Policy comms bootcamp, day 2: where your audience actually is
A four-segment map for locating your audience, the evidence that untargeted persuasion does almost nothing, and the rule about political temperature that should change how you handle opponents.
Sebastián Rodríguez Pérez is a European campaign strategist with direct experience running and advising campaigns for some of Europe's largest pro-European organisations. He founded the European Campaign Playbook to codify practitioner knowledge across the EU's 27 political environments and make it accessible to campaign professionals, advocacy teams, and civic organisations working at the European level. His work spans electoral strategy, EU public affairs, digital campaigning, and the integration of AI tools into political communication workflows.
Disclosure
Sebastián Rodríguez Pérez is the founder of the European Campaign Playbook and Campaign Intelligence Library. He has worked with pro-European organisations across multiple EU member states. He maintains editorial non-partisanship in all published content; where articles relate to campaigns or organisations he has directly worked with, this is disclosed within the article. He holds no current positions in active electoral campaigns.
What it covers
The four-segment audience map and how it maps onto base, middle and opposition, why the activist subsection distorts your feedback, the correlation with authoritarian attitudes and what follows from it operationally, the field-experiment evidence on persuasion and targeting, the 2026 Eurobarometer backdrop, and how to write an audience description precise enough to build on.
Who it is for
Policy, advocacy and communications professionals who need to decide who a campaign is for, and who have previously answered that question with a demographic or with "the general public".
When to use it
At the start of campaign planning, when deciding whether a piece of work is mobilisation or persuasion, or when a team cannot agree on who the campaign is talking to.
Key takeaway
Segments narrow you from everyone to a defensible guess. Only testing tells you whether the guess was right, and the difference between untargeted and tested persuasion is the difference between nothing and something.
In brief
- Four segments: Enthusiast, Moderate, Ambivalent, Sceptic. Base, middle, middle, opposition.
- Most enthusiasts are not activists, so the people who reply to you are the least representative part of even your own base.
- The segments track a scale from pro-democratic to authoritarian attitudes, which tells you what you are really arguing with.
- Raising the political temperature mobilises your opposition more reliably than your base.
- The best estimate of untargeted campaign persuasion in general elections is close to zero.
- Tested targeting changes that: 5.6 additional votes per 100 conversations in one documented case.
- There is no stable, identifiable group of persuadable people in campaign records, so treat any segmentation as a hypothesis.
- In 2026, EU support is at record highs while only 44% rate the EU economy as good. That gap is where most campaigns fail.
Ask a communications team who their audience is and you will usually get one of two answers. Either "the general public", which is not an audience, or a description of the people who already agree with them, which is not an audience either.
Both answers cost money. The first spreads a budget across people who were never going to engage. The second spends it on people who were already convinced, and mistakes their applause for progress.
Today is about locating your audience precisely enough that the rest of the campaign has something to aim at. It uses a four-segment map I have been using in workshops for years, and it then tests that map against the research, which is considerably less flattering to segmentation than most campaign training admits.
Fair warning: one of the findings in this day says that the best evidence on persuasion in general elections puts the direct effect at close to zero. We are going to sit with that rather than skip past it, because what the same research says next is the most useful thing in the bootcamp.
Every prompt from this bootcamp is collected in the AI prompt library.