Build Data-Driven Communities: Beyond Digital First & Demographics

by Mariano Avila

Rowing to Data Safety-Image created by Mariano Avila using Dall-E text to image generator.

From Digital First to Data-Driven

Is your station or media team still talking about transitioning to digital? Are the metrics you’re looking at still based largely on demographics? If you answered yes to either question, this article is for you.

For folks with one foot in Public Media and another in the broader industry, hearing that someone’s digital strategy is diving into Facebook, IG, TikTok, YouTube or Spotify can feel like watching them jump from a life raft into a leaky cruise liner. By 2027, PBS expects its linear audiences to dwindle to near zero. And while digital-first strategies do reach eyes and ears, that reach rarely translates into the deep engagement needed to build a community invested in your sustainability. So, what’s the move?

Considerations for Social Media Strategies

Platforms like Facebook and Instagram are engineered to keep users within their ecosystems. The algorithm punishes you for directing traffic out of the app or for promoting events—unless you pay for the privilege. Perhaps more critically, focusing on engagement and brand awareness on these platforms means you don’t own your relationship with your followers. So, the moment a social network decides to change its algorithm or prioritize a different content format than the one your team is skilled at creating, you’re not on their feed anymore—and that’s no way to build long term.

So, what should we look for? Instead of focusing on views and clicks from “borrowed” platforms, it’s time to shift towards data-driven methods that work directly on your owned media. If you must pay, don’t pay for eyeballs, pay to redirect traffic to platforms you own, where you can see how people engage, their habits, values, interests. This information is called psychographic data and comes only from the sources you control—your website, app, newsletters, and events—the foundation on which you can build what our team calls “Communities of Purpose”: groups of highly engaged individuals driven by shared interests and sustained by intentional, data-informed touch points.

“Put bluntly, the game has changed from capturing more eyes and ears, to fostering relational depth and sustained engagement with very specific groups.”

Psychographics, Not Demographics

In a world of psychographic data, you’re not just analyzing age, sex or location. You’re exploring how audiences engage, the types of content they value, and how to design experiences that resonate deeply. Instead of tracking that a 65-year-old woman in the suburbs clicked on a video, you focus instead on the fact that she’s part of your education-focused audiences, who watch longer shows, give small, recurring amounts, are also interested in mental health, and are highly involved in volunteering for children’s events. Armed with this kind of knowledge, you can create touch points designed to get to know them and to get them more involved, eventually fostering communities within your network that support each other and your mission. Put bluntly, the game has changed from capturing more eyes and ears, to fostering relational depth and sustained engagement with very specific groups.

Example to Get Started

Imagine mining insights from touch points you already have—linear audiences, social followers, website visitors, and email subscribers. Let’s say there’s clear data pointing to interest in resourceful living and financial literacy. More specifically, you discover that folks engaging are younger parents watching PBS Kids and retirees who love cooking shows, and that both show up to your events. That’s a start. Now you can create content and events (touch points) to actively test assumptions and predictions about that audience. Those who engage most become your first candidates for a “community of purpose” around personal finance. Now you start building ways of increasing their engagement—recruiting volunteers in that group to babysit at cooking classes after 5 p.m. for the young parents, or promoting a limited podcasts designed to fit their average commute, or promoting a newsletter series with 10 tips for budgeting living. You can now design touch points meant to serve them while teaching you how they want to be better served.

To recap, better data is more valuable than more eyeballs. And psychographics are better data than demographics.

In this newsletter series, we’ll be exploring these approaches with insights from experts like Hollywood and nonprofit strategist Kathryn Schotthoefer, who taught me about psychographics, as well as from our in-house subscription and data expert, Tim Nafziger, who has helped me understand a data-driven mindset. You’ll also hear from journalist and social media strategist, Adriana Loya and other experts in our network.

Data Sources, Data Workhorses

Consider where your most valuable data comes from—sources you can control and analyze directly:

• Website analytics that show engagement time and content preference.

• Email interactions that reveal open rates, click-throughs, and follow-up behaviors.

• Event participation data from live gatherings or online webinars.

These are sources where your data serves your mission, not the bottom line of a tech giant.

A note: If you’re not already analyzing this data, get started and make it a habit. It can be a challenge to move users off of social media and video sites to your platforms, but it’s not impossible. It means balancing the platform’s preference for engagement with your need for web traffic—but that's a whole different post.

“The data you control can take you beyond basic KPIs. It helps you build a community that feels connected to your mission.”

Moving Forward

This article is the first in a series about developing a deeper connection to your community. In shifting from a digital-first to a data-driven mindset, you’re not just gathering data—you’re creating the foundation for fostering communities of purpose. And as more of your team begins to think this way, you’ll see opportunities for building up supporters who turn others on to your mission and programming.

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