When designing programs, we usually have a specific target population in mind.  In fact it would be highly unusual if we didn’t.  The target population, after all, is the group of people for whom the program is purposely designed.  Entry into the program is often restricted by certain criteria that help to differentiate between people who are, and are not, the target population. 

Once our program is operational, we actively recruit the target population into our programs, we advise our referrers who the target population is, and is not, and we try and be clear and transparent about this in all our comms.  We may have an alternative pathway for people who are referred to our programs who are not the target population.

Examples of target populations could be:

• adults experiencing mild psychological distress;
• young people aged 12-25 experiencing mild to moderate mental illness;
• adults experiencing two or more chronic illnesses;
• adults with a BMI of 30 or over;
• young people who identify as part of the LGBTIQ+ community;
• people from Culturally and Linguistically Diverse backgrounds;
• young people disengaged from schooling;
• people who smoke and reside in a particular geographic area…

Whilst all the above populations are different, it’s helpful to think of target populations as groups defined by a common need profile – people within a target population are connected by a common set of needs.

There may be a range of needs, with people at the lower and upper end of a need profile still being considered part of the target population, but it’s important to acknowledge that there are boundaries to our target population.  These boundaries are critically important, because we have designed our program to target a particular set of needs. 

No matter how amazing your program is, it can never meet everyone’s needs, which is what’s great about the diverse market of health and social service providers we have in Australia – we have a variety of services and service providers, with a variety of practitioner types, skilled in a variety of areas, located in a variety of settings.  Each individual program cannot appropriately and effectively serve every need profile, by design.

So, when we end up with people in our programs who don’t improve as we expect they should – what do we do?  A lot of the time, when we look closely at where programs have failed people, we find that their need profile is not within the range of the target population.  They are either beyond the lower or upper limits.  Maybe their needs were beyond the lower limits of our target population, and therefore they didn’t really need our program, and didn’t find value in it, and therefore didn’t genuinely commit… or maybe there needs were very high, and beyond the upper limit of our target population, and the program or service wasn’t comprehensive, intensive or frequent enough to genuinely meet their needs.

There are many reasons why people beyond the range of our target populations end up enrolled in our programs, but do we know who they are, and do we take them into consideration when we’re assessing our program’s performance.  When you look at the effectiveness of your program, or the appropriateness or quality of your program as determined by those who use it – do you think it would make a difference if you split your sample into two groups – those in the target population (who have a need profile that the program was designed to support), vs those outside the target population. 

It’s reasonable to expect, if you have a program that’s well designed, that effectiveness, appropriateness, and quality would be higher for the target population.  If you did discover that your program really wasn’t meeting the needs of people outside your target population – what would you change?  Are we doing people a disservice by enrolling them in our program if the evidence suggests it’s not going to be helpful?  If you discover that your program is actually reasonably effective for people with a more complex need profile than it was originally designed for – perhaps you could expand your scope.  This evidence could be used to lobby for additional funding.

Are you targeting your target population?