Audience Analysis

The key message delivered in this week’s readings was “know thy audience.” The first two chapters – and even the chapter on computer usage conveyed the necessity of knowing exactly who it is you are trying to reach in order to effectively reach them.

If you don’t know who you are talking to (or talking with) then you won’t know how to reach them. There are issues of language to be employed; means of addressing the issues, types of communication that might work best, soliciting feedback (or not) that come into play. How can you communicate risk – or in a way, communicate anything – if you don’t know your audience?

That may seem obvious – but we have all witnessed case after case of failed communication efforts because those in charge did not know their audience. The need to change approach was documented quite well in a movie I saw this weekend, “Freedom Writer,” about a young and idealistic female teacher whose first job was in an inner city school in the greater Los Angeles area. Her students were Asian-American, Hispanic, African-American and a smatter of whites – most gang members – who hated each other and had basically been written off by other educators as having no future – literally and figuratively. This was definitely a group at risk; but the teacher analyzed her audience and found a way to communicate with these students that worked. A different kind of risk communication, but one I think that helps make the point about the need to understand your audience.

Another recent issue that comes to mind was the case of the student protests at Gallaudet College over the appointment of Jane Fernandes as president in October 2007. The students were angry because they felt they had not been consulted or brought into the process. (They were not.) There is a history of student activism on the Gallaudet campus especially around issues of deaf culture. The decision makers, and the communicators, did not know their audience – or if they knew their student audience -- failed to take its members into account. Had the Gallaudet administrators engaged in consensus communications, they might not have had crisis communications to contend with ex-post-facto? Because I was curious to know the outcome, I looked online and saw a new president, Robert Davila, had assumed the office on Jan. 1, 2007. He seems to have learned from others’ past mistakes. He has already begun what appears to be an excellent outreach effort to develop real consensus communications, something he is calling “Bob’s vlog: A conversation with President Robert Davila” which he hopes “will help Gallaudet come together as a community.”

And this just in from California about the aftermath of the spinach E-coli outbreaks late last year which left three people dead and caused at least 200 other people to get sick. The spinach was traced to California as was the spinach that was reported to be the source of two other E-coli outbreaks in November and December of 2006.

According to a news story in the Sacramento Bee last week, http://www.sacbee.com/111/story/114684.html, farmers and legislators are trying to come up with a way to provide better consumer food safety guarantees. The growers are proposing a new set of voluntary safety standards, but consumer groups are bound to question how effective a voluntary standard could be.

The E-Coli incident was definitely a crisis communication situation when it occurred, but it seems now that care and/or consensus communications could more appropriately be the order of the day. Yet as far as I can tell from what I have read, legislators and growers are communicating with each other about what is best for the consumer, but the consumer is not part of the process. Beware!

My final comment concerns the case study from Rutgers University. As a Jersey girl, I am always interested in news from my home state. But I found the study of the RUSure campaign to be quite interesting. The possibly fictitious incident used to set up the report was effective precisely because it conveyed the sense of normal drinking patterns among first-year university students – It did not end with the death of one or the rape of another. It simply conveyed what the existing problem was. But what really grabbed my attention in this one was how effective the campaign was because the message was coming from other college students – not from administrators or health care professionals. That made the message more effective and I think was what really made the campaign work. Again, it seems that a real effort was made to analyze the audience and proceed accordingly. Go Rutgers!