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    1. Technology

    Best Practices: Want to Understand Public Opinion? Here’s How Data Can Help

    March 12, 2020
    From the March issue's "Best Practices: Targeted Advocacy" section: Scott Wilkinson outlines the importance access to data tools has to understanding and affecting public perceptions.
    Related To: AlphaVu
    Scott Wilkinson, AlphaVu
    Scott Wilkinson, AlphaVu

    WASHINGTON, D.C. - Public opinion changes with lightning speed, so it’s vital you have access to data tools for understanding and affecting public perceptions on a minute-by-minute basis. Fortunately, developments in the neuro and social sciences have given us better insights into human decision making than ever before. This means we have quickly improving measurements to reveal what the public believes and why. If you’re still doing telephone survey research, that’s great—you probably need a poll on occasion, but this is no longer a sufficient tool for understanding public opinion in today’s fast-paced information environment. Here are a few quick tips to consider when making sure opinions in your market are covered:   

    1. Pay attention to the non-representative groups. These are small, vocal and active communities. Though often too small to be picked up in a telephone poll, these groups drive media narratives and perceptions of elected officials and other important community stakeholders. It’s a mistake to overlook or ignore them as they’re often indicators of nascent but growing public opinion. You’ve no doubt seen these groups online, where they organize most often. For example, a disgruntled group rallying against light rail in their city, although small in number, may sway an election in their favor if their influence isn’t sufficiently understood and addressed. You can use Social Network Analysis (SNA) techniques to measure their impact so you know how best to inoculate the public at large from their influence.  

    2. Use methods to accurately test opinion and message receptivity in real time. The ever-changing opinions and media cycles make it imperative you take the public’s opinion temperature on a day-to-day basis. A good place to start is by integrating sentiment metrics (machine learning based sentiment is the best). Trends in positive or negative sentiment among segments of the public who are engaging with you, or are talking about relevant topics, will give you a sense of what is trending over time. If you notice daily increases in the number of people talking favorably about your issue, you may have good evidence that opinion is moving your way.

    3. Use data that reveals the realities of human decision making. We understand better than ever the biology and neuroscience of how humans develop opinions and make decisions. Like it or not, emotion is the overwhelming driver of decision making, no matter how rational we think we are. Knowing this, we should regularly incorporate metrics that reveal what emotions our messages evoke, because those emotions impact the end opinion far more than the factual content of the message itself. Impressions and click-through rates won’t help here. One basic way to approach this is to normalize your digital engagement metrics across ad campaigns or organic posts. This means dividing the metric of interest (direct engagements, average sentiment, etc.) by the number of people in the target audience and then (if applicable) by the budget of the ad campaign. This results in an engagement metric you can compare across messages, ad groups and time, thus revealing how intensely one audience reacts compared to another. There are more sophisticated commercial approaches available, but this is a good first step in understanding the connection points between your content and the emotional reactions of your audiences.

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    Scott G. Wilkinson is the Founder of AlphaVu.