Understanding audience journeys for the Health Foundation

Following a Fresh Egg event, we were engaged by the Health Foundation to carry out an exploratory research project with two clear aims:

• Learn more about existing audiences, their needs and how they interact with the Health Foundation across a range of channels

• Develop practical recommendations for improving audience journeys in order to drive engagement and build long term relationships

The focus was on the Health Foundation’s main owned touchpoints, including:

• The website
• Social media platforms
• Email

The Health Foundation was already running comprehensive activity across their communications channels, but wanted to find out more about their audiences, in order to to tailor these communications, building on established organisational strengths.

Having heard about our innovative audience research methods, the Health Foundation identified that Fresh Egg would be the best partner to explore their audiences’ journeys to understand information such as:

• Needs
• Actions
• Touchpoints
• Experiences
• Behaviours

The overall aims were to:

• Provide initial audience insights that could be fed into and used in conjunction with existing planned activity
• Highlight future opportunities for the Health Foundation to be more audience focused

“What we were able to do on this project was to take the extensive knowledge the Health Foundation team already had about its audiences and layer on additional insights by speaking in-depth directly to representatives from the different audience groups.

Doing this provided us with key ‘Moments of Truth’ that not only gave the Health Foundation additional information to factor into their future communication plans, but also validated much of their existing and planned engagement activity.”

David Somerville, Strategy director

The project involved several phases of discovery work, including a mixture of workshops, qualitative and quantitative research, and identifying tactical solutions.

We broke this down into five workstreams flowing from the initial audience workshop, with quantitative and qualitative aspects running concurrently to ensure each informed the other, each broadening our knowledge of the audience and possible solutions as the project progressed.

This internal workshop saw members of the Health Foundation communications team collaborate on a series of exercises that provided information to inform various stages of the project. First, we undertook empathy mapping to help the team get into the heads of their audiences.

This helped them to generate audience needs statements and conduct user journey mapping, where we could start to spot gaps and potential opportunities in communications and marketing activity. We used all the information we gathered during the workshop to inform both the further research in the subsequent phases of the project and potential solutions.

Informed by what we’d gathered from the team in the workshop, we carried out a top-level quantitative analysis of the Health Foundation’s digital performance data using Google Analytics and CRM data.

As well as giving us a good insight into current performance, this data helped us identify areas of focus for the heuristic analysis. During this work, we also identified opportunities to enhance the existing tracking implementation to increase the quality and quantity of data the Health Foundation team would be able to access and use for decision making.

Following the initial immersion workshop and analysis, we created a set of interview questions to help us explore people’s journeys deeper and gather more information in relation to their needs, touchpoints and pain points.

The Health Foundation identified and recruited candidates who had engaged with their marketing and communications activities and we conducted telephone interviews with each person to find out more about their experiences and needs.

Using data from the workshop, interviews and quantitative analysis to guide us, we conducted a heuristic review of seven typical user journeys across the Health Foundation’s owned digital channels.

This helped us to understand the typical journeys that people make, the quality of experience that they were getting and where it could be improved, and assess these against usability best practices and web standards.

After each interview we used the detailed notes, as well as referring back to the audio recordings, to complete customer experience journey maps for each interviewee. These provide a point of reference for the Health Foundation to refer back to when planning future communications activity.

With the maps complete, we reviewed the findings and extracted any stand-out pain or gain points as ‘Moments of Truth’ - the key points that highlighted where the greatest opportunities exist for the Health Foundation either to fix something or to make more of something.

Throughout the research, we reviewed all evidence and observations and used the key insights from these to develop initial recommendations.

We took these forward to a final delivery workshop where we worked with the Health Foundation team to generate and prioritise tactical ideas, which led to the creation of a roadmap for the Health Foundation to follow.

“The project brought together multiple people from across the Health Foundation, with many different skill-sets, to share valuable inputs and knowledge. By bringing these teams together to work collaboratively and involving them in the development of the resulting roadmap, the hope is that all teams will benefit from continued knowledge-sharing, collaboration, and audience focused planning.

"We were lucky enough to work with a fantastic team of people at the Health Foundation on this project who were really engaged and invested in what we were aiming to achieve.”

Nicky Moody, Project director

The Health Foundation has not only gained valuable insights into their key audiences, but also has a robust roadmap of marketing and communications activity to implement and test.

Additionally, the Health Foundation team is now armed with additional knowledge, skills and tools to be able to adopt an audience-focused approach to their future activities.

The quantitative analysis of the Health Foundation’s Google Analytics setup uncovered opportunities to make positive improvements to tracking, leading to a further project and additional training to maximise the value the Health Foundation gets from their data.