What is a Cultural Audit?

Media in all of its forms has influence. The stories we view -- through TV, films, news, music, games and online -- are the currency of our culture. If you are interested in using the power of entertainment to encourage change, your first step could be to conduct a Cultural Audit. Cultural auditing provides deep understanding of your audiences by analyzing their media choices. By focusing research on their cultural lives, a Cultural Audit can help discover undetected niche groups, reveal ways to truly inspire the people who care about your issues, and unite otherwise disparate groups.  ​

Goals of a Cultural Audit

A Cultural Audit is essential for designing and implementing culture change strategy. Among other things, it can accomplish:

Finding your audience

• assessing their awareness of, and attitudes toward, your key issues
• understanding how your key audience is allocating their attention, including where they are tuning in to news and entertainment
• discovering where your target audience is congregating and engaging in cultural conversations and exchange
• identifying influencers and sub-groups that share​ characteristics (taste, beliefs, media habits, demographics, psychographics, etc.)
• finding cultural touchstones that unite disparate audiences

Clarifying the cultural/media messages your audience receives

• understanding how your key issues are represented in media, including entertainment, news and user-generated content
• establishing a baseline for the representation of your key issues
• identifying storytellers, influencers and media personalities to partner with
• determining a strategy for debunking myths and changing inaccurate/harmful media narratives

Assessing how cultural messages impact your audience

• investigating relationships between how your audience views your key issue and depictions of that issue in media

Discovering why certain messages are created

• understanding the perspectives and motivations of storytellers
• determining a strategy for engagement with storytellers

Methods

We use mixed methods research techniques to conduct Cultural Audits. These include:

• Landscape Analysis
  
• Focus Groups and Interviews
• Survey Research
• Content Analysis
• Social Media Monitoring
• Social Network Analysis

Options for Implementation

A range of tools can be utilized to accomplish a variety of goals. Here are some typical scenarios:

Level 1
An organization commissions a Landscape Analysis to “test the water” or to begin the process of building a culture change campaign. May supplement the Landscape Analysis with Focus Groups and/or Interviews with experts.​

Level 2
In addition to the Landscape Analysis (and perhaps the focus groups/interviews), an organization commissions Survey Research OR a Content Analysis.

Level 3
An organization commissions a Landscape Analysis, Focus Groups/Interviews, Survey Research and Content Analysis. Combining the Survey and the Content Analysis is crucial because it enables you to determine whether there is a connection between audience attitudes and awareness of a specific issue and its depiction in media.

Level 4
An organization adds Social Media Monitoring (SMM) and/or Social Network Analysis (SNA). SMM provides, among other things, a complementary dataset to a Content Analysis in that it monitors an audience’s response to a media narrative. SNA can supplement SMM by tracing the route by which messages are shared. Both SMM and SNA provide valuable information about target audiences

How (and Why) To Do a Cultural Audit
by Erin Potts

Cultural strategy is a field of practice that centers artists, storytellers, media makers and cultural influencers as agents of social change. It springs from the central notion that politics is where some of the people are some of the time, but culture is where all of the people are all of the time. MORE