For the last year I’ve been working freelance for the ARC Accelerator supporting academics from the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences to develop their research insights into impacts (see my earlier Case Study).

In the process of this work we’ve used an array of existing venture-planning tools from professional practice including a variety of canvasses. We use the canvasses as a means of ‘unpacking the head’ and making would-be-founders ideas and assumptions apparent on paper, both to themselves and to those they interact with. This process of teasing out the assumptions for testing and gathering feedback is really helpful and canvas tools can articulate a lot of the key relationships and questions.

However, the language of many existing canvasses is quite commercial; very much focused on ‘customers’, for-profit start-ups, and with product-oriented businesses. Even though a familiar user of such tools can translate the terms and interpret it for wider audiences, for a new and unfamiliar audience we know the language can be a barrier to engagement. For an audience of academic researchers who are new to this space the language often does not resonate helpfully.

From Customers to Audiences

One of the biggest barriers to engagement for the academics we worked with is the word Customer. Most ideas we see in ARC are socially purposed and their research will have identified clear beneficiaries but who may not be able to pay for that benefit themselves. By using the word Audience as the starting point for discussion and then differentiating between Beneficiaries, Users, and Customers as different audiences this can help unpick the sometimes knotty process of finding a source of revenue for a social purpose venture and identifying who will use it for or with the beneficiaries.

To that end we developed a new canvas; the Audiences Map:

The aim of the Audiences Map is:

• To identify and specify potential audiences.
• To tease out assumptions of who they are, why they might care, and some awareness and empathy for that audience’s context.
• To identify relevant actions for making progress.

This canvas is a very simple one:

1. Add working titles for different audiences down the first column: e.g. ‘Bristol HE students’, ‘Filmmakers from Brazil’, ‘History Academics’, ‘Policy-makers with an interest in Early-Years Education’ etc. Basically, whatever nomenclature helps identify a discernible audience.
2. Define whether they are a Beneficiary, User, Customer, Stakeholder, or some combination of those terms. If you’re identifying a lot of Beneficiaries and Users but few Customers that can provoke a useful exploration of who might have a vested interest in paying for the idea. Is there another party measuring the health or productivity of the beneficiaries for their own purposes?
3. Try and capture how the people in that group might describe the problem or opportunity you’re addressing, e.g. ‘difficulties of finding funding’, ‘high turnover of staff’, or ‘new opportunities for publishing’. This might be quite different to how the would-be entrepreneur frames the same scenario. A good example of problem-framing disparity is often the would-be entrepreneur trying to do a ‘public good’ whilst the beneficiary might be thinking in very personal ‘make my life easier’ terms and whilst a Government funder might be thinking in terms of ‘reducing costs’ or ‘delivering efficiency’.
4. Try and frame what you think the initial offering might be to them, e.g. ‘a searchable database of funders’, ‘a way to engage staff in their professional development’, or ‘a new online journal’.
5. Identify ways you might engage them in your exploration of impact; e.g. ‘present at conference’, ‘arrange a meeting’, ‘survey via social media’ or ‘get referral from X’.
6. Identify the likely barriers to engaging in the exploration; e.g. ‘no time’, ‘distrustful of academics’, or ‘unlikely to engage without incentives’.
7. Identify 1-3 next steps to take to engage, remove barriers to engage, or test the framing of the problem and offering.

Having developed an Audience Map with the different potential audiences for a venture we might usefully develop an Idea Canvas.

From Audience to Idea

The original Idea Canvas developed by Ben Mumby-Croft and Harveen Chugh is a great capture sheet for emergent ideas; the problem, the solution, the earliest customers and the potential revenue model. For the process of ‘unpacking the head’ and getting to some testable assumptions it’s a neat tool.

This revised ARC Idea Canvas makes some small but useful changes:

• We’ve adopted both the ‘Audiences’ term and the idea of breaking that down into Beneficiaries, Users, and Customers on the canvas to highlight the existence of multiple audiences with different needs.
• We’ve moved Audiences above Solutions/Mitigations in the left-right visual ordering to highlight the user-centred approach.
• We’ve split the Revenues section into both Impacts and Revenue Models so we’re not just asking where the money comes from but also whether any wider purposes are being served and how they’re being measured.
• We’ve updated some of the provocation questions to better serve our audience with slightly less commercial terminology.
• Rather than ask about ‘assumptions’ we’ve found ‘hypotheses to test’ to be a more helpful framing.

This canvas is still a very early-stage tool, but again a useful one for making the would-be entrepreneur’s thinking more apparent, more structured, and easier for themselves and others to interrogate and provide feedback on.

The PPT versions of the canvasses are linked below – they’re Creative Commons licensed so please use them and let me know what you think of them!