Audience Insight to Right-sized Innovation

After living several years in another country, I came home to visit my family. We planned to meet in New York City, and I arrived earlier than the others. After setting my luggage down in the hotel, I decided to go to a grocery store to pick up some food. First on my list was juice. I went to the juice aisle and found myself paralyzed by the wall of options. Orange, grape, apple, cranberry-apple, multi-fruit... Then, there were five brands for each option and four sizes for each. After standing there for ten minutes, I left the store with my hands and stomach empty. 

I sometimes think about that day when I think about our options for using digital strategies to advance the Great Commission. Which missional gap audience should we prioritize? What approach should we take with them? Is it best to start a podcast, build a social media campaign, use videos or articles, or try something altogether different? What is the right call to action for them? We don’t want to ask too much and scare them away. We also don’t want to bore them so that they see us as irrelevant and uninteresting. Are you overwhelmed yet? Can you relate?

There is good news. We have principles and approaches that can help narrow your options and increase your fruitfulness as you engage with audiences God has called you to reach. 

1. Start with your national plan to set your goals.

What are the top priorities for your country? It may be launching movements on campuses where SLM has not yet started. Or maybe your leaders are trusting God to see more disciples join as staff. Maybe the focus is on GCM and seeing churches planted in specific neighborhoods. Or maybe all the strategies are coming together to trust God to reach football fans who will come to your country for the World Cup. The goals of your national team can help you narrow your options and find points of collaboration that can make the most of your resources. Your national leaders should understand your goals and think, “Wow! It would be great for our national ministry if you succeed. I will pray for that!”

2. Identify your Audience.

If you have been through The Basics of our Digital Academy, you know the importance of identifying your audience. Start with your missional gaps. Identify where your missional gap audience is on the Audience Map. Use the research, insights, and guiding steps in the Audience Map to pray for them and learn how to engage them. Then, build off of this knowledge by creating your persona. This process will narrow the focus of your digital strategies approach. Your persona will tell you what channels you should use — whether it is a podcast, WhatsApp, Instagram, or something else. 

3. Choose a call to action.

The call to action you choose for your audience will come from your research with the Audience Map and your persona. After doing this work, you should have a pretty good idea of what you can offer them based on our organization’s purpose and your ministry’s capacity. Don’t invite them to do something that you do not have the people, money, time, or ability to deliver. It can be very tempting to invite them to something big and impressive. If you can’t execute that plan, you will lose the trust of your audience. With every engagement you have, you want to communicate the love of Jesus that you have for them and show yourself to be a trustworthy guide in their spiritual journeys. 

Take a deep breath. Don’t panic. God is with you, and the Holy Spirit will guide you as you take these steps of faith. After you do all of these things, evaluate. What did you learn about your audiences? Your approach? Your call to action? Your national ministry? Take these learnings, improve your plans and try again. I am praying that the Lord will use you and your digital strategy efforts to see more and more lives changed by the good news of the gospel and the abundant life found in joining in his Great Commission!

Together with you,
Cheryl

One of our highest values as a DS team in the UK is being audience-centered, so we work hard at growing our knowledge and insights to tailor our offerings to our audiences’ needs. We serve a relatively small but diverse country, so there’s a lot to learn. 

When we first started as a team in 2022, one of our big dreams was to grow our digital offerings for every nation of the UK (Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and England) and expand our reach outside of the few places where we have historically had a ministry presence. As we learned more about each nation in our scope, God put it on our hearts to pursue a new audience in Wales, specifically Welsh speakers. People in Wales are proud of their cultural heritage, distinct from the rest of the UK, but they often feel sidelined and overlooked on the national stage. Advertisements, government information, and signs that have been mistranslated into Welsh are a national joke in the UK but also a pain point for people who already feel they’re treated as unimportant. Our research also suggested moderate spiritual openness in Wales and, for people who come to faith, reading or hearing the Bible is an important stepping stone. 

Our Story of God project — filming 42 oral Bible stories in a representative mix of UK accents and languages to use in digital evangelism journeys — seemed like a great opportunity to move toward this audience. Still, it also presented a few significant hurdles for us. None of us on the team speak Welsh, and we started with only minimal contacts in Wales through our networks. But we prayed and asked everyone we could think of to help us meet the right people who could join us in our efforts, and God provided in beautiful ways. 

