Strategic planning: A design approach for public diplomacy (Part 3 of 3) — Public Diplomacy in Practice

Snapshot of the January 2025 edition · U.S. Department of State (R/PPR) · Public domain · Unabridged · State's internal edition is authoritative over this copy

G. Audience analysis: using data to inform decision making

Audience analysis helps you reach the right people with the right message in the right way. Alongside sound policy analysis, situation analysis, and drafting a clear problem statement to articulate what needs to change. Audience analysis helps answer the following questions, using data and evidence:

What is the right priority audience to effect that change?
What is the right message that will resonate with that priority audience?
What is the right way to reach the selected priority audience?

Audience analysis is the second element of the PD Framework, and is closely related to the elements “Apply Policy in Context” and “Develop Plans.”

Audience analysis is an evidence-based process to identify, select, and define the groups of people whose attitudes or behaviors need to change in order to achieve a policy objective and to determine effective ways to communicate with and engage these priority audiences. The audience analysis process helps ensure that limited resources are spent on activities that can effect change towards your policy goal. Your audience is actionable when you can 1) reasonably target the group with a single section activity, and 2) reasonably predict how the group will respond or engage with the initiative.

Audience analysis as part of situation analysis: what needs to change?

While audience analysis is a distinct element in the PD Framework, understanding public opinion is crucial throughout the planning process. For example, to write your problem statement, you first need to know the current environment. Public opinion research can help you better understand the current environment so that you can think about what needs to change to achieve the desired future state. Public opinion research may involve such activities as collecting data on the number of people in your country who 1) see a policy topic, like education, as a priority, or 2) do or don’t take a certain action, like voting. Understanding current public opinions before deciding what it is you want to change can help you decide where to invest your valuable time and limited resources to best achieve your desired outcomes.

This section uses an extended fictional example about a PD section working on an ICS goal focused on improving cooperation on multilateral climate protection agreements. However, public support is low in the example to illustrate how a PD section can use public opinion data and audience analysis to help it make data-informed decisions throughout its planning process.

To achieve an ICS goal focused on improving cooperation on multilateral climate protection agreements, you might assume people will be more likely to support the agreement if they understand its implications for improving climate change. However, you decide to check the latest public opinion research and realize that only 8 percent of people in the country list climate change as a top priority. This new information changes your perspective: You now think that the underlying problem might not be that people don’t know about the climate benefits of the agreement, but rather that they don’t see benefits of mitigating climate change as making progress on their higher priorities, like unemployment and health. Your team decides to frame its messaging around the economic and health benefits of the agreement rather than making it directly about climate change.

Once you have identified the current situation and the problem your activity will address, you can move on to figuring out who you need to reach to achieve the change you are looking for.

Who are the right audiences to achieve the change you want to see?

Potential Audience: Once you know what problem you are trying to solve, the next step is to figure out whom you need to reach to achieve your policy goal. After exploring existing data and your team’s observations about the current environment, you may already have some ideas or assumptions about potential audiences who either care about the policy area or might be able to bring about the change you are seeking. A potential audience is a group of people who are affected by or influential on a particular policy or issue. These are the people whose attitudes, knowledge, or behavior you are ultimately looking to change.

Goal: improve cooperation on multilateral climate protection agreement
Problem: people do not connect the effects of climate change to higher priority issues (unemployment and health), so they do not support their government’s cooperation with multilateral climate protection agreements.

Now you think through who is affected by climate-related unemployment and health concerns. While you might say, everyone, or the general public, is affected by climate change, you can narrow this group by considering those whose employment or health are affected by climate change. There may be groups who are unemployed due to changing weather patterns that affect farming. Additionally, you might also consider those who do not have clean water or are suffering from air pollution-related health conditions as affected groups. Or you might want to consider groups that would be most influential in swaying broader public opinion on the agreement, such as trusted economic journalists or business leaders.

There are two important things to note about these potential audiences:

The audiences identified in this step will likely be far too broad to engage successfully, and there will likely be too many potential audiences for you to engage all of them. You will need to select the potential audience that will be most effective at helping you reach your goal and continue narrowing in to determine your priority audience.
As you consider potential audiences, you will make a series of assumptions about who is affected by the policy and who can be most influential in achieving your desired policy outcomes. These assumptions are important first steps in the audience analysis process and are key in guiding the direction of your research. However, when possible, it is important to use evidence to confirm or refute these assumptions.

