For political campaigns, advocacy organizations, nonprofits, and labor unions, knowing your audience usually means knowing who they are: their age, where they live, how they vote, how engaged they've been. That's a persona.
But persuasion happens at a deeper level. Do you know what your audience values, how they see themselves, and how they see the world? That's what turns a persona into a person, and it's the foundation of values-based messaging.
With Grow Progress, teams use Audience Understanding Surveys to uncover the values, motivations, and identities that shape how people respond to an issue. Here are three reasons to make them the first step in your creative process.
What is values-based messaging?
Values-based messaging connects your issue to something your audience already cares about, such as fairness, family, freedom, security, or community. Instead of leading with facts and policy details, it starts with shared values and shows how your cause reflects them.
It works because people rarely change their minds based on information alone. They respond to messages that fit how they see themselves and the world. The challenge is that you can't guess which values matter most to a given audience, or which framing of those values will land. That takes research.
1. Learn real motivators, not just demographics
Audience Understanding Surveys help you understand why people think the way they do, not just who they are. Your current research might tell you that you're talking to suburban women aged 35 to 49. An Audience Understanding Survey tells you what those women believe in, how they see the world, and how your issue connects to their values.
Each survey polls a representative sample of the types of people you need to reach, and captures their views in their own words. That reveals the emotional and identity-based drivers behind their decisions, so your strategists and creatives can build on real values instead of a vague persona.
2. Get a research brief that actually inspires creative
Too many creative briefs are built on assumptions, demographics, or recycled insights from the last campaign. Audience Understanding Surveys give your research and creative teams a head start with an actionable, evidence-based analysis delivered in days.
You'll come away with clear insights into:
- Your target audience's core values and personality traits
- How they see the world and themselves
- How they feel about your issue, and why
That level of detail sharpens your values-based messaging from the start. Your team can brainstorm smarter, develop creative faster, and walk into message testing with stronger options.
3. Focus group insights at polling speed
Focus groups have long been the go-to for understanding what's behind people's opinions. But they take weeks to recruit and field, they're expensive, and someone still has to sift through hours of recordings to pull out the takeaways. Even then, you're working from a handful of voices.
Audience Understanding Surveys deliver the same strategic clarity in days. Instead of anecdotal soundbites, you get structured, segmentable data from a representative sample, with open-ended responses that are easy to review and act on.
In the time it takes to get a focus group off the ground, you can have the audience insights you need to start creative development.
| Focus groups | Audience Understanding Surveys | |
|---|---|---|
| Timeline | Weeks to recruit, field, and analyze | Days |
| Sample | A few small groups | A representative sample |
| Output | Recordings and anecdotal quotes | Structured data you can segment, plus responses in people's own words |
| Next step | Another round of qualitative research | Straight into message testing |
From values to tested messages
Knowing your audience's values tells you where to aim. Testing tells you whether you hit. The strongest values-based messaging comes from using both:
- Understand. Run an Audience Understanding Survey to learn which values and identities shape how your audience sees your issue.
- Draft. Write several messages that frame your issue around those values. The Persuasion Library, with 8,000+ tested messages, shows what has worked on similar topics.
- Test. Run a Rapid Message Test, a randomized controlled trial that measures which message actually persuades, with results in as little as 24 hours.
Whether you're working on a political campaign, an advocacy effort, a nonprofit appeal, or a union campaign, the sequence is the same: understand first, then test.
Build your messaging on what your audience values
Teams that use Audience Understanding Surveys aren't guessing what their audience cares about. They know, and their values-based messaging shows it.
Talk to our team to design your first Audience Understanding Survey.