Audience engagement methods are crucial to the success of an IP and a company’s business development, and using the right tools to engage the prospective audience early on in a project’s life cycle can improve its value proposition.

Those are some of the key findings in the ideaBOOST: Audience Engagement Report, the outcome of a research partnership between the Canada Media Fund and the Canadian Film Centre’s Media Lab by Zan Chandler of ZancomMedia, launched Wednesday at the International Start Up Festival in Montreal.

The CFC Media Lab’s ideaBOOST digital entertainment accelerator  launched last year with seven  projects in its first cohort.

IdeaBOOST participate followed a curriculum that focused on using business design tools, like Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas and the Lean Startup Machine, to create customized strategies and to develop their projects and businesses into commercial products. Participants received financing of up to $15,000 towards development costs and $15,000 of in-kind services.

The goal of the research into the ideaBOOST projects was to understand how program participants used audience engagement strategies. Using case studies and cross-case analysis, the researchers probed which methods were most successful.

A key point in the report was that creators should put extra effort into understanding who the audience is for their products, in order to engage them successfully.

According to the study, the audience is no longer simply a group at the end of the content production value chain; no longer passive consumers, audiences today are comprised of active participants, creators and collaborators who play a role in creation, development and exploitation of a property.

The important and effective pathways for engaging audiences were online and social media platforms.

Social media platforms, like Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, Tumblr or YouTube, encourage discussion and can reach a global audience.

“As mediated platforms, direct feedback mechanisms are directly built into the experience. This is especially important to digital entertainment producers as the simple act of being present on social media platforms affords the opportunity for fans to give feedback on the content or experiences that were design and created,” the report states.

The study also found that particularly early on in a project’s development, using tools to understand how to engage the audience can improve an IP’s value proposition. And in the case of creators working to develop their businesses and brands, tools to identify and engage the audience are scaleable processes that proved equally as important for the longer-term.

The ideaBOOST spring cohort was announced in May.