It took a lot of perseverance, but we met a handful of wonderful believers in Wales who were happy to help us with this project and are open to continue working with us. Among them are several great churches, a student studying the Welsh language at university who agreed to help us make our Welsh-language videos and journeys, and a social media influencer (a new believer in Jesus) who featured in one of our videos and is interested in helping us with our social media in the future. Our journeys are launching now, so time will tell if and how they will gain traction with seekers in Wales. But for now, we are celebrating the opportunity to reach out to people with the Word of God in their heart language and caring for them by making something just for them.

There are so many good things that we could spend our time on. It’s easy to get bogged down in work. Chad Causey, Chief Strategy Officer at OneHope, developed the following tool as a guide to help you spend your time more intentionally. Innovation best happens at the intersection of what your ministry can do and what your audience needs. 

In this diagram, two overlapping triangles form a hexagon in the middle. One triangle represents your ministry — its skills, resources, and mission. The other represents your audience — their needs, motivations, and access.

Let’s break down these six elements:

Audience Triangle

• Pains and Gains: This corner represents the specific challenges (pains) and benefits (gains) your audience experiences. Pains might include daily struggles, like loneliness, poverty, or a lack of spiritual support. Gains are positive outcomes or transformations they seek, such as hope, community, or a stable life. Recognizing both helps ensure that your innovation directly addresses their needs in a meaningful way.

• Jobs to Be Done: From the same canvas, this concept focuses on the “jobs” your audience “hires” solutions to complete in their lives. These jobs are not just functional but also emotional and social. An audience might have the “job” of getting good grades in school, being distracted from stress, or being a good parent. They may look to anything from an AI tool, video games, or church to solve those jobs, respectively. Identifying these jobs clarifies the why behind their choices, helping you tailor your mission’s efforts.

• Access: This term highlights where and how you can reach your audience and how willing they are to engage. It considers practical barriers, such as limited time, financial constraints, physical or mental effort, social pressures, and whether the ministry experience fits an existing routine. Understanding access is crucial because your solution needs to be realistic and attainable, meeting them where they are.

Ministry Triangle

• Skills: Your ministry’s specific abilities, talents, and knowledge areas. These could be evangelism skills, teaching abilities, digital outreach capabilities, or even unique forms of worship or community-building that your team brings to the table. These skills define what your ministry can offer to meet your audience’s needs competently.

• Resources: These are the tangible and intangible assets available to your ministry, like finances, technology, partnerships, and facilities. Your resources enable you to deliver solutions effectively and sustainably. If you lack the resources to tackle a particular area of need, it’s outside the design space of innovation where your ministry can realistically operate.

• Mission and Vision: This is the driving purpose of your ministry — the gospel-centered goals that direct all your efforts. The mission provides a clear boundary for innovation, ensuring your projects align with the core objectives of your faith and calling. Your ministry’s mission keeps you from drifting into projects that, while interesting or even beneficial, don’t truly serve your larger purpose.

The Design Star: Where Ministry Meets Audience Needs.

In this shared space, the middle space of the star represents the sweet spot where innovation can thrive. Here, your ministry’s skills, resources, and mission align with your audience’s pains and gains, jobs to be done, and accessible channels. This intersection doesn’t just promote innovation but ensures it is strategic and purposeful, fully integrated with both your ministry's capabilities and your audience's genuine needs.

For example, suppose you discover that people in your audience are struggling with loneliness (a pain) and are seeking friends (a gain). If your ministry has the resources and skills to provide online community spaces or local group gatherings, and if this aligns with your mission to foster fellowship, then the innovation of launching a digital community initiative fits right in the center of this hexagon. However, if there’s interest in ice cream but it lies outside your skills, resources, or mission, it’s not a good use of your time.

By focusing your efforts within this hexagon, you ensure that you’re being strategic in how you spend your time. It helps you to diagnose what your audience needs. A clear statement of the problem is an essential step in strategic innovation. After that, you can define your guiding plan for how your ministry efforts align with solving that problem. Then, within that plan, all your activities should fit, and if something is outside that overall solution, then you know it’s not a good use of time and energy. This tool is a guide to help you be intentional in your work. Your innovation should be impactful, mission-driven, and fully aligned with the needs and realities of those you’re called to serve. 

Even more than your own effort, you should always begin with prayer and seeking God’s will. God can do more in an afternoon than you can accomplish in a lifetime. Innovation tools like this help us steward our time well, but if God is not in our work, we are wasting our time. Pray first, innovate second.