Audience Research

In autumn 2017 we conducted our first large-scale audience research. We aimed to find out about who follows our work and why—and most importantly, what we are doing well, and what we can be doing better.

We’re extremely grateful to the 2,000 people who filled out our online survey, including nine who then took part in telephone interviews.

The majority of participants were people who had known Full Fact for a number of years, but just over a quarter (26%) said they had come across Full Fact in 2017, with a small number of people who said that this was the first time they had come across us.

The findings should not be taken to be an accurate reflection of Full Fact’s audience as the participants were self-selected. But here we have the first insights into how we can better meet our existing core audience’s interests and needs. We can also see some important areas for further exploration.

We have supplemented the findings with representative survey data of name recognition of Full Fact, and data from Google Analytics.

You can read the full report, including the methodology used, survey questions and interview questions, here.

Background notes

• We received 2,459 responses to our online survey – of which 2,053 were complete responses.
• Full Fact is distinctive among factchecking projects. We observe that factchecks alone are not enough to halt the spread of misinformation. We seek systemic changes to improve the quality of public debate, pushing for corrections where necessary, and working with government departments and research institutions to improve the quality and communication of information at source. We also work with media partners to get our work out to a wider audience and to help journalists understand and use public information. This means we have a range of professional audiences for our work. This research focused on our online audience.