Your Audience Isn’t You: Why Empathy Beats Assumptions

There’s a phrase that comes up surprisingly often when reviewing creative:

“I wouldn’t click on that.” Or perhaps, “That wouldn’t make me donate.”

It sounds like useful feedback. After all, we’re all consumers, donors, social media users and email recipients ourselves. Surely our own reaction tells us something? The problem is that the campaign probably wasn’t designed for us.

One of the hardest disciplines in marketing, communications and fundraising is separating our own preferences from those of the people we’re trying to reach. We bring our tastes, experiences, knowledge and biases into every decision we make. Without realising it, we can start designing communications for ourselves. Good strategy asks us to do something much harder and see the world from somebody else’s perspective.

 

Your audience isn’t sitting in the meeting room

Imagine a fundraising team reviewing two potential Facebook ads aimed at people aged over 60. Someone dislikes the photograph. Someone else thinks the headline is too emotional. Another person says they would scroll straight past it. There’s nothing inherently wrong with those reactions. The problem comes when personal reaction becomes evidence.

We naturally assume other people see the world somewhat as we do. Psychologists call this the false consensus effect: our tendency to overestimate how widely other people share our own preferences, choices and beliefs. In the original research by Lee Ross, David Greene and Pamela House, people consistently perceived their own responses as more common than they really were. Across four studies, participants consistently overestimated the extent to which other people would respond as they did.

In other words, we have a natural tendency to assume other people are a little more like us than they actually are. That bias can quietly make its way into strategy.

• “I hate pop-ups.”
• “Nobody reads long emails.”
• “People already know who we are.”
• “That language feels too simple.”
• “We need to explain the program in more detail.”

The people making those statements often have a completely different relationship with the organisation, issue and communication than the audience does.

 

Knowing too much can be a disadvantage

Working closely with an organisation creates another problem: you know things. You know the programs, the acronyms and the organisational structure. You understand why the organisation exists, how its services work and what makes it different. You may have spent months discussing a fundraising proposition and weeks reviewing a campaign. Then somebody encounters your organisation for the first time while scrolling Instagram for three seconds.

Behavioural researchers describe this as the curse of knowledge. Once we know something, we struggle to fully imagine what it feels like not to know it. Research by Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein and Martin Weber found that better-informed people had difficulty disregarding information they possessed when predicting the judgements of less-informed people.

For fundraising, the implications are significant.

An organisation may believe its campaign proposition is obvious because the team has discussed it for six weeks. A supporter encountering the ad for the first time doesn’t have those six weeks of context. A program name may feel meaningful internally while communicating very little externally. An impact statement may make perfect sense to a fundraiser who understands the service model and leave a potential donor wondering what their $50 will actually achieve.

Sometimes the clearest communication feels almost too obvious to the people creating it.

That can be precisely why it works.

 

Demographics aren’t the same as understanding people

We can also mistake audience definition for audience understanding. 

“Women aged 45–65” is an audience segment. It tells us something useful, but very little about how to communicate with the person sitting behind that demographic label. What does she care about? What makes her angry or hopeful? What does she already believe about this issue? What would make her hesitate before donating? Which organisations does she already support, and why? How much does she understand about the problem we’re asking her to help solve?

Those questions move us from targeting towards empathy.

Demographic information can help us locate an audience. Behavioural data can tell us what they did. Neither automatically tells us what an experience means to them, what motivated the behaviour or what might persuade them to act differently.

Understanding requires curiosity.

 

Assumptions are hiding everywhere

We design websites around organisational structures because those structures make sense internally. We prioritise information because stakeholders believe it’s important. We send every supporter the same content because our database labels them all “donors”. We build donation forms around the information the organisation wants to collect rather than the experience the supporter wants to have.

None of these decisions necessarily feel like assumptions when we make them. They often feel logical because we’re looking at them through an organisational lens.

The supporter sees something entirely different. They experience one email, one ad, one webpage, one donation form. They arrive with their own knowledge, motivations, distractions and expectations. Understanding that perspective requires us to get outside our own.

 

Empathy means getting curious

So how do we do that? We ask.

Talk to donors. Interview supporters. Read survey responses. Watch how people actually navigate a donation page. Look at search behaviour. Listen to supporter-services conversations. Examine where people abandon a journey. Read the comments underneath social ads.

And test. If half the room thinks an emotional headline will perform better and the other half prefers something rational, you have an opportunity. Instead of debating until the most senior person wins, run both and let the audience answer.

A/B testing can turn subjective disagreements into useful learning. Landing pages can be continually optimised. Different propositions, creative treatments, calls to action and donation amounts can be tested. Over time, each experiment builds a richer understanding of how your audience actually behaves.

You don’t need to transform your entire approach overnight. Start with one assumption and turn it into a hypothesis. Make a small change, test it, learn from the result and use that learning to inform the next decision.

 

Start with them

Empathy doesn’t require endless research budgets or six-month audience studies. Small changes can fundamentally improve the way teams make decisions. Before approving a piece of communication, ask: What are we assuming here?

• When somebody says, “I wouldn’t respond to this,” ask whether they resemble the intended audience.
• When something feels painfully obvious internally, consider whether that clarity might be exactly what an unfamiliar audience needs.
• When two credible ideas are competing, look for an opportunity to test them.

Our job as strategists, creatives, marketers and fundraisers isn’t to predict what we ourselves would click, read, share or give to. It’s to understand the people we’re trying to reach well enough to create something meaningful for them. That requires data. It requires curiosity. And occasionally, it requires admitting that the audience may prove us completely wrong.

Good strategy begins when we leave our own perspective behind.

Because your audience isn’t you and they’re much more interesting when you stop assuming they are.