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Now that you know the kind of information to look for when analyzing an audience, how do you actually uncover it? Unlike a professional pollster, you cannot survey thousands of people and apply sophisticated statistical techniques to analyze your results. On a smaller scale, however, you can use the same techniques. These include interviewing, surveying, and consulting published sources. Often, it takes just a few questions to get some idea of where audience members stand on each of the demographic factors.

Conduct Interviews

Interviews, even brief ones, can reveal a lot about the audience’s interests and needs. You can conduct interviews one-on-one or in a group, in person or by telephone or e-mail. Consider interviewing a sampling of the audience, or even just one knowledgeable representative of the group that you will address. As in questionnaires (see “Survey the Audience,” which follows), interviews usually consist of a mix of open- and closed-ended questions. (See Chapter 9, pp. 70–71, for more on conducting interviews.)

Survey the Audience

Surveys can be as informal as a poll of several audience members or as formal as the pre-speech distribution of a written survey, or questionnaire—a series of open- and closed-ended questions.

Closed-ended questions elicit a small range of specific answers supplied by the interviewer:

“Do you or did you ever smoke cigarettes?”

Answers will be either “Yes,” “No,” or “I smoked for X number of years.” Closed-ended questions may be either fixed-alternative or scale questions. Fixed-alternative questions contain a limited choice of answers, such as “Yes,” “No,” or “Sometimes.” Scale questions—also called attitude scales—measure the respondent’s level of agreement or disagreement with specific issues:

“Flag burning should be outlawed”:

Strongly Agree ______ Agree ______ Undecided ______

Disagree ________ Strongly Disagree __________

Scale questions can be used to measure how important listeners judge something to be and how frequently they engage in a particular behavior:

“How important is religion in your life?”

Very Important _______ Important _________ Moderately Important _________

Of Minor Importance ________ Unimportant_________

Open-ended questions allow respondents to elaborate as much as they wish:

“How do you feel about using the results of DNA testing to prove innocence or guilt in criminal proceedings?”

A mix of open- and closed-ended questions can reveal a fairly clear picture of the backgrounds and attitudes of the members of your audience. Closed-ended questions are especially helpful in uncovering the shared attitudes, experiences, and knowledge of audience members. Open-ended questions are particularly useful for probing beliefs and opinions.

Consult Published Sources

Yet another way to learn about audience members is through published sources. Organizations of all kinds publish information describing their missions, operations, and achievements. Sources include Web sites and related online articles, brochures, newspaper and magazine articles, and annual reports.

Although published opinion polls won’t specifically reflect your particular listeners’ responses, they can provide valuable insight into how a representative state, national, or international sample feels about the issue in question. Consider consulting these and other polling organizations: