Who are you talking to?

Each time you communicate you need to decide who your message is aimed at. The recipient is your target audience.

For each communications objective you may have a number of target audiences, but each individual message should clearly target one audience. Differentiating between types of audience is important. It helps you focus your message and the methods you can use to get it across.

HOW TO DIFFERENTIATE BETWEEN AUDIENCES

It is tempting to treat everyone as a potential audience, but targeting a message at ‘everyone’ will end up being so vague that you will end up grabbing no one’s attention.

Identifying common interests or characteristics will help you differentiate between audiences.

For example:

• Are you trying to speak to business people or members of the public?
• NGOs or governments?
• Other sustainable development actors or those outside the field?
• Specialist sectors and experts, or practitioners in the UN Major Groups?
• Do they understand specialist language and jargon, or everyday language?

Depending on your answer to these questions (and many others) you will be able to focus your message and decide how to get that message across.

MEDIA AND AUDIENCES

Journalists understand the importance of knowing the audience. This is the way they work out which questions are relevant to readers, listeners and viewers. Any media organisation will aim to engage with a specific type of person.

If you are hoping to get your message across via any media outlet, you need to think about who you are trying to reach and whether your message matches the audience for that outlet.

You may have to do some research to work out which media outlets are the best for your target audience. This should involve familiarising yourself with the content of newspapers, magazines and websites, listening to radio programmes or looking out for relevant TV programmes.

While doing this, keep a note of any journalists who are interested in the kind of topics you are involved in. Contact them by name and ask them what sort of items they are interested in and how you might help. We look at this in more detail in Sections 3 and 4.

PRIMARY AND SECONDARY TARGETS

You can sometimes use one target audience to help you reach another. These are called multipliers.

For example, if you wanted to help school children learn about sustainable development you could target teachers with information and materials they could use in the classroom.

Multipliers can take many forms. Here are some examples:

• Professional advisors, such as accountants
• Journalists
• Politicians
• Well-known personalities
• Professional organisations, unions or other special interest groups.