Activity #1

January 2010, by C.Antonini

1. Pick up the introduction to Audience Profiling in the Unit 3 pick up folder.

2. Group activity: expanding beyond demographics.

3. Now you will begin compiling the data you need to create a profile of an organization/companies's typical client/customer. We will be doing two of these exercises: the first one will be smaller and informal. The processes is as follows:

• pick a video game (can be anything)
• examine the website for the video game
• create a mini profile of the typical client--give the person a name and be sure to touch on demographics and psychographics.
• write your profile in a Word Document--we will present infomally today.

Activity #2 (for Thursday, Jan 21st)

January 2010, by C.Antonini

As we noted last class, teenagers are the most studied group by marketers and communication firms. Most market research and profiling of teens takes place in order for companies to sell their products and services. However, not for profit organizations (NPOs), charities and foundations are beginning to market themselves to teens in order to get donations or volunteer help.

Your communications firm has been hired by a not for profit organization (list of them below) to create an audience profile of a potential teenage donor/volunteer. By the end of this project you will create an audience profile of a typical teenage who could become a donor/volunteer for a particular Not for Profit Organization (NPO). Then, you will create an advertisement prototype (ad “on-spec”) that would appear on a website used by teens, such as Twitter, Facebook, Myspace etc.

NOTE: this is not a group project. Create a folder called "profile" and drop off your work each day.

To complete this assignment, follow the steps below You should be able to get most of 1 and 2 done by the end of today:

1. Pick one of the NPOs below (if you would like to pick a different one, that is fine. You can find many listed here. Or, check out this list of Toronto NPOs ):

Unicef
Redcross
Toronto Humane Society
Toronto Cat Rescue
United Way
Cancer Society
Toronto Housing
Greenpeace
Amnesty International
Kiva

2. Once you have selected an NPO (your client), start compiling a teenager profile of who you believe the NPO should market to. Put some thought into what segment of the teen population could become interested in helping the organization. Use the profiling handout in the pick up folder to help you create your profile. Drop off your profile notes (Word Document).

3. Now, read over your notes and select/rewrite 10 key descriptions of your audience profile (be sure to include descriptions from the various catagories on the Profiling handout). Find a picture on the web to suit your audience profile.

4. Make your Audience Profile Poster (see the show The Persuaders @ minute 7:57 for an excellent example)

5. Next, you will create an ad "on spec" that is "narrow casted" to your audience profile. Your ad should be designed to fit on a banner or "sidebar" of a social networking web site such as Facebook.

Activity #3

Now that you have your ad ready, you will "focus group" your ad to get feedback on its effect of audiences. For your focus group, you need to come up with questions to ask your participants. The questions should start with some profiling questions in order for you to get some psychographic information about your audience. These questions should get the following:

basic demographic info (age, background, region)
past volunteer/charity involvement values

The value questions (3 minimum) can be rate the following in importance", do you "strongly agree, somewhat agree, agree etc.) type questions.
Next, your focus group questions should uncover the audiences' reactions to the ad proposal. You should make questions (4 min) explore the audiences' emotional reactions and associations (what comes to mind when looking at this ad?) of your audiences.
Finally, the last question should ask the audience if they would/would not click on the link and why. The focus groups will run on the forum. Go to the forum to post/run your focus group (you will find more instructions on the forum).

Activity #4 - Culminating

You will now produce a PR "media kit" for an organization of your choice. The Media Kit instructions, Rubrics, workflow and schedule or in the "Pick up" folder, listed as "PR".