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Defining Your Audience

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At the end of the day, it all comes down to knowing your audience. Before you begin to plan for your session, before you fire up PowerPoint to set up your slides, heck, before you even decide what content to present, you must assess your target audience. This includes defining your stakeholders, figuring out what their unique goals and learning objectives are, and learning what they are already bringing to the table. [1] Just as you use a specific language to communicate in the way that your audience will best understand, you must prepare your learning objectives, content and design materials in the same way. All of this is easily handled with a learner assessment.

“The totality of your audience’s experience is profoundly impacted by what you know—or don’t know—about them.”
Dr. Susan Weinschenk, “100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People”

Assess Before You Address

Knowing your audience beforehand allows you to stack the deck in your favor – you can present just the content that they need, leaving them feeling more satisfied with the personalization of instruction.

You can take a lot of the pressure away from the task of presenting by knowing your audience’s needs beforehand and building a level of engagement with them from the very beginning. Completing an audience assessment is like stacking the deck in your favor. You’ve already defined what your audience wants and needs and are able to provide that specifically during the session. Best of all, if your audience is informed that they’re going to receive exactly what they need to succeed, then you’ve already built up intrinsic learner motivation.[2]

The easiest way to figure out who your audience is and what they need specifically is to ask them. Try answering these questions listed below and if you can’t figure out the answers, present them to your participants for the session to help you glean exactly what they need from you. Then, you can address those needs as learner objectives as defined by your project plan in the next step.

  • Who will be participating in this webinar?  What do they do?
  • What do they currently know about the content being presented? Is this prior knowledge consistent for everyone in attendance?
  • Have they taken any other classes or workshops that we know of?
  • Do any of these previous classes or workshops correspond with what they’ll be taught in this webinar?
  • What are the overarching learning needs for this group of participants?
  • How will the anticipated material presented meet these learning needs?
Audience Assessment Worksheet
UP NEXT: DEFINING THE PURPOSE, GOALS AND OBJECTIVES 
Ok, so you know your audience, what they know and what they need. Let’s take that list of motivators and convert it into a meaningful goals statement for the session. Then, once we have that, we can define the learning objectives. This next step will drive all of our subsequent design decisions for the entire webinar.

References and Further Reading    (↑ returns to text)

  1. Azer, S. A. (2009). What makes a great lecture? Use of lectures in hybrid pbl curriculum. The kaohsiung journal of medical sciences, 25(3), 109-115. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1607551X0970049X↑
  2. Domizio, P. (2008). Giving a good lecture. Diagnostic histopathology, 14(6), 284-288. Retrieved from http://www.diagnostichistopathology.co.uk/article/S1756-2317(08)00068-6/abstract↑