This is an Eval Central archive copy, find the original at freshspectrum.com.
You know the audience is important, but how do you actually design a report for one? My suggestion, design your report for 3 audiences.
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Transcript
Okay. So today I’m wanting to talk a little bit about your reporting audiences. Now, this is something. If you’ve actually read my book, the reporting revolution available on Amazon. In chapter two. I talk all about finding your audience. And you’ll see this little chart here. And so if you’ve read it, that’s actually what I’m going to talk about today.
You can skip it. Just share it with other people, tell people to buy the book, for other people, that kind of thing. Anyway. One thing to, to know. Or one thing to ask you is, do you know what the 1, 3 25 a report. Thing is.
Basically it’s when you create a report you should have 25 page report, a three page executive summary and a one pager.
Now, at least this was written pre-web early days of the web. I don’t know if it really holds up it’s a good rule of thumb. If you’re just trying to create a set of reports and just want to go the old school way. But I really think it hints at. Three different audiences.
And our need to serve multiple audiences at once. Serving a whole bunch of audiences. As many of us try to do with our reports. Is one way to get overwhelmed really quickly because you start listing off audiences. And if you try to create reports for all of those audiences, you’re going to become overwhelmed.
And you’re not going to create anything good. That tends to be what happens? You burn yourself out. So we want to avoid burning you out. But basically we can think about our audiences as just being three different entities. And if you can at least use this as a starting point. Create for these three audience members.
And you’ll be a bit better off. You can add more if it’s important later specific types of people that you want to try to create for, but let’s start with this. The first audience, the 25 pager audience is your high interest audience. They’re the ones who want everything. They’re really invested in your work. So they want to be kept up to date. Maybe your work is really relevant to what it is that they do on a day-to-day basis. Maybe you just write really good reports.
This is your audience. That is the high interest. This is the one that they’ll read, whatever you write. So your comprehensive stuff, your data dashboards that you put out. Unfortunately, most of our audiences are not that audience. Most of our audiences are either medium or low interest or casual. Medium interest is an important one, because this is usually our boss, the executives that politicians were trying to reach.
There are people that might have an interest in our work and what we’re trying to do, but usually they’re pretty busy with other stuff or they’re. They have their own overwhelming stuff going on, busy calendars, all that stuff. So reaching them is more about. Figuring out what it is about them, that they would find interesting.
To see in your report. So this is how you design presentations, executive summaries. Even some kind of visual reports. Slide docs and shorter reports that you share online things that these are things that are designed for your medium interest audience. And our last audience is probably the biggest number of people.
Is our low interest or casual audience. This is our like social media following people who are somewhat connected to your work. They don’t, they’re only gonna read what you have to write, what you share with them. If it is particularly relevant. To what it is they’re doing at any given moment.
So that’s the whole idea around one pagers, infographics, micro graphics, short kind of videos. These types of things are designed for low interest audiences. It’s about making a connection. And All of this is fluid. Low interest audience member can become medium interest or high interest.
And they can go back and forth. And depending on what you’re writing about, depending what your report is about, but these are three general audiences that you can think about. And. If you try to put names to these people, sometimes it helps to. But I hope that helps try that. Next time you go into reporting, try to think about three audience members, your high interest, low interest, and medium interest.
And see how that changes the way you report. Try to create a report. Designed for each one of those levels. And I think you’ll come up with something interesting. So good luck. Talk soon. Bye.