Reaching your audience with the right message has never been simple. But today, companies face even more challenges getting attention for the issues they care about and advocating for positions that will help the people they serve. Amid the current pandemic, communications channels are increasingly crowded, and stakeholders have even more distractions pulling them away. While many of us have adapted to this virtual world as we reach the seventh month of the pandemic, the “new normal” remains different for all of us.

Adding to this challenging environment is “fake news,” where it is increasingly difficult to get stakeholders to trust messages. For example, recent misinformation campaigns about elections and vaccines have brought new attention to this phenomenon and further underscore the need for reliable sources. In fact, the Nieman Lab at Harvard University publishes a weekly fake news roundup focusing on the latest research surrounding misinformation and clickbait.

Thus, it is more important than ever to understand who is critical to success, what channels are trusted and how to reach audiences with the right message the first time. Fortunately, Reservoir is guiding clients in this journey with innovative research offerings that combine the insights of our trusted Reservoir Network experts with technology that helps gain targeted feedback to inform messaging and engagement.

Our approach is three-fold:

• • Our first step in any research project is to gain an understanding of the field in which an organization or company is operating. Through a comprehensive landscape analysis, we identify the most important issues influencing the field and the other players that are also competing for visibility. This initial process provides a baseline to determine the overall sentiment in the field and pinpoint opportunities to dive deeper with our research. It is always helpful to understand general perceptions before diving into the thoughts of specific people within a selected audience.

• • We then identify the stakeholders most important for a given initiative, leveraging our trusted elite influencers in the Reservoir Network and proprietary techniques to identify their circle of influence. We specifically work to determine who has the greatest impact on core audiences to ensure the insights and opinions we gather are legitimate and representative, avoiding the plague of “fake news.”

• With this information, we craft a research plan that uses tailored approaches to find actionable insights and opportunities. We leverage a variety of tools that combine qualitative and quantitative research to ensure the data can be sliced in several different ways. We strongly believe that the quality of research participants is vital to producing actionable recommendations for moving forward, which is why we invest so much time engaging thought leaders and influencers through our research platforms.

Through our research, we can help identify the exact audience that is relevant to our clients’ goals and pinpoint the messages that resonate best as stakeholders separate the wheat from the chaff. We welcome the opportunity to help more organizations craft the best research strategy and deliver meaningful insights, as we finish 2020 and move into the new year.