MM8 Considering your purpose and audience

MM8-b: Identifying your audience's needs and perspectives

MM8-bIdentifying your audience’s needs and perspectives

In the previous example, student composer Alyson D’Amato was asked in her assignment to “engage” her audience. To determine what the audience will find engaging, composers first need to identify an audience. Here are some questions you might ask as you think about who your audience is:

Does the assignment provide any direction about who the audience is? What direction about audience has your instructor provided?
Is there a particular audience you want to reach?
Could you have more than one audience?
What do you know about your audience’s life experiences? Interests? Demographics (age, race, socioeconomic status, level of education, location)?
What are the most effective ways to engage your audience members—attract their attention, get them interested, help them learn, and so forth?

Finding answers to these questions will allow you to see your topic from your audience’s perspective.

Sometimes professionals in marketing or product development will create “profiles” of different types of people who make up their intended audience. These profiles help them to imagine specific details behind a general idea like “audience.” For a project in a technical writing class, students were asked to write a proposal for a new, Web-based application to be used by their peers at the university on the school’s Web site. To get a sense of the possible audience for their Web-based app, a group of students worked together to create user profiles. They interviewed other students and came up with two user profiles.

Group 1

One potential user group is made up of residential students who are online at least 7 hours a day and who primarily use social media to stay connected with friends. These users visit Web sites only to seek information not available through social media. They use the college Web site to look up their class schedules and check grades and sometimes to look for news about what’s going on around campus. One student told us: “If there was a way to sync up the college Web site with my newsfeed, that’d be great!”

Group 2

Another potential user group is made up of commuter students, many of whom have transferred from a community college. They live off-campus and are not online as often as those in the first user group. Most work at least part-time and use the Internet primarily for work-related e-mail and projects. This group typically uses the college Web site only when enrolling for classes. One student told us: “I guess I’d need a reason to use the school site more.”

You might create a similar profile for your audience. Or you might just do some brainstorming in answer to questions like these:

Where are your readers/viewers/listeners from?
When were they born?
What groups or causes are they involved with?
What experiences have they had with your topic?
What are the best ways to reach them?
How are they likely to receive your message?

NOTE: When creating profiles of your potential audience members, keep in mind that people are diverse. Creating audience profiles is helpful when it gives you a sense of the people you are trying to reach and what they are interested in and value. Your profiles should not turn into stereotypes that lead you to make faulty assumptions that homogenize or alienate your audience.