Understanding Audience and Purpose

Using an Audience Profile Sheet

DOWNLOADABLE FORM: Audience Profile Sheet

CHOICES AND STRATEGIES: Responding to Readers’ Attitudes

Techniques for Learning About Your Audience

DETERMINING WHAT YOU ALREADY KNOW ABOUT YOUR AUDIENCE

INTERVIEWING PEOPLE

READING ABOUT YOUR AUDIENCE ONLINE

THINKING VISUALLY: Determining the Important Characteristics of Your Audience

SEARCHING SOCIAL MEDIA FOR DOCUMENTS YOUR AUDIENCE HAS WRITTEN

ANALYZING SOCIAL-MEDIA DATA

Communicating Across Cultures

UNDERSTANDING THE CULTURAL VARIABLES “ON THE SURFACE”

UNDERSTANDING THE CULTURAL VARIABLES “BENEATH THE SURFACE”

CONSIDERING CULTURAL VARIABLES AS YOU WRITE

GUIDELINES: Writing for Readers from Other Cultures

USING GRAPHICS AND DESIGN FOR MULTICULTURAL READERS

Applying What You Have Learned About Your Audience

DOCUMENT ANALYSIS ACTIVITY: Examining Cultural Variables in a Business Letter

ETHICS NOTE: Meeting Your Readers’ Needs Responsibly

Writing for Multiple Audiences

Determining Your Purpose

WRITER’S CHECKLIST

EXERCISES

LEARNINGCURVE: Analyzing Your Audience and Purpose and

CASE 4: Focusing on an Audience’s Needs and Interests and

JASON FALLS, THE DIGITAL STRATEGIST for the online retailer CaféPress, writes frequently about how companies can use social media to create relationships with customers. What does he say is the key to using social media for business? Knowing your audience. In a 2013 blog post, Falls wrote about some of the electronic services that can help companies figure out who their customers are so that they can better appeal to their interests. One of the services he discussed is DemographicsPro, which supplies information about your Twitter followers. Figure 4.1 shows part of the report that DemographicsPro supplied to Falls about his Twitter followers.

Organizations of all sorts, not just businesses, analyze their audiences. Government agencies that want to appeal to the general public—to urge them to eat better, get vaccinated, or sign up for health insurance, to name just a few campaigns—start by analyzing their audiences to learn how to motivate them. Political campaigns analyze voters to determine the issues they want to see addressed. Charities such as the March of Dimes analyze their audiences to improve the effectiveness of their communications.