Produced with the support of the
Written by Ankita Mukhopadhyay, freelance journalist, and former Product Manager at POLITICO.
Documented, a nonprofit news organization dedicated to covering news for immigrants in New York City, faced a crucial problem in 2018. Despite its intentions, their work was not being read by the immigrant community they aimed to serve.
The Documented team was doing stellar work with the mission of breaking the cycle of extractive reporting on immigration, but they knew they wouldn’t be effective if their target audience wasn’t reading their work. “At this time, we wondered, what does the audience need in terms of information, every day?” said Nicolás Ríos, Documented’s audience and community director.
Ríos and his team soon figured out that the problem was less with the type of content they created and more so with its approach to dissemination. Documented’s target audience wasn’t active on the platforms where Documented published. Latinx communities consumed content on WhatsApp, while Chinese immigrant communities looked for information on WeChat. Getting on those platforms wouldn’t just give Documented a first-mover advantage. A new distribution strategy would give Documented access to understanding the needs of the specific communities they covered.
This case study explores how Documented approached user research to understand the needs of its audience and ensure that their mission-critical work was designed to serve New York City immigrants, not just report about them.
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