Empathizing With Your Target Audience

About this course:

This course will provide tools and resources for Empathize, one of the eight steps of the Behavior Centered Design (BCD) approach. Empathize enables program designers and implementers to collect data on motivations and barriers that will inform their behavior change solution.  

What you'll learn: 

• The purpose and key components of the Empathize step
• Considerations for setting up a data collection activity
• How to select appropriate data collection methods for your environmental challenge
• How to develop questions and tools to gain insight into people’s behavior
• How to plan for data collection
• How to organize data collection results for analysis and sharing
• Tools and templates for conducting the Empathize step

What this course is not: 

This course is not a comprehensive research methods course. We will provide some additional resources should you like to explore those. It focuses instead on collecting data on people’s barriers, motivators, and context to inform the design of a behavior change solution.

Who will benefit:

This course provides a broad understanding of the Empathize step to help:

• Program/Program Managers, Designers and Implementers manage and oversee the design, planning, and implementation of data collection for Empathize;
• Education, Communication, and Outreach staff to create relevant, targeted materials; and
• Funders to make informed decisions regarding behavior change project proposals.
   

Prerequisite to this course:

Before taking this course, you must complete one of our courses on the Behavior-Centered Design (BCD) process. To do so, please select from one of these options: 

• Introduction to BCD for the Environment (free self-paced online course)
• BCD for the Environment (live virtual sessions)
• BCD for the Environment (in-person sessions)

Training Costs:

For this course, we offer all applicants the freedom to opt into a course fee tier they feel is appropriate based on their personal and professional capacity. To make this program as accessible as possible for practitioners who lack the means to attend, we offer three tiers of course fees:

The discounted fee and fee waiver tiers are aimed to ease the costs for those from small non-profit organizations, those from the Global South, and those who have limited access to professional development funds. Requests for fee waivers are determined on an individual basis. We take into account financial need, the potential for impact, and access to opportunity, as well as overall cohort diversity.

You should apply to the course fee tier you can afford without burdening yourself or your organization. In order to keep our training offerings sustainable, we are able to offer more invitations to applicants who apply under the full tuition tier. If you have any questions about which tier to apply to please write to behavior@rare.org.