Priority Audience: In order to narrow your potential audience to an actionable priority audience, consider your policy goal and the knowledge, attitude, or behavior that needs to change to achieve that goal (see above). As a reminder, no single activity is going to change the attitudes of everyone in your potential audiences in a predictable way.

A priority audience is an audience that you select for targeted engagement with PD programs, initiatives, messages or other activities. To identify a priority audience whom you can effectively engage, consider the shared knowledge, attitudes, or behaviors that need to change to achieve the policy goal. By focusing your activities on the priority audience who needs to change, your resources will be more effective, and you will be better able to evaluate the outcomes.

If you want to target people who live in areas where their daily health is affected by climate change, you will need to narrow in on groups whose knowledge, attitudes, or behaviors will need to change in order to improve public demand for cooperation with the multilateral climate protection agreement. To identify these groups, you can look at public opinion data on views of climate, environmental protection, and government action.

For example, you may see an analysis of a recent survey that shows that while only 8 percent of the total population view climate change as a top priority, 65 percent of respondents say that climate-related issues are “somewhat” important for the government to address and only 20 percent say that they are “not at all” important. This tells you that there is a persuadable group out there who does not see climate as a top priority but may still be interested in seeing government action. This is your priority audience, which will be segmented further into a unique and reachable audience.

Audience segmentation: Now that you know your priority audience, you will need to identify what makes this group of people unique by researching the shared characteristics of your audience. In this step, you will use demographic characteristics to better clarify and define your audience. This step is important because it is very difficult to target a group of people based solely on the information in their heads (their knowledge or attitudes) or even on potential future behaviors. However, you can use audience analysis to identify shared demographics of your priority audience that will make them easier to engage. Key demographics often include age, gender, region or location, socioeconomic status, education, and more.

Goal: Improve cooperation on multilateral climate protection agreement
Problem: People do not connect the effects of climate change to higher priority issues (i.e. health and unemployment, so they do not support their government’s cooperation with multilateral climate protection agreements)
Potential Audience: People living in areas with decreased air quality and/or access to clean water due to climate change (urban residents)
Priority Audience: People who think the government should make climate issues at least somewhat of a priority

To better understand the demographics of your priority audience, you could reach out to R/PPR/REU’s Audiences team at Audiences@state.gov to get support in further analyzing any demographic data that may be available on your priority audience. For example, they may have data that indicates that people who say climate issues are “somewhat” important for the government to address are more likely to be between the ages of 35-50, have at least a secondary education, and live in urban areas.

This demographic information helps you better understand your priority audience and begin to inform your message and medium as you develop plans for your engagement.

What is the right message?
Once you have identified your priority audience segment, you need to determine the right message that will engage them and affect change. Your message is the idea you are trying to convey to your audience. It could look like the theme of a program, the script for a television spot, or the talking points in a speech. As you craft your message, you should consider the problem you identified, what you want your priority audience to say, think, or do (the goal of your message), and the shared characteristics of your priority audience segment.

By using your priority audience to inform your message, you are more likely to affect the change you desire in this group. You may have a solid understanding of what messages will resonate with your priority audience from your analysis or you may need to perform additional analysis with this sub-group to understand which messages will best resonate. Message testing is a great tool for this analysis and can be done as a part of audience research, such as surveys or focus groups.

Based on your analysis, you know that your priority audience is more concerned about health than they are about climate change. You also know that they already expect their government to take action on climate issues. This information can help you craft a message that focuses on the health benefits of cooperating with the multilateral climate protection agreement and gives information on how your priority audience can demand further cooperation from their government.

What is the right way to reach your audience?
Once you have identified your priority audience, you need to determine how to reach them. A medium is a communication tool that connects the intended message with the intended audience. This could come in many forms, such as a conference that you host, a radio advertisement, or a social media post. You can utilize data on media usage to better understand how your priority audience gets their information. Once you know where they consume information, you can create a plan to distribute your message on that medium.

