Reboot supported the Wikimedia Foundation to develop an organizational strategy for integrating more audience research into their work. This strategy was then used to kickstart generative research with priority audience groups.

Design Synthesis & Facilitation

The Wikimedia Audience Development team conducted a series of five internal Audience Definition Workshops to understand Wikimedia teams' perception of their audiences, current approach to audience development, and knowledge gaps that affect their ability to serve their audiences.

Reboot then facilitated a Synthesis Workshop with the Audience Development team to process the findings from these workshops and develop a framework to guide audience research and engagement throughout the Wikimedia Foundation. As part of this workshop we:

• Aligned on the goals, objectives, and forward work necessary for this project

• Mapped audience descriptions heard in the Audience Definition Workshops, and segmented them into audience groups

• Identified tools that would be useful for to guide generative audience research

Systems Mapping

Building on the outcomes of the Synthesis Workshop, Reboot further refined and designed two tools for audience understanding:

1. Understanding of Audiences Map which reflects how Wikimedia currently describes their audiences, according to their relationships to other audiences and the roles they play in Wikipedia's production flow.

2. Audience and Stakeholder Framework which demonstrates an alternative, more dynamic way of understanding Wikimedia's audiences. It maps them against a key attribute that effects their relationship with Wikipedia (how individual or institutional they are) and their level of engagement with Wikipedia (degree of consume to contribute).

As living documents, these audience maps will continue to be updated as more feedback is collected from the movement and generative audience research begins.

Strategic Recommendations

These workshops and maps identified knowledge gaps, opportunities, and challenges in building a common audience understanding across the organization. Our recommendations guided Wikimedia on how to enable their teams to do more user research in order to better serve their broad ecosystem of audiences. Wikimedia immediately acted on on some of their key knowledge gaps, by conducting research on new editors with Reboot.

Read more about the Wikimedia Foundation's Audience Research project.