‘Know Your Audience, Improve Your Radio Ratings’ is the name of this two-year capacity building project that combined online and offline training with eleven community radios from Kenya and Uganda in a participatory manner. The principle was to merge elements in the form of easy-to-use and modifiable learning modules with tools and templates, face-to-face on-site visits by mentors allocated to each station, and peer-based learning.
Funded by Stem van Afrika (SvA) since 2022, the implementation of the project has been accompanied by CAMECO throughout the phases of planning, follow-up and assessing the progress of the activities.
The programme’s key capacity-building objectives were manifold. On the one hand, the overall goal was to help radio managers and producers learn more about their listeners and the effectiveness of their stations in achieving their goals.
Additionally, the learning modules aspired to equip radio managers and producers to determine their listener share in a competitive media environment. And, finally, each station should be able to build up its own knowledge on the basis of audience research, necessary to attract listeners, funding and advertising.
Each of the participating radio stations received guidance on data analysis, visualisation, extracting insights, conclusions, and recommendations. This project ended with the graduation event held online on June 20, 2024.
The comprehensive course embraced the basic principles of Theory of Change, from conceptualising audience research based on scientific methods to actually conducting fieldwork, using software to analyse the data and producing a final report with lessons learnt and recommendations.
In addition to how to sample respondents and conduct focus group discussions, the aspects that participants highlighted as most important included the significance of understanding their audience without making assumptions.
According to the Executive Director, Dr Elias Mokua of the Loyola Centre for Media and Communications (LCMC), “tapping into the findings of the audience research the radios themselves managed to conduct, the participating stations are now better equipped for future decision-making”.
