FT Strategies recently partnered with Defrontera, an impact-driven Kenyan health news start-up, to develop an ambitious strategy and plan to help grow audiences through content that addresses their needs.
Working closely with the founding team, FT Strategies helped lay the foundations for future success by clarifying the organisation’s mission, identifying key audience segments, validating their needs and providing recommendations to create and market content that meets those requirements.
“For me, it’s the excitement of being able to put this thinking to work. It’s been a long time coming. It won’t be easy but we learnt every day and I’m glad we did this work the way we did” - Verah Okeyo, co-founder of Defrontera.
This case study explains our collaboration to the project’s outcomes and highlights key learnings as well as the methodologies used to get there.
The Challenge
Defrontera is a health-focused news journalism startup in Nairobi, Kenya, founded by experienced journalists Verah Okeyo and Anne Mawathe. Its mission is to bridge the gap between the public, healthcare professionals and policymakers to enhance accountability and public health understanding among the Kenyan population.
With a clear vision, strong leadership and long-term funding secured, Defrontera recognised the need to build an ambitious strategy to ensure its growing team produced content that resonated with target audiences and raised brand awareness.
What We Did
From the outset of the project, Defrontera had a number of strategic choices that it could make to achieve its mission of connecting the general public, healthcare workers and policymakers.
To guide these decisions, the project was structured around three workstreams, which informed each other:
- Audience research: We identified the key audience segments that Defrontera could target through detailed market research and stakeholder interviews to understand their needs
- Strategy Development: Using the North Star framework popularised by the Financial Times, we co-developed an ambitious 3-5 year strategy to align the existing structure of the organisation with its impact goals, including clear outcomes and metrics for success.
- Value proposition: Using the Value Proposition Canvas, we refined Defrontera’s messaging and identified features that it could offer in order to meet the needs of its target audiences. We also provide content and formats, playbooks with tactical guidance on how to introduce initiatives which met those needs.
The three workstreams enabled us to answer three key questions that drove this work:
- Who are the right audiences to target, and how do you build awareness amongst them?
- How can the organisation’s structure align with future impact and goals?
- How could the content strategy and digital presence better engage target stakeholders?
Our Methodology
As Defrontera is still in the early stages of its growth, we used the Business Model Canvas which provided a framework for articulating the strategy and helped to connect the three workstreams. The canvas evolved as the work was delivered, and acts as an easy-to-understand tool to socialise the strategy developed in the future.
A major focus of the project was the audience research. Given Defrontera aims to address a wide range of stakeholders through its journalism, it was crucial to define and prioritise audience segments that would provide the most value to the organisation.
To achieve this, we conducted detailed market research on the Kenyan media ecosystem and performed quantitative demographic analysis to identify the audiences that the content would most benefit. This informed more than a dozen interviews with individuals within these target audiences to better understand their needs and current news consumption.
Alongside this work, we produced a North Star goal, establishing an ambitious goal and outcomes to deliver it in 3-5 years. This was further expanded on by developing hypotheses which could be used to validate these outcomes, and the launch of an experiment to test one of these and drive towards the goal.
This work was supplemented with the development of a value proposition. Using the Value Proposition Canvas, we used the inputs from the audience research and North Star to define key products, features, and messaging that matched the needs of the target audiences. This informed two bespoke playbooks on content and formats, as well as user engagement.
Tangible Results
The output of this work led to a number of results:
- Audience clarity
The audience research workstream provided detailed insights into the behaviours and needs of target audiences, along with recommendations, prioritised by effort and impact, of initiatives that could be launched, which would attract these audiences. As a result of this, Defrontera gained an understanding of the audience segments that should be targeted as a priority, as well as tactical guidance on how to engage these.
“I like the clarity, we don’t have to do the mental lifting about where we go from here”
- Anne Mawathe, co-founder of Defrontera
- A bold but achievable goal
The North Star workstream developed a robust goal of reaching 10,000 healthcare professionals by 2028. This was supported by accompanying outcomes and hypotheses that form a future roadmap of initiatives. The team were able to launch an experiment which yielded strong results.
- Verah Okeyo, co-founder of Defrontera
- Refined messaging and actionable playbooks
The Value Proposition workstream enabled Defrontera’s team to align the product and features the organisation offered with the needs of its priority audiences, ensuring that value was created through every piece of content produced. This was supplemented with playbooks for content and formats, which provided tactical guidance and best practice from the FT and the wider industry to help inform any initiative that was developed.
Supporting Your Future Growth
If you’re an independent publisher or news startup, you’ll know how challenging it can be to bring your mission to life through a coherent strategy. There are so many priorities at the beginning and often you don’t have a strategy team to count upon.
That’s where FT Strategies comes in. We help you make smart decisions about who to serve, what to publish and how to grow.
Whether you’re starting out or moving to a new phase, we can help you:
- Define and prioritise your target audience
- Turn your mission into a clear and achievable strategy
- Build systems and processes for content and audience growth based on industry best practice
Please get in touch so we can discuss how we can support your growth.
