WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED FROM YOUR AUDIENCE

FEEDBACK?

■ As a whole, our audience feedback has really helped the development of all three products we have created, our documentary, TV listings double page spread article and the radio trailer. It allowed us as a group to make informed decisions on how we can improve more specific elements that didn't work for our target audience, which we didn't notice during the development of our products.

■ To ensure all of the feedback given from the audience, we decided as a group to mainly focus on our target audience, who would be interested in our theme of documentary- plastic surgery. This is because as a group we would be able to trust their overall judgment on what will make the documentary more interesting and what needs improving as they will be the type of people to watch our documentary and see/ listen to our ancillary products. This therefore indicates how crucial getting the audience for the audience feedback is otherwise they wouldn't have an opinion of as much value compared to what our targeted audience would have.

Radio Trailer Feedback

■ We carried out the questionnaire online on a survey website called Survey Monkey; the audience we asked to answer the online survey was the same target audience of Capital FM as this was the broadcaster we decided to advertise our documentary on.

■ In terms of the style of questions asked, I personally feel we should have ensured the majority of questions- especially for our radio trailer were open compared to closed questions. Our target audience who we got to answer the questionnaire weren't likely to make sure they expand on particular questions, especially if not specified to. Therefore this shows a weakness to our method of question choice- which has affected our feedback from the target audience as some didn't turn out to be as helpful as they could have been. For example we asked on our online survey "From listening to our radio trailer, who would you say the target audience is". From this question we hoped to gain the appropriate target audience as well as some slight development to suggest why they potentially think this. However, out of the 10 people who completed our online survey 2 people suggested a specific age range of 17-25 and 16-25 which was our potential target audience. 4 of our responses described the target audience in terms of their hobbies of having an interest in plastic surgery and the rest just stated teenagers. Therefore, due to the fact we weren't as specific as we should have been we weren’t shocked with the feedback we have received, but importantly, we used this to improve as we carefully selected questions for the documentary and the TV listings magazine in order to avoid this type of problem.

■ Another question we asked on our online survey was “How clear are the voice overs in the radio trailer out of 5”. On average we received a 4.4 meaning that it is clear and the voice overs from clips within the documentary and the extra ones we recorded for the purpose of the radio trailer have mixed well in terms of sound levels especially.

Documentary feedback■ To show we used a variety of different formats of carrying out our audience feedback, we

decided to create a focus group to gain the feedback on our documentary. To ensure the feedback was accurate we included 6 people in our focus group, 3 boys and 3 girls of the same age group which meant we could get a contrasting view on our documentary, but also so the feedback we received wasn't biased. The advantage to recording our focus group is we managed to gain the honest reactions towards our documentary as they watch it but also their reactions to each others opinions and feedback to the documentary- allowing us to develop further as they agreed with certain elements each other were suggesting as either improvements or a strong element to our documentary. Once the focus group had watched the documentary we asked them a series of questions on different aspects of the documentary. We already thought of before we carried out the focus group, to help us get constructive comments, either positive or negative based on our documentary. The first question we asked the focus group was based around the sound levels as we wanted to make sure they were level, especially as we had to focus a lot on this area during the editing stage as we wanted to make sure they were consistent throughout. A positive note from our focus group was, the majority agreed the levels were “consistent throughout”. Secondly, we asked the focus group the overall strengths of the documentary, which collectively they decided it was our interviews and the editing in terms of how we have put the documentary together.

Due to these elements being the main strength according to our focus group it has meant we have followed stereotypical conventions of a real documentary. Once we asked the strengths of the documentary we had to ask the focus group what the weaknesses were in order to help us improve before submitting the finished piece for our coursework. The main element the focus group picked up on was on some of the sound levels, which we were able to edit in response to this helpful feedback. As a group we weren’t surprised by any of the feedback as we knew some of the sound levels needed picking up as some scenes were slightly quieter compared to others, but by gaining a view from someone outside the group it meant we weren’t being too critical of our own work and someone else had picked up on it too.

TV Listings magazine feedback

■ To record our audience feedback for the TV Listings magazine we handed out a physical paper copy of the questionnaire to people we thought would read Radio Times, which is the magazine we decided to present our double page spread in. The first question we asked in the questionnaire was based around us challenging conventions of a real TV Listings magazine by having both a question and answer and a free flowing style based article, also whether it was a good idea or not to mix both styles of articles. One person disagreed but the rest of the targeted audience we asked agreed to it being a good idea, showing how we managed to challenge the conventions of a TV listings magazine being successful overall. The target audience collectively agreed that our double page spread followed codes and conventions, being a positive response for our audience feedback as we didn’t want to challenge too many conventions otherwise it wouldn’t have been easy for the target audience to want to read as it would have been so different.

However, from our feedback we did get told from our audience the grab quotes weren’t as appealing in terms of grabbing their attention, so if we were to have time to improve this we should ideally think about changing the colour (shade of the colour)/ size of the font to make it interesting and grab the target audiences attention, so it would make them want to read the article and find more out about the documentary based on plastic surgery. Originally as a group we didn’t think much of the grab quotes as we thought they would have gained the attention of the audience straight away making us a little bit more shocked based on this- however it is an easy element of the double page spread to be fixed.