So, thinking about your audience is the first step of any communication effort, and I want to be really clear here, I mean it when I say first step. This comes before you're thinking about the content. Often what happens is people start by thinking "Okay. I need to communicate X," and they get focused on the specific facts or messages they need to communicate. They're not even thinking about anything else. They're not even thinking about their audience. If you really want to do this right, if you really want to be successful, you have to start by considering who and why you're communicating with your audience. How you should think about your audience depends on understanding the person, or the community, or the set of people who you're trying to reach, the situation or context, where are they going to be, how are they going to be thinking or feeling as they're interacting with your message and your goals. Now, when we go through the audience, there's a variety of questions you ought to be asking yourself. The first one is, what is the audience's common or salient characteristics? What are the things that we need to remember about the audience? This could be demographics. It could be, I want to reach out to teens in a high school setting where this community is predominantly, let's say Latino. I might have a different communication goal, where, let's say I'm trying to reach out to older adults who are needing to think about influenza vaccination let's say. So, the common characteristic there is their age and perhaps their health status. But remember sometimes the common or salient characteristic isn't something so much about the physical person, isn't their demographics, it might be their profession or their background. So, the common characteristic might be these are people in a community who is being affected by a natural disaster, and if that common location, that's the common characteristics. Or these are, let's say, nurses, who are going through a professional education about, I don't know, cultural competency. Again, that context, the common thread is these are nurses, and so that common professional background is the salient characteristic. Then lastly maybe sometimes this is just the situation. These are all people who've been exposed to an infectious disease, or these are all people who are at the same conference on, let's say infectious diseases. Whatever that situation is, even if these people come from wildly different backgrounds, if that's the common characteristic, then that's the anchor that you can use to shape your communication and to reach the audience. Now, when we get into this, we need to pause and think about are these people going to be interested in what I'm communicating? I want to talk about a distinction between two different kinds of communications, the first one here is what I would call pull communications. The audience is already interested in this topic, and so what we need to communicate with them is to give them a reference communication, something they can reference, they can go back to to get the information they need because they're already interested, so they're already going to be looking for whatever it is we need. The classic example of a reference communication is like the frequently asked questions pages on websites. I have a question, I go looking for it, I'm pulling the information. So, all we need to do from a design standpoint is make it easy for people to find what it is they're looking for. That's really different than what we might call push communications or message communications. These are situations where the audience is not yet interested. They may have no idea that this topic is of relevance to them, or they may not have their attention yet focus to it. They may know that they're interested in it but they haven't engaged with this idea or this topic yet. In those kinds of situations, we, we the communicators have a goal, but we also need to consider their goals too. We have to negotiate a relationship between our goals, our information and what the audience needs, and so the design of message communications is really quite different than the design of reference communications. Now, what's the context here? You might think it wouldn't matter but it really does. I can design a communication differently when I'm only talking to a couple of people versus when I have to give the exact same message to hundreds, maybe thousands, maybe millions of people, and what's the context in terms of when and how will people interact with it? Is this a TV ad? It's going to be interacted with while people are watching shows. Is this a presentation at a particular conference, or maybe at a community meeting, or maybe it's a one-on-one interaction, a conversation? Either way knowing that context is really important. Now, when we know who it is we're relating to and where we're relating to them, then we can think about the audience related barriers, and there's many of these barriers but there's two I want to emphasize in particular: first one is attention. You maybe sitting right in front of me but if you're looking at your phone, what? The message is gone. So, that's just not going to work. You have to think about how am I going to capture somebody's attention. That could be a big deal when you've got 100 people in front of you. It could be a big deal when you're handing somebody a brochure and you're not sure whether they're going to read it or they're just going to throw it away. Either way, being conscious of how can I get the audience's attention is an important question to ask. Then the second second one comprehension. Are they going to understand it? We have good words, pictures. What's the design that we need to think of that's going to overcome this barrier and make sure that they can understand it. So, this is a quote from a research colleague of mine that I just love when I think about reaching out to different audiences: "We need to design for the way people are, not the way we wish they were," and the way I think this is really important is, I wish I could just make this course like an encyclopedia of facts. I would just, here's fact, here's another fact, here's another fact, and you would just absorb them all and it would all make sense and I'd be done, but you don't work that way and I don't work that way. We have limits on the ability on our attention and how much we can absorb at a given time. We have differences. So, what works for you might not work for somebody else. If we take a step back as communicators and think that our goal is to meet people where they are not where we wish they were, then we are much more likely to be able to achieve what we want to achieve. Speaking of which, what are we trying to achieve? What are we trying to accomplish, given the person or population's characteristics, given the context or the moment when this person is going to be interacting with our message? So, the real question is, what is actually achievable? Sometimes what's achievable is, I want to give you some knowledge, I want to overcome a barrier. You don't know this fact and as soon as you do know this fact, your life will be better. You will prevent some kind of disease. You will know what you need to do in a particular situation, whatever it is. Sometimes what's achievable is not so much about knowledge, it's about beliefs. I don't care that you remember some fact, I care that you are motivated to act in a particular way, or that you think that something's important, that you want to learn more about it, let's say. Those kinds of beliefs sometimes are our primary goals for communications, even to the exclusion of knowledge, and being clear about to whether it's knowledge versus beliefs that what we're trying to get at is really important. Sometimes our goal is direct compliance. I want you to wear your eye safety gear when you're in the lab. I want you to throw away the contaminated food that is been recalled. I want you to make sure that you wear your mask when you are in the hospital meeting your clients because you're sick and you don't want to infect them. Whatever it is that we want to ensure direct compliance about, we can achieve that but only if we recognize that that's our goal. Then I'll be honest sometimes, what's done is that we communicate simply by just sort of tossing information out there. We make information available. We're not actually thinking about those other three types of goals that I was talking about earlier, and the honest truth is when all we're doing is just disclosing information, that rarely results in changes to beliefs, to knowledge, or to behavior. So, it's not really an effective communication because there's no outcome, there's no end point that represents success. The important point here is that we do have to choose amongst those other types of goals. It's different when you're focusing on knowledge versus when you're focusing on compliance or you're focusing on beliefs. So, the key takeaway is, communication is always about audience needs. If you don't care about their needs, why are you talking to them? But if you don't know who your audience is and when and why they will interact with it, it's really hard to meet their needs. It's really hard to be a successful communicator. Therefore, it's a really simple point here, be intentional. Think about your audience, think about your goals, so that you can be the communicator you want to be.
