Why you should know your audience

What are you doing to meet your audiences’ needs? How would you rate your connection with them? And what happens when you don’t get them and they don’t get you?

The short answer is that you look a bit daft and it teaches you to laugh at yourself. Here are two occasions when I did not do my homework about who was sitting in front of me.

This is little of the conversation between myself and a group.

“Isn’t that fascinating that your grandparents did the same kind of work?”

They looked at me a little strangely. I wondered why.

In the evening I told my then fiancé about it and he smiled. Then he patiently explained…

And, to use a great Scottish phrase, I felt like a wally (idiot).

Knowing your audience is important for a number of reasons.

1) It strengthens the connection between you and them

2) If you know why they are there you can offer them something of value

3) It improves trust between you and them and so they might come back – this is important if, say, like me, you’re a teacher.

But back to the story: I was teaching adults in Reykjavik and I’d given my class a homework assignment.

Their task was to prepare a short 5 minute talk on someone they admired. A lot of them spoke about one of their Icelandic grandparents many of whom had been farmers or fishermen.

And hence my comment: “Wasn’t it amazing that so many of them had had the same job?”

Now, Iceland has a tiny population with approximately 364,000 people but it’s a big island of roughly 103,000 km² - roughly the same size as Kentucky or Maine and more than twice the size of Denmark. And so you can imagine how much countryside and coastline there is. And going back 70 or 80 years ago, most people lived in the countryside and on the coast.

This meant at that time an awful lot of folk were farmers or fisherman. Or actually both. (Icelanders are a stoical breed. Historically, it was not uncommon for farmers to become fishermen in, wait for it, the winter months. Fishing in the north Atlantic in the dead of winter. You can just imagine the weather.)

But having lived in Iceland for a few weeks I did not know that it was inevitable that a lot of my students’ grandparents had been farmers or fishermen.

Thankfully, my lovely class forgave me and I told them that my fiancé had put me right. I shared that I’d learned a lot from that class with them – which is one of the brilliant things about being teaching – you're always learning.

My second story moves from Europe’s least densely populated country to one of its most densely populated – The Netherlands.

It was the first time I was teaching a new class of first year university students. They had that nervous, fizzy energy and palpable excitement at being at a brand new stage of their young adult lives. They were also trying to suss me out as their teacher.

And unwittingly, I may have come across as a bit prim and a teacher from the 1950s.

Maybe the 1930s.

Here’s story 2 about how I messed up by not preparing for my audience…

This time I was teaching in Amsterdam.

Now, I’m quite big on student’s names. I think it’s important to remember them and to use them and as with any new class I’d been getting to know which name belonged to which face.

Near the end of the 100 minute class I made a joke that I was having a tough time with a whole new batch of (mainly) Dutch names.

“So many of you have names that I’ve just never come across before” I told them.

There was a pause.

Then one young woman shared that I’d been calling them by their surnames.

“You’re kidding?” I laughed. “And no-one told me this?”

“Er, no. We thought that was just how you spoke to students.”

And right away I felt that I’d come across as very Professor McGonagall from the Harry Potter series. This was not what I was going for at all.

So, I decided that taking a closer look at a register of students’ names was probably a pretty sound idea before I walked into a new class in the future.

Both of these situations reminded me that preparing for an audience is important. It pays dividends in the short and long term. It shows you've taken them and the experience of being with them seriously.

And so getting into the habit of preparing for an audience is only a good thing.

What about you? What mistakes have you made with audiences? How has it changed what you do now? And what habits do you have to help you prepare?