Audience Understanding Surveys are designed to do something that standard polling cannot: segment your audience by how they actually think about an issue, not just by demographics or party affiliation. The result is a richer picture of who you're trying to reach, what concerns drive their hesitation, and where the real persuasion opportunities lie. Today, we're introducing Combined Key Opinion Segments, a new feature that gives researchers greater flexibility in how they analyze and act on that audience data.
The Challenge: A More Flexible Way to Analyze Audience Data
When you run an Audience Understanding Survey, Grow Progress segments respondents into opinion groups based on their responses, typically a spectrum from strong supporters to strong opponents, with persuadable audiences in between. Each segment is analyzed separately, giving you a granular view of how different groups differ in their beliefs, concerns, and values. But sometimes the most useful analytical move is to look across segments, to combine adjacent groups in order to increase sample size, reduce noise, or examine the full range of persuadable audiences as a single cohort. Until now, that kind of flexible segmentation required a separate data request. With Combined Key Opinion Segments, it's built directly into the Grow Progress platform.
Turning Audience Insights into Stronger Messaging Decisions
The ability to combine segments unlocks several analytical moves that make audience research more actionable:
- Increase sample size for lower-incidence audience groups by merging adjacent segments, giving you more statistical confidence in subgroup findings
- Reduce volatility in segment-level estimates by pooling responses from groups that are similar in meaningful ways
- Clarify opportunities by examining the full persuadable middle, soft supporters, undecideds, and soft opponents, as a single audience with shared characteristics
- Strengthen confidence in directional findings that appear consistent across multiple segments but are individually underpowered
- Develop deeper understanding of how the persuadable audience as a whole differs from committed supporters and committed opponents
Now Available: Combine Segments in Your Grow Progress Audience Understanding Surveys
Combined Key Opinion Segments is now available in all Grow Progress Audience Understanding Survey reports. When you receive your AUS deliverable, you'll see both individual segment breakdowns and the option to view combined segment analyses, letting you move fluidly between granular and aggregated views of your audience data. For teams running multiple AUS studies over time, combined segment analysis also makes it easier to track opinion movement across waves, even when individual segment sizes shift between studies. The result is a more flexible, more powerful research workflow, one that makes it easier to move from audience analysis to strategic decision-making. Key benefits of the feature include:
- Reducing noise in segment-level estimates for harder-to-reach audiences
- Validating directional trends that appear across multiple individual segments
- Increasing confidence in findings about the persuadable middle
- Moving from analysis to action faster by surfacing cleaner, more actionable audience portraits