I wanted to give you a short update on the audience research work and let you know what's coming down the pipeline over the next few weeks. As always, if you have any questions, concerns, hypotheticals, or just want to bounce some ideas/questions/what-nots, please reach out directly or respond to the listserv.

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Audience Frameworks: We finished up our initial collaboration with the research design firm Reboot, and published two framework diagrams: the first is an ecosystem map showing relationships and actions associated with various movement roles; the second shows audience groups in terms of their actions and size. You can see the metrics meeting deck about this work here (slide 15 --> and watch a recent presentation about it here. These presentations will be up on-wiki shortly, if they're not already.

Collectively we identified over 400 audience groups we serve or could be serving in our work! Caveat: The diagrams do not show all 400 groups. It is also likely that a group can fit into more than one place, or that a person can be in more than one audience group. We view these as a framework or guide that we may be able to use to think about any audience, even if it's not explicitly mentioned. 

On-wiki: All of the work about our process to date is on-wiki. Feel free to share it or use it or adapt it or use it for anything you're working on.

Prioritization Process: We are now prioritizing the identified audiences for further research, analysis, and experimentation/interventions. We're working on a pilot project with the audience leads from the Product team to develop a criteria we can use against their identified high-priority audiences as well as the goals they have for their teams. This process will be outlined on-wiki shortly, and is designed to be replicated. If you'd like a preview, here is a slide deck that imagines the different ways we could think about text editors, all of the ways we might be able to segment that audience to learn more about them, what questions we may have about them, how we could learn more about them, and what we might be able to learn through internal or external data. This will be on wiki shortly.

What's next: Once we identify the prioritized list of audiences with the product team, we will then determine the best ways to learn more about these groups, and then validate and test those assumptions. This might be a combination of research, generative research, and ideas about product, partnership, programmatic, and communications projects — or a smattering of some of the above.

Other work to keep your eyeballs on: The New York Times released a 2020 strategy report today, which outlines where the paper sees itself growing over the next 5-10 years: http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/

I see many of the bullet points they've written about the design/content as potentially transferrable to our use cases. I also think this report is really smart from a strategic perspective — and I like that they consider how their structure may need to change to accommodate changes in the ways people read and consume material. It feels like we're thinking about similar questions and spaces.

- Mel