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Audience size refers to the number of people who will be present for your speech. In a classroom setting, the size of your audience will be obvious. But in the world beyond school, this information may not be so apparent. For example, if the leader of a charitable organization asks you to give a speech at an awards dinner, you would need to ask how many people will be attending: Seven to ten people? Twenty-five to thirty? Three hundred? A thousand?

When it comes to speech presentations and audience, size matters. In other words, the number of audience members affects how you’ll craft and deliver your message. The smaller the group, the greater the opportunity for you to interact with your audience—for example, through question-and-answer sessions.¹ With small audiences, you can also communicate a more detailed and specific message because you’re tailoring it to the needs of just a few people. Conversely, the larger the audience, the less opportunity you have for interaction. You’ll have to work harder to anticipate your listeners’ questions and craft a more generally accessible message.

Consider the example of Jeanine, a marketing representative for a software company. Jeanine’s boss asked her to visit several cities and deliver big sales presentations—what the boss described as “dog and pony shows”—for a revolutionary new software product designed to create striking visual online advertisements. Up to that point, Jeanine had only presented the product to groups of five to seven people in intimate boardroom settings. In contrast, the dog and pony shows would be in large hotel ballrooms, and her audiences would range from three hundred to five hundred prospective customers.

As she prepared for the first presentation, Jeanine realized that unlike her previous experiences, she simply would not be able to answer every audience member’s question as it cropped up; if she did, she’d never get through the presentation. Nor would she have time for a lengthy question-and-answer period. With this in mind, she decided to incorporate some of the more likely audience questions into her presentation.

Jeanine also realized that among audience members, there would be a wide range of computer know-how. As a result, she decided to cover technical issues by “teaching to the middle.” Rather than pitching her speech to the few listeners who would be extremely computer savvy, or slowing things down for the few who would know very little about technology, she focused her content for the large group in the middle. That way, she could feel confident that her talk would be accessible to the largest portion of her audience.