📚 It’s Not About You, It’s Your Audience!

Welcome Back! 👋🏼

To kick off our year, I started by sharing how I’m revamping my content strategy and process so I can create more space and time for creativity and deeper research. This month’s resource, our Content Strategy Hub, has become my go-to place for creating this newsletter. To wrap up building a micro strategy review into your year, I wanted to touch on understanding your audience in a time of decaying cookies. We don’t need deep analytics to understand human behavior. Read on for more...

On Tap This Week
🔬 It’s not about you…it’s your audience
🌱 Google search is getting worse
🌱 Gen Z’s changing tech behavior
🌱 An Activist Burnout Audit
🧰 Resource: Content strategy hub

Over the last fifteen years, I have worked pro bono for small non-profits and with Fortune 500 companies commanding million-dollar budgets. No matter the organization, there is one extremely common mistake that brands make in their communications.

It’s the audience.

Most organizations spend their strategic planning time talking about themselves. For social change work that usually means programs competing for the most attention, disagreements over goals, and long email chain discussions over the color pallette or graphics. (If you’re chuckling, you can relate!)

The problem? Your audience doesn’t care.

I’m sorry to be harsh, but it’s true. Our organizations and theories for change are important to us. Many communicators live and breathe the brands they work with. It makes sense that we would naturally want to talk about what we know.

But it’s important to remember the environment surrounding our brand. Your audience have seen an average of 4,000 to 10,000 ads during just a day of their busy lives. So by the time they get your email or see your social post, they’re not as attuned as you’d like to hope.

🌺 Flowering & 🍋 Fruitful Member Zone

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• 📚 Google Search is Getting Worse - We reported last week that more people are using TikTok for search and it’s easy to see why.
  • 🤓 The Root 🌱 - The “enshitaficaton” of the Internet continues to fragment where people are getting their information, which helps the rise of disinformation.
• 📚Turn Longer YouTube Videos into Shorts - There will now be a “Remix” option on your YouTube clips for editing tools that can reformat your clips into Shorts
  • 🤓 The Root 🌱 - YouTube is incentivizing TikTok style videos. If you want to grow on YouTube, test more Shorts.
• ❤️‍🩹 Prevent Burnout with Time Alignment - Between now and February 7th, my friend, Taj Smith, is offering a limited number of 1-hour Time/Energy Alignment sessions for activists looking to avoid burnout.
  • 🤓 The Root 🌱 - I love his trauma-informed approach to reorient our time. Help protect your peace for $250.
• 🎬 If Fonts Hung Out Together - a little font humor for you.
  • 🤓 The Root 🌱 - Sometimes I miss the comic sam days of the Internet.

And that's a wrap on this week’s newsletter! We hope you found this newsletter helpful in your work. If you have any topics you want covered or have any questions, please reach out to let us know.

In Solidarity,
Sam Chavez
Roots of Change Founder

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🌱 about the roots of change agency

The Roots of Change Agency was founded to support nonprofits, campaigns, and activists to avoid burnout and tell empathetic stories to cultivate connections that empower social change. We were founded in 2020. Learn more.

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