Who is your audience?

Knowing your audience is important.

Once you defined your goal, you should think about your audience: who are you talking with? Why? What do they know about your topic, and what are their goals?

This is important for more than one reason. Knowing what your audience goals are will allow you to reach them more effectively; understanding what they know will allow you to calibrate the complexity of your communication; knowing what is interesting for them will make your message more relevant for them.

Getting to know your audience is not easy, but it is an integral part of science communication. To get started, you could ask other communicators for help and guidance, run a small survey among your intended audience, or read reports on the public attitudes towards science.
In this way, you could understand what the public thinks about science and scientists, and some reports could contain data specific to your country, which makes them particularly useful.

You can find the link to the reports we mentioned in the video in the “see also” section.

Share with us

• Were you aware of their existence?
• Did you use them?
• What other approaches could you suggest to assess public opinions and knowledge about science?

Share your opinion with us in the comments section!