In addition, information on whom your priority audience trusts or looks to for this type of information can help you better understand who should deliver your message. At this point, you may want to consider the messengers who are influential to your audience or in your policy areas. These groups may be key messengers as you plan your medium.

As you dig into the data, you find that educated, urban residents between the ages of 35-50 tend to get their news and information from the TV or radio and particularly trust a couple of key outlets.

Alternatively, it is possible that at this point you realize that you are not able to communicate directly with your selected audience. You may not have access to the platforms they use, or they may not trust U.S. messaging and sources. This is when you should consider who may be influential to your audience. It may be more feasible given your resources to target those influential groups.

Given that our priority audience tends to get their information from a couple of key trusted news outlets, you may decide to develop a program to discuss the importance of covering the economic impact of climate change for urban communities with journalists from those key outlets.

The goal of audience analysis is to help you make evidence-based decisions about how you use limited resources effectively. By taking time to answer some key questions about your audience as you determine the policy context and develop activity plans, you can be more confident that your PD activities are affecting the change you need to achieve your policy objectives.

Although this information is presented linearly for simplicity, it is important to keep in mind that audience research is rarely a linear process. As you learn more about your audience(s), you are likely going to want to adjust the plans you set in previous steps. Specifically, this is where further segmentation and identification of the specific changes you want to see within the audience(s) is important.

Bias in data

During this process, data and desk research can uncover previously undiscovered biases among your staff, and they allow you to plan programming that takes these experiences into account. Department and local regulations may prevent specific demographic information from being collected. However, to address this challenge, start by identifying gaps in the human resource systems by determining what information is available and what information is desired. By working with human resources and legal advisors, team leaders can ensure they are capturing the right data while allowing people to opt-in appropriately. Validate information by actively engaging in conversations with members of key audiences. Seeking external confirmation from populations of interest ensures that goals will be met most effectively. Additional outreach efforts can include contacting other organizations whose efforts in the region have been successful with successful efforts in the region, holding focus groups, or connecting with contacts during representation events or alumni reunions. Contacts are likely to appreciate your efforts to better understand their country, context, and people.

H. The Public Diplomacy Implementation Plan process

The Public Diplomacy Implementation Plan (PDIP) process helps PD professionals move from strategy to tactics. It provides a clear plan and common vision for a PD section or PD office, ensuring that all PD activities are organized under initiatives that directly support foreign policy goals. The PDIP is more of a planning process, regularly updated, than a fixed plan.

The PDIP process is documented in PD Tools, a platform for planning, budgeting, analysis, and reporting. It serves as an active planning tool for missions and functional bureaus and illustrates the alignment of resources and activities that advance policy goals. The specific requirements and fields in PD Tools change based on new guidance and user needs, so specific details on using this platform are not included here.

The PDIP process helps posts:

Explain the problems PD initiatives and activities aim to solve.
Show leadership the impact of PD programs in advancing mission/bureau goals, objectives, and sub-objectives.
Increase organizational effectiveness by unifying the PD team and the mission around a common strategic vision.
Strengthen justifications for PD funding.
Provide Washington with data to demonstrate results to external stakeholders such as the OMB and Congress.
Ensure the adequate allocation of resources.
Set objectives and indicators for monitoring and evaluation.
Align social media strategy, communications, and programming efforts.
Guide decision making about new PD efforts, helping prioritize initiatives that align with strategic goals.
Align leadership support behind PD priorities and help leadership understand the trade-offs involved by taking on nonpriority activities that aren’t included in the leadership-approved PDIP process.
Update their plans regularly to reflect current priorities and changes in the environment.
Create a framework and tool to coordinate across the interagency, where various parts of the government, such as the Department of State, the Department of Defense, and other federal agencies, work together to achieve common goals and ensure that their efforts are aligned and effective.

Through the PDIP process, PD sections (at missions) and PD offices (in functional bureaus) analyze the policy context, stakeholder relationships, and opportunities and challenges related to achieving foreign policy goals. They describe the problems that hinder U.S. goals and identify key audiences, resources, and a coherent plan to effect change. The PDIP process has three main components: an overview statement, initiatives, and section activities (which include budget information).

