The Audience Dialogue web site is here to provide useful information for communicators of all kinds: broadcasters, publishers, NGOs, arts groups, webmasters, educators... and anybody else who's interested in using research-based techniques to make their communications more effective.
We specially welcome people in developing countries- so we have tried to make this web site easily accessible, even if you have a slow internet connection, and not the latest software. To help people whose first language is not English, we have tried to write in a way that you can easily understand, avoiding technical jargon and cultural assumptions. If anything is unclear or confusing, please let us know, and we'll fix it.
July 2004:
There's a lot of talk about business models, but what
exactly are they? We looked for an example and din't find one - so we've
designed a way of
displaying a business model.
June 2004:
Our
audiencedialogue.org email addresses, which we thought were well protected, have
suddenly become deluged with spam. So if you want to contact us, don't send any
email to any address at audiencedialogue.org in case it gets lost in the
avalanche of spam. Instead use our revised contact page to send
something to our new email address.
June 2004:
How can you select
a representative sample for a survey when no population data is available?
Here's our guide to
maximum variation sampling - one of the few methods available in such a
situation.
April 2004:
The page of quotations about the
future got too big, so we've moved the hopelessly wrong
predictions onto a page of their own.
March 2004:
We added a
section on Creating a
website after being surprised to find that such information is rare on the
Web. (There are thousands of pages on the technical aspects of web development,
but hardly any discuss the management and marketing aspects of site ownership.)
Our new section is maybe the most comprehensive you'll find anywhere.
February 2004:
Printed copies of Participative Marketing for
Local Radio are available again, and can be ordered from
here.
This website is divided into three main areas: Tools, Techniques, and Cases.
The Tools section of this website describes the tools available for communications research, evaluation and planning. These are not hammers and saws, but tools for working with words, numbers, and software.Here you will find glossaries of technical terms, reviews of research software, and notes on writing global English. Another tool that can help people whose native language is not English is online translation. The Tools section also includes links to useful websites in our main topic areas, and reviews of books on social research methods.
Techniques is the largest section of our website. It focuses on practical methods for research and planning. The Techniques section includes the text of two books by our founder, Dennis List: Know Your Audience: a Practical Guide to Media Research, and Participative Marketing for Local Radio. There are pages on qualitative research methods that we've developed: the consensus group technique and the co-discovery conference.
The cases section is in a different style: mostly narrative. Here you can find 30-odd stories describing the way we've approached some interesting research projects, as well as some amusing tales about projects that didn't turn out quite as we expected.
Audience Dialogue is based in Adelaide, South Australia, but we work on projects all around the world. In Australia, our work is mainly internet-related: researching and evaluating websites. In developing countries, we work mostly with media and aid agencies: training staff and organizing evaluations. More about us, and our privacy policy.
We have developed a rather unique mix of methods that we use in our work, including some new techniques for qualitative research and project evaluation. We like to work with our clients, rather than for them. As part of this capacity-building, we train their staff in simple evaluation methods: not only how to collect relevant data, but also how to use it well. The types of work we do include...
We always welcome feedback. If you have any questions, or any comments on this web site, we'd be pleased to hear from you. We aim to respond within one day. How to contact us.
