Audience

Communication is not the act of us broadcasting information and hoping that it is received. Instead, it is delivering information in a way that is understood and remembered by our target audience. If we fail to accurately identify our audience, we run a very good chance of giving too much, too little, or the wrong type of information.

Audiences are made up of people, and people can be very different. Generally, audiences tend to differ most in terms of what information they find relevant, and how they would like that information to be presented.

Let's say you had to present information about global energy consumption to three different audiences: A group of kindergarteners; a class of electrical engineering students; and a panel of experts in energy macroeconomics.

What should be immediately obvious is that you need three very different presentations as you have three very different audiences. To communicate effectively, we will need to adjust the information we present and how it is presented.

A group of kindergarteners cannot understand complex information and they tend to have short attention spans, so the presentation you make for them should be very simple and entertaining - perhaps presenting only the easiest concepts as a puppet show.

A group of electrical engineering students have longer attention spans, and they can understand complex information, but they may not be familiar with the subject of global energy consumption, so you may need to provide background information specific to the energy industry before you get into the main body of your presentation.

A panel of experts in energy macroeconomics has a practically limitless attention span and can understand all of the information you throw at them no matter how you present it - even a presentation with hundreds of detailed slides covering wide swaths of complex information.

While three separate presentations may seem like a lot of work, you would not be an effective communicator if you presented a hundred-slide presentation to an audience of kindergarteners, or a puppet show to an audience of experts.

In the business world, audiences fall into two broad categories: external audiences and internal audiences.

External audiences are outside of the company, and include customers, shareholders, and the general public. Communication with external audiences is typically in the form of press releases, industry publications, product descriptions, advertisements, blog articles, and social media posts. As any type of communication that comes from a company employee is a representation of that company, extreme caution should be taken whenever you are communicating as an employee on behalf of your company, as it is very easy to get you and your company into serious trouble if you make even a minor mistake when communicating with external audiences.

Internal audiences are made up of the people you work with and work for, and there is usually a lot less pressure to be perfect, and far fewer consequences if you make a mistake. Though internal audiences are comprised of people who all work at the same company, they can still be very different, especially when communicating across different groups within the organization.

Imagine there was a customer emergency, and your team had to scramble to figure out the problem, come up with a solution, and get that solution into the hands of the customer. After working nights and weekends your team finally got it fixed, and now you have to explain the crisis and its resolution to the various impacted groups throughout the company.

One approach would be to write an enormous comprehensive email; add all of the affected people from operations, customer support, sales, management, and key executives to the CC list; and blast out the same email to everyone. The rationale justifying this approach would be that no matter what information people in the various groups are looking for, they can find it somewhere within the massive wall of words you have provided.

The question then becomes, is an enormous comprehensive email the clearest way to communicate what happened during the crisis to all members of your audience? Considering that people will generally not read a massive wall of words - especially if the information does not seem relevant to them - this email that is supposed to be appropriate for everyone ends up being ineffective at communicating anything to anyone.

A better approach would be to write different emails for each group that only contain information relevant to them.

For example, operations may want details on what exactly caused the problem; customer support may want to know how to answer questions the customer might have; sales may want to get an idea of how much money might have to be refunded; managers may want to know how many hours their staff had to work overtime to resolve the issue; executives may want reassurances that this problem will never happen again.

While writing separate emails for each group takes more time than a single wall of words, separate emails make each email shorter, more relevant to your audience, and easier to understand.

A timesaving technique that might make this process less painful is instead of writing a single email, write a single well-formatted master document. Then, send separate emails to each group with a few bullet points summarizing the information contained in the master document that is relevant to that specific audience, and at the end of the email refer people to the master document if they would like more detail.

When in doubt, simply ask your audience the question, "What information are you looking for," and then give the people what they want. You may be surprised by how little information people actually care about, and instead of writing thousands of irrelevant words, all that may be required is a few well-thought-out bullet points, each tailored specifically to only and exactly what your audience is looking for.

Communication is not just the distribution of information; it is making sure that the most important information to your audience is understood and remembered by your audience. Taking the time to figure out who your audience is and the information they are looking for is well worth it, as it makes your communication more focused, more relevant, and easier to understand.