Boosting Government Communications Through Audience-Centered Plans

Agencies at all levels of government have critical information to impart for the benefit of public health, safety, and economic security. But as a 2024 study revealed, a majority of U.S. adults surveyed view the government as dishonest, self-serving, politically motivated, and lacking transparency. It also showed that government communicators surveyed identify misinformation and disinformation as a key factor driving mistrust.¹ 

Government communications efforts rooted in research, staying informed through continuous feedback loops, and actively engaging audiences in strategy development instead of simply regarding them as targets of the strategy can help build and sustain public trust. Here are a few recommendations for building audience-centric government agency communications plans.

Take a deeper dive to understand audiences

Communications professionals ground their work in the mantra of “know your audience”—but if your target audience includes large swaths of the American public, how well can you genuinely know and connect with them?

The first step to developing an audience-centric communications campaign is to make sure you have an accurate picture of the audiences you’re trying to reach. Relying on inaccurate perceptions or outdated assumptions can lead to inefficiency and potential failure.

The U.S. Census Bureau offers deep insights on the changing portrait of America, with detailed tables and visualizations to zoom in for a more accurate picture of communities.² For example, changes in the way the 2020 Census invited people to report their race and ethnicity revealed that those who self-identify with two or more races grew to 33.8 million people in 2020—a 276% increase since the last census in 2010.³ While population growth has been fueled in recent years by Hispanic, American Indian/Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander populations, people across the nation overall are having fewer children, increasingly remaining single, and living longer.⁴ These are all insights that can drive how people live and what they care about.

Government communicators often face resource and regulatory constraints to conducting quantitative and qualitative audience research at scale. Today, earned and social media monitoring accelerated by generative AI (GenAI) offers a cost-effective alternative for gathering insights and identifying influencers across a particular population group. 

Employing social media listening tools provides insights into the mindsets of the people and communities you seek to reach and the influencers shaping their attitudes and intentions. Consider using this cost-effective desk research approach to inform development of data-driven personas and journey maps—something typically used in customer experience initiatives but equally valuable in communications planning. 

Social media platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, and X can also be used to take pulse surveys and gauge audience sentiment in real time. These come with some caveats for communications teams when it comes to federal requirements under the Paperwork Reduction Act, but it can be worth exploring what’s allowed.

Invite representative audience members to your team

While creating an accurate portrait of your audiences and their mindsets is fundamental, inviting them to the table will go further to strengthen relationships, build trust, and drive better outcomes. Consider identifying representative audience members to be part of the communications development process. Their contributions will reflect a different perspective without the assumptions and preconceived ideas often found in teams consisting only of government employees within an agency.

For example, the U.S. Department of Labor has published a resource for states that often struggle to communicate effectively about unemployment compensation benefits.⁵ The toolkit guides state unemployment agencies in how to bring a human-centered design approach by engaging claimant advocates from across the community to shape proposed communication materials. These advocates can provide feedback on whether communications effectively adhere to plain language principles, ensuring the accessibility of these programs to those who need them most. This perspective can be difficult to achieve when communications team members have extensive existing knowledge of the topic and often don’t realize that their target audience doesn’t have the same baseline understanding.

It's also important when you’re looking to hire new team members to conduct a wide search that encourages people who are representative of your target audiences to apply. 

Maximize innovation opportunities

In addition to the approaches cited here, GenAI is opening up new ways to create written and visual content tailored to specific audience segments. Our experienced team of technology professionals works with public sector organizations to enhance the citizen experience, improve operational effectiveness, and increase community engagement using cutting-edge GenAI tools. This helps clients across federal, state, local, and tribal governments consider all available paths to create a deeper, more accurate understanding of their target audiences and execute audience-centric strategic communications efforts.

With so much at stake—and so many possibilities to improve on old ways of working—now is the time to take a fresh look at your communications efforts and explore practical, actionable, and innovative ways to engage with your target audiences.