Audience profile sheet

Markel, M. (2015). Technical communication (11th ed.). Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin's.

CHAPTER 5

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 5.1 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.

understanding Audience and purpose

Projects and campaigns of all sizes and types succeed only if they are based on an accurate understanding of the needs and desires of their audiences and have a clear, focused purpose. Because the documents and other com- munication you produce in the workplace will, more often than not, form the foundations of these projects and campaigns, they too will succeed only if they are based on an accurate understanding of your audience and have a clear purpose.

Although you might not realize it, you probably consider audience in your day-to-day communication. For example, when you tell your parents about a new job you’ve landed, you keep the discussion general and focus on the job details you know they care most about: its location, its salary and ben- efits, and your start date. But when you email a former internship supervisor with the same news, you discuss your upcoming duties and projects in more detail.

As you produce documents for this technical-communication course, you will of course consider your instructor’s expectations, just as you do when you write anything for any other course. But keep in mind that your instruc- tor in this course is also playing the role of the audience that you would be addressing if you had produced the document outside of this college course. Therefore, to a large extent your instructor will likely evaluate each of your course assignments on how effectively you’ve addressed the audience and achieved the purpose specified in the assignment.

Analyzing an audience means thinking about who your audience is, what they already know about your subject, how they feel about it, and how they are going to use the information you present. You analyze your audience as you plan your document so that it appeals to their interests and needs, is easy for them to understand, and motivates them to pay attention to your message and consider your recommendations.

The word purpose refers to what you want to accomplish with the docu- ment you are producing. Most often, your purpose is to explain to your audience how something occurs (how regenerative braking systems work in hybrid cars), how to carry out a task (how to set up a Skype connection), or why some situation is either good or bad (why the new county guidelines for water use will help or hurt your company). When your purpose is to explain why a situation is either good or bad, you are trying to reinforce or change the audience’s attitudes toward the situation and perhaps urge them to take action.

Before you can start to think about writing about your subject, analyze your audience and purpose. Doing so will help you meet your readers’ needs—and your own. For instance, you’re an engineer working for a consulting company. One document to which you might contribute is a report to the city planning board about how building a housing development would affect the natural environment as well as the city’s roads, schools, and sanitation infrastructure. That’s the subject of the report. The purpose is to motivate the planning board to approve the project so that it can begin. How does the audience affect how you analyze your purpose? You think about who the board members are. If most of them are not engineers, you don’t want to use specialized vocabulary and advanced engineering graphics and concepts. You don’t want to dwell on the technical details. Rather, you want to use general vocabulary, graphics, and concepts. You want to focus on the issues the board members are concerned about. Would the development affect the environment negatively? If so, is the developer including a plan to offset that negative effect? Can the roads handle the extra traffic? Can the schools handle the extra kids? Will the city have to expand its police force? Its fire department? Its sewer system?