iCrossing to Measure Social Impact of Channel 4’s Disarming Britain season

10 July 2008

iCrossing, a global digital marketing company, has been commissioned to measure audience engagement levels around Channel 4’s newly airing Disarming Britain season, to discover whether the multi-channel programme content makes a meaningful impact on viewers.

The pioneering Measuring Engagement project will run for two months, from the start of July to the end of August. Audience attitudes toward street crime in Britain have been benchmarked by iCrossing across all major social media environments – including blogs, content communities, wikis, social networks and forums – to understand the current digital landscape around issues addressed in the Disarming Britain season. These attitudes will be monitored alongside Channel 4’s TV and online programming output, to assess how successfully audiences have engaged with the content, helping the broadcaster to understand how to better connect with its viewers online in the future.

A calibrated engagement scorecard has been created by iCrossing to evaluate the effectiveness of the season, in line with Channel 4’s objectives and identified measures of success. This is based on the scorecard that iCrossing developed for a pilot project with Channel 4 Education earlier in the year, for its online game, Bow Street Runner.

Active listening is a key component of the research, to understand the elements of user behaviour that cannot be tracked simply. iCrossing’s proprietary web mapping platform, NetworkSense Mapping, will be used to draw a visual map of Channel 4’s online communities to provide an illustrative representation of what its audience looks like around the Disarming Britain season.

In addition, iCrossing has set-up a shared internal blog with Channel 4, which will be used as a collaborative workspace where both teams can record examples, insights and links to related content.

Jason Ryan, Head of User Experience at iCrossing in the UK, comments: “Channel 4 is making tremendous strides this year in understanding not only the social use of the internet by its target audience, but also how they engage with and respond to its multi-channel content.”

Sue Gray, Head of Corporate Research at Channel 4, adds: “Channel 4 is keen to explore new and innovative techniques that will help us to understand and assess the impact of our public service broadcasting across different platforms.  We have been working closely with iCrossing to develop a sensitive framework for measurement in this complex social area.”

Category: Press Release