The overview statement explains the PD section’s or office’s strategic thinking and how PD will advance policy objectives.
An initiative is a campaign or group of activities intended to achieve an objective or sub-objective. Initiatives are the major building blocks of a mission or section’s PDIP, as they link sets of activities, programs, and messages to a foreign policy outcome. They are collections of related section activities that work together to achieve an ICS or FBS sub-objective.
Section activities are programs, events, or projects, including messaging and digital outreach, that contribute directly to achieving goals of their parent initiative. They should be updated throughout the year.

The initial PDIP is not an exhaustive list of all activities, but an overview of how the PD team will support foreign policy goals. Once approved, section activities can be added in support of initiatives throughout the year. Any activity using significant funds or staff time should be entered as a section activity.

The PDIP process is evolving and dynamic. PD teams update the PDIP in PD Tools regularly to reflect current strategic priorities and changes in the environment, as teams learn more about target audiences or impact through monitoring and evaluation. Posts planning to commission PD research (audience research, formal monitoring and evaluation activities, or digital analytics), should include these activities in their PDIP using the “Post: PD Research and Evaluation” activity subtype in PD Tools.

Strategic PDIP summary statements and initiatives serve as a framework for messaging efforts across the interagency. Interagency planners often look to PDIPs when developing their own communication products. DoD military information support operations (MISO) planners may look to PDIPs as they develop MISO activities.

A design approach to PD helps PD sections and offices translate policy and strategic guidance (ICS or FBS) into detailed plans (PDIP process) based on audience analysis. Involving the front office in setting priorities can help PD leaders focus their team’s work and engage in productive discussions with mission or bureau leadership about priorities and trade-offs. For more information on effectively incorporating the PD Framework into your planning process, take a look at the PD Framework and the PDIP Process.

I. Approaching planning in diverse environments: Cynefin framework

Public diplomacy often deals with diverse and evolving situations. While strategic planning and using the design approach are important processes for connecting public diplomacy work to policy outcomes, not every PD intervention demands or allows this level of planning. Some problems require quick responses with little time for planning; other situations are routine, so a solution may be quite obvious and straightforward. Design thinking and strategic planning are best suited for complex problems and long-term solutions. The Cynefin (pronounced kuh-nev-in) framework, developed by Dave Snowden, offers valuable insights into how to approach different types of problems or environments for planning.¹

The Cynefin framework can be highly beneficial in planning for public diplomacy efforts because it is applicable in a variety of cultural, political, and social contexts. The framework allows for a flexible approach, where approaches can be adjusted based on changing context. This framework can help leaders identify the type of situation they are facing and make better decisions about how to respond.

Within the Cynefin framework, there are five domains: clear, complicated, complex, chaotic, and disorder. Each domain represents a different kind of problem or context, characterized by its level of predictability and the relationship between cause and effect. This section discusses PD examples in the first four domains; in the fifth domain, disorder, the primary characteristic is that you can’t figure out which domain you are in. Here, your task is “sense-making” to figure out what kind of problem or situation you have.

The Cynefin framework: four domains and their action postures, with disorder in the center. Redrawn from the source document's graphic.

Figure 7. Cynefin framework

In the clear domain, cause-and-effect relationships are ordered and predictable. It is an ordered domain. The clear domain focuses on rules and compliance. When the clear domain breaks down, it results in chaos because everything falls apart. You do sometimes have to find workarounds in this domain when things don’t make sense. You don’t even have to plan in this domain because things just are what they are.

Examples: Security procedures at the American Center, drafting and clearing social media posts for the embassy Facebook account, conducting weekly staff meetings, inviting a visitor to the embassy, issuing a routine press release.
Actions: Follow established best practices, protocols, and standardized communication strategies. Keep a consistent and clear message, which works best for predictable environments.

The complicated domain is also an ordered domain, characterized by multiple possible solutions to a problem, but cause-and-effect relationships can still be determined with analysis and expertise. Planning here involves analyzing options and consulting with experts to make informed decisions. Leaders delegate to experts, who make the right decisions, which lead to good outcomes, at least this is what happens in high-trust environments. There’s lots of planning that takes place in the ordered, complicated domain, but this is the planning of checklists, logic models, the A-F framework and SOPs.

