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Weave Learning Center

Know Your Audience

Overview

To truly connect with an audience, you must first understand them. Starting with the audience in mind will help you to make the most of each speaking opportunity. In this session, we’ll explore understanding your audience, their motivations, and their perspective; all to build a strong foundation for a presentation that connects authentically, and moves them towards new actions, ideas, and possibilities.

Understanding Your Audience

A key to successful public speaking is knowing your audience and understanding not only where they are coming from, but where you want to take them. You can’t deliver a great talk if you don’t know your audience well.

Think back to a time when you saw or delivered a presentation that felt out of sync with the audience. What happened when the presenter and the audience didn’t connect? If you were the presenter, how did it feel for you to deliver a message that fell flat? If you were in the audience, what were the reasons the message didn’t land?

To further illustrate the point of how important it is for presenters to know their audience, consider the following TED talk by Damon Davis.

But before you watch, think about the audience of TED talks:

  • 1,800 scientists, CEOs, designers, intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and artists.
  • Those who can afford the $10-12K cost of attendance, in addition to travel and lodging expenses.
  • Those who can take 5+ days from other responsibilities to be at the event hosted in Vancouver, requiring many to have an international passport.

As you watch, notice what David did to either align with or challenge the expectations of the TED audience.

What did Damon Davis do to connect with the audience?

Seeing from Your Audience’s Lens

There are 3 reasons why you need to think of your audience before you plan your talk:

  • Show Respect: You want to show your audience that you’ve done your research and acknowledged their knowledge and experience. What’s on their mind, what do they care about, and why are they showing up at your talk?
  • Connect to Values: Tie your message, stories, and examples to the values that matter to your audience and are relevant to their lives and actions. Do your stories, examples, and arguments speak to their values and priorities?
  • Anticipate Questions & Discomforts: Think of any challenges your audience may have with your message. Imagine ways people might feel inspired or uncomfortable, threatened or confused and address these within your talk.

Tailoring for Different Audiences

You can’t necessarily rely on one set speech that you know and like because you’re not always addressing the same audience or community. You can say the same words in the same way, and have it land differently depending on who is hearing them. People come to your talk with different ideas, attitudes, contexts and worldviews. A great speaker will take their audience’s perspective into account each time and adjust the stories they tell or the way they tell them.

You may be speaking to:

  • Educators
  • Faith groups
  • Local elected officials
  • Black Communities
  • Asian and Pacific Islander Communities
  • Latino Communities
  • Rural residents
  • Urban residents

Some of these audiences you might know well, but some might be quite different from who you are or who you typically speak to. Think about these audiences and their points of view. What do they care about? What are your shared values? What experiences in their lives influence their thinking?

Think about two different audiences you might talk to and identify some differences they have from each other, and from you.

You can speak effectively to an audience that has different values.

It may be hard to speak to an audience that seems to have different values, but researchers have found that most people share the same base values, they just put more weight on certain values (like seeing security as more important than freedom) and often think of values differently (like seeing fairness as treating people equally rather than believing some people have more challenges than others and require accommodation to be treated fairly.)

You should be able to bridge differences in how people think by focusing on the values and experiences we share - our common humanity. Researchers have found that most people share the same base values, some just put more weight on certain values (like seeing security as more important than freedom) and might think of values differently (like seeing fairness as treating people equally rather than believing some people have more challenges than others and require accommodation to be treated fairly.) You have to know where your audience is coming from and frame your talk to emphasize what matters to them.

To connect with an audience that’s different than you, you may first have to fill in some of your own knowledge gaps. Considering and doing research on your audience is part of the process of becoming a great public speaker.

So, how do you get to know your audience?

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that our audiences are like us, or to assume that we know what’s important to them. We want to encourage you to take some time to learn and get into their frame of mind. This will help you build a bridge from who you are and what you care about to who they are and what they care about.

Which method could be risky as you research the audience?

Be Prepared and Be Ready to Adapt if Needed

If things don’t go quite as planned during a talk, be ready to read the room and adapt — be flexible on your feet.. What many new speakers don’t know is that the more prepared you are, the more you know about the space and expectations, the easier it is to adapt to whatever comes.

In order set yourself up for success, seek to know:

  • Host goals: What are the host’s goals, desired outcomes, priorities, and context for the event? Are there relevant themes or topics that will be tied across the agenda that you can weave into your remarks?
  • Community norms: What are the norms and expectations? Is this an intimate gathering? A large one? Will you have lots of interaction with your audience before or after your presentation, or little to none? What is the expected attire?
  • Logistics: Is it in a huge room with a giant stage? Can you use slides and a microphone? What technology will you need to familiarize yourself with? When are you speaking during the day? What’s the expected running time for your piece on the agenda?

It’s so important to have an understanding of the stage that’s being set for you—literally and figuratively.

Take the Audience on a Journey

All great speakers take the audience on a journey. From a starting point to where you want them to end up.

Where they are → Where you want them to be

For most speakers, the endpoint is bringing your audience to an openness for a new way of thinking about your issue or idea, a desire to learn more, and/or a willingness to take action.

Techniques you can use to bring your audience along on the journey:

  • Start with Common Ground: Begin by establishing areas of agreement or shared experiences. This creates a foundation of trust and makes the audience more receptive to the forthcoming ideas.
  • Use Stores and Anecdotes: Personal stories or third-party anecdotes allows the audience to connect on an emotional level. It’s easier for people to relate to stories than to abstract concepts.
  • Pose Thought-Provoking Questions: Instead of telling, ask. When audience members come to a realization on their own, it’s much more powerful.
  • Offer Benefits: Explain how adopting this new perspective can benefit them. Whether it’s personal growth, better understanding of people, or any other advantage, folks are more inclined to change if they see value in it.

In the end, your presentation is all about the journey. As the speaker, you have to know where your audience is starting from in order to take them where you want them to go.

Which method could be risky as you research the audience?