Understanding a diverse diaspora audience

Context

A community organisation wanting to grow its reach across three generations of Cypriots in the UK

The work started as a tactical question from someone inside the Federation about how to get more from a Facebook campaign spend, and the deeper problem was that the team didn't actually know who they were trying to reach. You can't optimise a campaign for an audience you can't describe, so the brief reshaped from "run better ads" to "work out who the audience actually is and how to listen to them." I proposed a discovery workshop as the way in, and we brought it into &us as a project.

The research

Listening was the actual work, with the workshop opening the door to it

Four hours in a workshop with the Federation's team, where the partner facilitated and I came out with the brief for what to dig into. Ten interviews followed, sourced jointly with the team, spanning students in their twenties through to retirees across London, Manchester, Birmingham, and Liverpool. Different generations, different politics, different relationships with being Cypriot. Averaging across that range would have given us one fictional person who looked like nobody real, so each interview was treated as a standalone source and the synthesis worked by pattern rather than blend. That's why the four personas that came out are grounded in real interview material.

The personas

Four personas grounded in real interview material

Each one came out of the synthesis anchored in a real respondent rather than averaged across the sample. They named patterns the Federation had felt but hadn't articulated, events that read as London-centric, communications that felt more political than communal, a logo and tone that landed dated to younger Cypriots, a real desire to belong that wasn't being met by the current shape of the organisation. The work itself was solid, but the audience had moved on faster than the organisation had.

Outcome

Handed off, with no visibility into what happened next

I don't know what the Federation did with the personas after we handed them over, but the handover itself was something real, four personas that put words to patterns the team had felt but hadn't been able to name. Whether that changed how the organisation operated isn't mine to claim, but at the point of handoff, for the first time, the audience they'd been spending against was a thing they could actually describe. The work was pro bono, the partner cared about the cause and I'm Cypriot and willing, sometimes that's the engagement.