Examples: Conducting a press conference on a controversial topic, yearly events such as the 4th of July, planning and coordinating the Fulbright application and selection process to meet ICS objectives and ECA deadlines and goals
Action: Use expertise, data, and analysis to make informed decisions based on logic and reason. Leaders should trust teams of experts to make decisions that will lead to optimized outcomes based on available resources and information. Follow established guidelines and SOPs where they are available, and establish new ones when and where needed. A complicated system is difficult to understand, in part, because it has many moving parts, but the relationships are clear and the cause and effect linkages are direct. Complicated systems and processes can be managed with careful analysis, foresight, and planning.

In the complex domain, however, the cause and effect relationships are unpredictable, not immediately clear, and may become apparent only in hindsight. Planning in this domain requires experimentation, adaptive approaches, and an openness to emergent solutions. Leaders must probe, sense, and respond to the dynamic nature of the situation. This guidance suggests that strategic planning for public diplomacy is often in this complex domain. Because public diplomacy is a fundamentally human endeavor and deals with many variables and loosely coupled constraints, the cause and effect relationships between actions and reactions may not always be clear or immediate. Furthermore, the information environment is an extraordinarily crowded one, and relationships and networks are constantly shifting. As a result, there will be few right answers in PD strategic planning, and the design approach is intended to be flexible, adaptive, emergent, and responsive to changing information and changing contexts.

Example 1: A post needs to plan a series of engagements to gather various stakeholder perspectives on 5G policy to begin exploratory work on tech, economic, and policy partnerships with the United States. The post has few existing contacts outside of USAID’s networks with healthcare professionals.
Action: Map potential stakeholders and conduct situation and audience analysis to identify who holds influence, expertise, and who may benefit from the partnerships the post is aiming to develop. Initiate low-risk, informal discussions, such as roundtables, small group webinars, or one-on-one interviews. Focus on learning: What are the stakeholders’ concerns and aspirations around 5G policy? Bring together these diverse voices in various forums, and remain flexible and responsive. Encourage ongoing reflection and sense-making across all engaged parties. This might include creating regular feedback mechanisms (e.g., surveys, follow-up interviews) to refine your approach. Adjust your priorities and partnerships based on what stakeholders reveal and learn and evolve through the process.
Example 2: A post needs to develop an initiative to counter PRC and Russia messaging within the country. However, disinformation and anti U.S. narratives create a challenging environment.
Action: Conduct a thorough landscape analysis to understand the depth of the disinformation campaigns, identify key sources, and map existing narratives. Build trust with local audiences and community partners. To formulate messages that resonate with their audiences, post needs to understand their audience(s) interests and concerns. Work with a local team to administer focus groups to further define their audience's concerns and interests and explore which messaging best resonates with each audience. Based on the received feedback, launch a series of small, targeted messaging campaigns focused on facts and positive contributions from the United States, and continuously iterate, monitor, and respond. Since disinformation is constantly evolving, the initiative needs to be flexible and adaptive. The goal is to learn from each iteration and adjust the strategy accordingly.

In the chaotic domain, there is no discernible relationship between cause and effect, and the situation is rapidly changing; this can include emergency situations. Strategic planning in this domain involves containing the chaos, restoring order, and then transitioning to one of the other domains where a more systematic approach can be applied.

Example: Responding to unexpected crises, such as natural disasters or reputational damage (e.g., misinformation campaigns targeting a nation's image).
Action: Act quickly and decisively to stabilize the situation before reflecting on long-term strategies. This could involve setting up a temporary command center to coordinate responses, monitoring real-time developments. Provide transparent and consistent updates to all stakeholders. Messaging should focus on facts and steps being taken to address the crisis. Issue official statements and leverage trusted platforms to provide accurate information.

Cynefin provides a useful framework for planning by helping leaders understand the complexity of the situations they face and guiding them in choosing the most appropriate approach to problem-solving, based on the nature of the problem and the level of predictability.

https://hbr.org/2007/11/a-leaders-framework-for-decision-making ↩

Strategic planning: A design approach for public diplomacy

G. Audience analysis: using data to inform decision making

Bias in data

H. The Public Diplomacy Implementation Plan process

I. Approaching planning in diverse environments: Cynefin framework

Footnotes