62% of listeners make it to the end of a “Financial Therapy” episode, and the podcast itself recently crossed the one-million-listens mark. This is one indicator that the Sebto media team has long known its market well. Yet despite this experience, they were surprised by certain findings from an audience study conducted with support from East Europe Foundation as part of the “Phoenix: The Power of Communities” project. As it turned out, listeners barely notice the podcasts’ promotion on social media, even though the team believed its promotional efforts were active.

Sebto media is the brand of the NGO “Educational Human Rights Center in Lviv,” founded in 2018. For several years the team worked under an official but, as they put it, hard-to-remember name — until 2022, when it presented a new brand and focused on its core format: podcasts. Today, Sebto media not only produces its own line of podcasts but also, following a social entrepreneurship model, creates audio products for other organisations, directing the profits toward the development of the media outlet.

A full-scale audience study was exactly what the team had long lacked. At the same time, it became just one element of much broader organisational development work after the Sebto media team joined East Europe Foundation’s Institutional Development Program for partner organisations, implemented with the support of the European Union. The program gave organisations the opportunity to comprehensively strengthen their capacity, combining grant support with training, consulting, and expert guidance in areas critical to their further development.

For Sebto media, this support covered several areas at once — from updating founding documents, registering online media status, and protecting intellectual property rights to their own products, to working on communications. The team developed a new communications strategy and, for the first time, systematically researched its audience. This helped not only verify existing assumptions about listeners but also reveal new opportunities for podcast development.

The study didn’t change the understanding of who exactly makes up Sebto media’s audience: the target listener profile outlined in the organization’s brand strategy was fully confirmed. But it significantly deepened the understanding of why this audience chooses their content specifically — and what it’s missing.

Sebto media director Daryna Zarzhytska says the most unexpected result was precisely the story around promotion. The team was convinced it was actively promoting its podcasts. But the research revealed a gap between these efforts and how visible that promotion actually was to the audience.

No less valuable was the finding about part of the audience’s readiness to consume long, thoughtful content — despite the media market’s general trend toward shorter formats and vertical video.

“We saw the real motives of real people and what they’re looking for. If we have a certain percentage of Ukrainians who need this kind of content, they should get it. The 62% completion rate for long podcasts confirms this in practice,” Daryna Zarzhytska concludes.

The study also highlighted YouTube’s role as a channel for attracting new audiences and confirmed the team’s existing position on the currently popular technique of cutting the most striking moments into the beginning of an episode. Sebto media deliberately doesn’t do this: “We consider it an outdated technique,” the specialist adds.

The work didn’t stop once the results were collected. According to Daryna Zarzhytska, based on the research, the team created a strategy to understand exactly how to change the podcasts’ communications.

Not every organisation has the budget to commission such an in-depth study. Uliana Kolodii is a communications expert with over 15 years of experience who was brought into the Institutional Development Program as a trainer and communications consultant. For cases like this, she has concrete advice.

“You might not have the resources for a large-scale study, but you can at least conduct 10, 20, 30 interviews with beneficiaries, key stakeholders, potential employees. Finding the resources to conduct interviews, spread over a month or two, is, I think, easier to come by,” the expert explains.

According to her, this can also yield plenty of practical insights. The key is to go beyond your own assumptions, since any team eventually starts living in its own information bubble, relying solely on platform data and general media market trends.

And where there isn’t even the resources for such surveys, another tool works: the courage to test creative solutions and step outside the zone of familiar “safe” formats. This way, you can gauge your audience and see how it responds to one type of content or another.

The Sebto media study didn’t give the team a ready-made recipe, but rather a more precise understanding of what’s worth changing and testing further. And this is one of the practical results of institutional support: an organisation gains the resources and expertise to look at its work from different angles and strengthen exactly the areas that need it. This is precisely the kind of support East Europe Foundation provides to its partner organisations with the support of the European Union.