The Importance of Understanding Your Audience
Lesson 9 from: Data Storytelling: Deliver Insights via Compelling StoriesBill Shander
The Importance of Understanding Your Audience
Lesson 9 from: Data Storytelling: Deliver Insights via Compelling StoriesBill Shander
Lesson Info
9. The Importance of Understanding Your Audience
Lessons
Introduction
1Class Introduction
03:29 2Do The Exercises
00:37 3Communication Challenges and Solutions
05:20 4Exercise: 4X4 Model
04:31 5Exercise Solution: 4X4 Model
03:25 6Introduction - Quiz
Thinking Like a Communicator
The Power of Story
06:48 8Six Ways to Tap Into Your Inner Storyteller
12:32 9The Importance of Understanding Your Audience
03:42 10How to Understand Your Audience
04:35 11How to Embrace Emotion (to review)
04:38 12How to Tap Into Your Inherent Creativity
05:55 13Exercise: An Emotional Story
01:29 14Exercise Solution: An Emotional Story
01:12 15Thinking Like a Communicator - Quiz
Telling Data Stories
16Basic Data Analytics Tactics
08:54 17Basic Journalism Tactics
04:56 18Defining Your Story
05:37 19Sketching and Storyboarding
07:05 20Use Your Words
04:20 21Telling Data Stories - Quiz
Essential Design Principles
22The Power of Visuals
07:44 23How to Pick the Right Chart for Your Data
05:19 24Exercise: Chart Selection
06:27 25Exercise: Visualization
02:59 26Basic Chart Designs Principles
08:21 27Research Driven Design Principles
06:27 28Exercise: A Data Story
03:50 29Essential Design Principles - Quiz
And Now What?
30Great Data Stories for Your Inspiration
05:53 31Tips and Tricks
03:53 32How to Sell Data Storytelling Services
03:56 33A Conversation Guide for Talking to Prospects About Data Storytelling Projects
05:30 34Course Summary
02:48Final Quiz
35Final Quiz
Lesson Info
The Importance of Understanding Your Audience
I recently attended a day long lecture from a thought leader, a luminary in the field. Visual communications and data visualization and this person said that it's a pet peeve of his when communicators talk about focusing on their audience. He said you should focus only on your content. The audience doesn't matter now. He has a lot of great ideas and he's a leader in the field for a lot of great reasons. But this thinking is pure junk. Let's think about this for a second. Say you're presenting medical research findings to a classroom of sixth graders or if you're presenting the same information at a medical conference for cardiologists or say you're presenting the same information yet again to Congress. Do you think you might share different information presented in different ways to those audiences? Yeah, that's what I thought. You have to speak very thoughtfully and directly to your audience or you're just wasting everyone's time. It's not about dumbing things down. For instance, if y...
ou're talking to Children, it's all about tailoring the content for your audience. There are really just a few things to change depending on who the audience is and these changes are all on a spectrum. These aren't binary choices first. And most importantly, you have to adjust the context. For instance, if you're presenting to the conference of physicians, you're going to dive deep into the weeds, right to the heart of the matter on the medical subjects, right from the get go. They don't need definitions of the disease at hand. For instance, they don't need an anatomy refresher. You can get right to the good stuff for the sixth graders on the other hand, they need more context setting. You have to set up the story before you get to the specifics and for congress you may have to provide that context and you may also have the added requirement of explaining a level of detail from like a tangential point of view that isn't in either of the other presentations if you're affecting policy and legislation, the context you provide will be very different than the purely medical context you present to your medical audience. Secondly, you have to adjust the depth of your content. Of course, no matter how much content you provide, your sixth graders and congress people don't need to know every medical detail from the study. They need the overview. The goals for the communications are different, so the content is different. Third your audience will have very different requirements for the form the presentation takes. Maybe your presentation to Congress is limited to an hour in front of a committee and you have to capture their attention and get them to focus on just three key findings. Your visual support materials will be high level without too much distracting detail and much more narrowly focused than the medical conference materials for that audience. You may have a similarly high level visual presentation for your talk, but of course the paper itself will include dozens or hundreds of pages of research content, including many charts and graphs and even tables of numbers. Those doctors want more and more detail to help them apply your research in their practice or to argue with you about how erroneous your findings are. To me this is obvious and clear. You should never talk down to your audience, but you should always remember that each audience has characteristics and you have to be sure to talk to them in a language that they understand and using methods that will resonate. If you were speaking at a conference for doctors in Mongolia, you wouldn't start your presentation with a bad joke about the boston Bruins latest struggles to get into the playoffs. No, you'd probably reach out to your network and find out what's new in Mongolia and tell a different bad joke that would fall just as flat but might at least be a more relevant and targeted bad joke now that you believe it's important in the next video, we'll talk about how to understand your audience
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