Narrowing Our Audience
After some broad research, we narrowed our demographic focus to Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996).
The Pollinator Stewardship Pilot mass media campaign hit the airwaves and the web on June 22, 2020.
But before we could develop the campaign, we had to determine the target audience, and it needed to be an audience that would help Prairie View meet certain goals in its strategic plan:
• Prairie View’s strategic goal two: Enhance natural resource conservation and management.
• Prairie View’s strategic goal five: Prepare Texas youth to be productive, positive, and equipped with life skills for the future.
• Prairie View’s strategic goal six: Expand access to Extension education and knowledge resources.
After some broad research, we narrowed our demographic focus to Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996). First, Millennials are the largest generation — about 80 million — giving us a huge potential audience, one that is largely untapped by Extension programs. Second, the research indicated that Millennials are in a stage of life that makes them more likely to listen to and take action based on the message we wanted to deliver, especially in the context of Prairie View’s goals. Millennials are a huge home-owning population — putting them in an ideal position to focus on resource conservation and management (Prairie View strategic goal two) because they have yards in which they can create pollinator-friendly landscapes. According to a 2019 realtor.com study, Millennials represent 42 percent of all mortgage holders in the United States. In Texas, the number is even higher: 70 percent of Millennials owned their own homes as of September 2019, according to a Dallas Business Journal report. Millennials also are having children at a steady rate — more than one million become parents each year, according to Pew Research Center. Equipped with the right information, Millennial parents can teach their children how to protect pollinators, a positive, productive life skill (Prairie View strategic goal five). A key to the campaign, then, would be to give our audience the right information: the Pollinator Prep Guide, which would be available for download . This aligned with Prairie View’s sixth strategic goal: Expand access to Extension education and knowledge resources.
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