for radio.

The course duration is flexible and can be started at any time.