Use rapid, scalable qualitative listening to understand your audience's core beliefs and identity, before you write a single message.
Trusted by leading campaigns, nonprofits, labor unions, and advocacy organizations
Audience Understanding Surveys are qualitative listening surveys that give you a rich, actionable creative brief that goes far beyond demographics. They let you identify people who are undecided or conflicted about your issue, cause, or candidate, and uncover what values, identities and world views drive them. Campaigns that develop messages from these insights are likely to outperform those that don't.
Two different research questions. Two different products. Know which one you need.
"You don't yet know who to target or how they think."
"You have messages and need to know which one performs."
AU research delivers four categories of insight no demographic breakdown can give you.
Each segment comes to your issue with a different mental model. AU reveals what words, frames, and reference points each group uses, so you speak their language, not yours.
AU identifies the persuadable segments, and the precise conditions under which they shift, so you allocate effort where it counts.
Some words signal trust; others trigger skepticism. AU surfaces the specific vocabulary that lands with each group, and the landmines that sink otherwise strong messages.
Talk to our team. We'll walk you through a real AU study and show exactly how audience segmentation research would change your message strategy.