Course Overview
CHE 460: Health Communication, Social Marketing, and Advocacy, explores how strategic communication and advocacy influence public health. One of the foundational steps in creating effective messaging is understanding your audience.
This consists of methods for gathering information about readers to conduct an audience analysis. Depending on the purpose and needs of the documents being provided, you may find it useful to create a brief audience profile or an in-depth audience analysis.This page walks you through an audience analysis process using guiding questions and key principles. Additionally, the downloadable resource below is a template that can help you to map out your audience alongside your public health initative that you are developing.
Downloadable Resource:
Use this chart to map out your audience before building your campaign message. Download the file by hovering over the title above, and clicking the cloud and arrow icon.
Start by asking yourself questions such as:
- Who are they?
- What do they need?
- Where will they be reading?
- When will they be reading?
- Why will they be reading?
- How will they be reading?
Key tips:
The audience analysis portion is a process used to identify and understand the priority and influence audiences on the proposed strategy. The priority and influencing audiences are those people whose behavior must change to improve the health situation.
An audience analysis informs the design of materials, messages, media selection, and activities of the proposed strategy. It establishes a clear, detailed, and realistic picture of the audience. As a result, messages and activities are more likely to resonate with the audience and lead to the desired change in behaviors.
Good speakers are audience-centered, keeping the intended audience foremost in mind at every step of the proposal's preparation and presentation.
You must research your audience thoroughly.
If you do not know the composition of a group, you cannot make intelligent decisions about what to include, what to emphasize, how best to arrange and present your ideas.
The audience's age, sex, attitudes, and expectations are all relevant to your planning.
“Working" an audience requires different combinations of analysis and adaptation techniques. It is necessary to “mix and match" for different audience compositions.
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