Gathering around your audiences.
We design communications for organizations that steward, protect, and promote the natural world. Much of our work is advocacy- and behavior change-based. As we begin any project, we are looking to build a real time, scaled, and data-based view of audiences that matter most to an organization’s success. Our clients rarely possess that view in any usable form. They have pieces of it — vestigial knowledge or reports with mismatching dates spread across functional areas of the business. But we need to gather around something current to chart a course for what is ahead, whether building brand foundations or thinking about longitudinal campaigns.
The partner we've found to help us do this critical work is Shepherd. They are part of Nostos, our indie network. They are an audience company that mines public behavioral data — what people actually engage with online — and turns it into a continuously refreshed audience read, paired with paid media activation. The output is an Audience Operating System: insights for product, brand, and media. At Butler, we are listening to leadership and stakeholders to set vision and goals, while Shepherd is listening to the audience at scale to set focus and reach.
Here’s what happens when we braid our learning streams together:
Public engagement work lives or dies on whether your messaging reflects what communities actually care about — not what you assume they care about. Shepherd’s work gives us quantitative proof to stand ideas on. The conversation with clients gets less subjective and starts being about what the audience is actually saying and doing. That’s gathering around the audience objectively and making informed leaps together.
The audience definition that Shepherd builds at the start is the same one we use to brief, write, and ideate from. It’s also the same audience Shepherd can target with paid or earned media. Nothing gets reinterpreted. This means we can collaborate fluidly between each other, our shared clients’ in-house teams, and any other external partners they already have on their roster.
Behavioral data doesn’t just tell you who the audience is — it tells you where they actually spend their attention. This shapes which channels we pursue, which messages we lead with, and even helps inform talent casting decisions. We trust the behavioral side when we’re picking channels and shaping message hierarchy because the read is honest about what people are doing today.
Media performance data from Shepherd’s activation work flows back into how we iterate on communications. The strategy doesn’t freeze at kickoff. Some engagements treat audience definition as a phase; a deliverable that gets presented early and then sits in a folder. Shepherd built the Audience Operating System to refuse that. The audience responds and strategy evolves to progress toward desired outcomes.
Together, Butler and Shepherd are committed to the continuous learning that positions us as brand stewards — not merely project executors. The cycles we run together on behalf of our clients lead to sharper audience definition, sharper creative deliverables, and sharper media buys. The world is chock-full of problems worth solving. What challenge might we gather around together?
