2019 Video Class: Week One

PART 4: AUDIENCE FIRST

DEFINING YOUR AUDIENCE

Here’s the truth. There is only one way to succeed in connecting with audiences of any kind: to put your audience first. What does audience first mean? It means that you have clearly defined the audience that you want to engage. It means that the center of your message is not your own story – the focus is on the concerns and interests of your audience. If you know exactly who you are talking to and center your story on the things that they care about – well, you’ll have something that will make your audience sit up and pay attention.

Think of it this way. If you’re submitting a manuscript to a scientific journal, you’re going to write it very differently based on where you are submitting it. After all, papers in Ecological Monographs (pick your own specialist journal) are structured very differently than papers in Science. Why is that? Well, the audiences for those journals are not the same and what those audiences care about is not the same (we’re ignoring other factors like differing journal formats, for the moment). This is also why the Introduction section to your paper is so important. One of the central purposes of the Introduction section is to connect your research to a set of questions or debates that your audience already cares about.

All of these principles still apply when creating a story that isn’t going in a scientific journal. It may seem odd, but the key to a successful story isn’t actually your story. Instead, the key is accurately defining your audience and understanding where your audience is coming from. If you can do these two things, you are 90% of the way there.

Why is it so important to define your audience precisely? Because your story will only work if it connects to the interests and concerns of your audience. If you don’t define your audience correctly, you won’t have a shared set of interests and concerns to zero in on.

A very common mistake is defining your audience too broadly or too narrowly. On the too big side, we very frequently find scientists setting their audience as “people who watch science-related YouTube videos” or “readers of the New Yorker”. What do New Yorker readers actually have in common? Well, we guess they like to read. And we suppose they enjoy breathing. It’s going to be hard to hang your hat on things like this.
On the other side, we commonly hear scientists say that they want to produce a video to connect with a tiny handful of people – sometimes even one person. If that’s your situation, putting together a video is probably not the right way to go. Instead, just connect with those people directly. Your phone is your friend!

On the same line, though an audience should be specific, it doesn’t need to be micro-targeted. That is, you don’t have to focus down to something like “Women in Hawaii between the ages of 25-30 who waterski and are allergic to peanuts”. Rather, a specific audience is one that is generally alike in interests and concerns (alike in knowledge is a bonus) when it comes to the issue that a scientist wants to raise. Let us emphasize that the audience does not have to be alike in all respects, just more or less alike when it comes to a scientist’s issue.

Here are three real examples of scientists who have found nicely focused audiences for their outreach.

• A fisheries biologist whose research focuses on food webs of the US Pacific coast and who targets his outreach on fisherman of the central coast of California.
• A set of ecologists who write very short science stories for parents with young children (and who desire to read stories about science to their kids at bedtime).
• A marine conservation biologist who corrects widespread misconceptions about the dangers of sharks, by focusing on those who are watching Shark Week television programming (a popular yearly event on the Discovery television channel that features angry, angry sharks with sharp, sharp teeth).

What is the right audience for you? If you are just getting started with all of this, you might well have no idea. It often isn’t easy to narrow your audience from People of Earth to something a little more specific. The truth is that there are many different audiences you could select and the audience you are addressing might frequently change. Your audience will also naturally evolve as you gain experience. For example, you may start with the aim of engaging local adults with your research, but find that you are more interested in engaging state-level policymakers on science-related issues.

To identify your audience, try this approach:

1. What are the overall aims you hope to achieve with your videos? There are no wrong answers! Even if you are new to this whole thing and don’t have a specific aim in mind, you can still formulate some general goals based on what you find initially interesting. And you can always change your aims. Here are some potential aims to get you thinking.
   1. I want to influence policy associated with my line of research or field.
   2. I want to influence public opinion on issues associated with my research or field.
   3. I want to increase the public visibility of my research or field.
   4. My research doesn’t use the creative part of my brain enough and I want to podcast/blog/other to exercise my creative side.
   5. I find my research or field extremely interesting and I think the wider world would share my passion if they knew more about my research or field.
   6. I want to transition out of a research career into some other career and I think that building a communications portfolio will assist in that transition.
   7. I want people in my field to pay more attention to my research.
   8. I want to entice graduate students to join my lab.
   9. I want visitors to my website to spend more time looking through it.
2. Once you have at least one aim in mind, think of what sort of audience would be most appropriate to achieving it. For example, let’s say that your top priority is option 1 from above (influence policy). For any given policy, there will be multiple relevant groups, such as: policymakers (at potentially local, regional, national, and international levels), various stakeholder groups, and consumers associated with a policy. Just as with general aims, there is no one right audience – just the audience that you would like to communicate with now. Here are some good guide rules:
   1. The more you can visualize your audience in your mind – the more you can see individual people (even if they are people you have invented in your brain) – the more on the right track you are.
   2. Start with what you know. It is much easier to have a sense of an audience with which you have at least a little personal experience.

UNDERSTANDING YOUR AUDIENCE

Once you have begun to define your audience, it is essential to understand what that audience cares about. After all, that’s what your message needs to be centered on. But how to gain insight into your audience? Perhaps you personally know people in your target audience that you can directly ask. Or, perhaps you have access to media written by or designed for your target audience.

But an especially powerful way to understand your audience is Twitter. The power of Twitter is in the numbers. There are hundreds of millions of active users, meaning that whatever audience you want to engage, they’re likely on Twitter. If you read the tweets of people in your audience, they’ll tell you in real time exactly what they care about.

Many scientists are extremely wary of Twitter, so don’t worry – we aren’t going to force you to join Twitter. Our exercise only involves reading other people’s tweets (meaning that there are zero potential negative consequences for you). The exercise will be a little more effective if you have a Twitter account (we’ll walk you through how to sign up for an account, if you’re interested), but you can definitely still do it without joining up.

Exercise: understanding your people using Twitter.

This exercise is actually part 3 of our self-guided Twitter course. The parts before that (accessible from the exercise link) will walk you through the basics of how Twitter works and how to set up your own account. The exercise assumes that you have a Twitter account, but if you aren't interested in creating a Twitter account, you can still participate. Just use this Twitter search page, which doesn't require an account.

LISTENING TO YOUR AUDIENCE

Now that you have put your audience together, the next step is to listen to what they have to say. Read through the tweets of your audience to get a sense of the issues that they are tweeting about right now. How many tweets should you read through? You can stop when you feel you have something of a pulse for the current frame of mind for your audience. Pay particularly close attention to anything that surprises you about your audience. Keep checking in with your audience from time to time over the week! The issues your audience tweet about (and therefore care about) may change and you want to have a feel for that change.

Lastly – and this is most important – start thinking of how you might connect your science message to the current concerns of your audience.

THE AUDIENCE FIRST WORKSHEET

Great – you have done some thinking about your audience. Now what? The next step is to follow the Audience First worksheet, which will help clarify your thinking through a series of questions. Click the link above or find the worksheet in the Community Forum under Week One instructions. Please follow along in the worksheet for the following sections.

The purpose of your video is to cause a (small) change in behavior

Let’s walk through the ideas behind the worksheet. Here is the biggest idea: the point of your video is (almost certainly) not to convey information! Rather the purpose of your video is likely to motivate your audience to do something.

Let’s stop and examine why this is the case. There are certainly plenty of short science videos that have no purpose other than to inform an audience, like this video on aircraft engines by the very popular Minute Physics: