Chapter 8 – Analyze Your Audience

Don't wonder about what the microwave is doing here. Read to find out!

The main emphasis of this chapter is the need for knowing your audience when managing or communicating risk or crisis. Audience analysis is an important part of risk and crisis communication and the audience should be an important part of the decision making process starting from message creation to which medium will be used to communicate.

Begin with purpose and objectives
The authors argue that risk and crisis communication should start by understanding why you are communicating and what type of communication you are using. The nature of the situation will help you determine the state of mind of your audience (e.g. are they in panic, do they not know anything about the situation or is this a situation they have been aware of for a along time and they will be hostile).
Also determining who is at risk is also an important beginning point in trying to understand your audience.

Choose a level of analysis
How much you analyze your audience will depend on some factors. These include: funding, time, and the number of staff involved in the situation. Organizational constraints such as approvals are also a factor that affects your audience analysis. Different levels of analysis include: Baseline audience analysis, midline audience analysis, and comprehensive audience analysis.

The authors also list some characteristics of audience analysis. Most of the factors to be analyzed listed there are common sense things that we could all come up with. One factors, however, caught my eye and I realized that I could have missed the importance of that one. Communication interaction and information flow in the community. This analysis includes looking at how your publics interact and change information. I could have easily missed this one but it is really important during the communication process, because how you use communication and which mediums to use will all depend on this factor. If there are certain community leaders that people trust, you would probably try to reach them and maybe even try engaging them in the communication process.

Determine key audience characteristics
This step is important for all kinds of organizations, but it becomes especially important for global and multinational organizations. Understanding people from your own culture can be hard at times, but understanding the audience becomes especially important for big companies that work globally since they have to consider the characteristics of all kinds of different audiences.

Socio-cultural effects on perception of risk and accepting risk are a main factor for risk communications. Two examples that come to mind are from my country, Turkey. The first risk issue is microwave ovens. As popular as these ovens are in the US, most Turkish homes do not own microwave ovens. And whenever the topic comes up, people (even educated people) have this fear of radiation from microwave ovens. People believe that these ovens are really dangerous and that is why they are not common in many homes. It is really hard to understand why, but people have such a belief and company that sells microwave ovens has to consider this misperception.

Another example would be AIDS awareness. There are many organizations that try to inform people about AIDS and try to educate people about unsafe sexual behaviors. Most educated people are aware of the risks. However, it is one section of the society – uneducated males – that does not seem to be accepting the reality of the risk, and even argue that they are immune to the risk by saying that: “We are Turks, nothing will happen to us”. I think certain demographics may be hard to communicate to and educate about risk, and this becomes a major challenge for global companies or organizations where they are trying to communicate with many different types of people with very different perceptions of risk.