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Chapter 25 ✦ Cataloging Audiences
✦ Donors: This audience consists of all those who make major grants to the organization.
✦ Press: This audience consists of all those who learn about and provide publicity for the
organization.
As I move through the description of audience analysis, I draw on these hypothetical audi-
ences for examples.
Analyzing Audiences
In the sections that follow, I lay out a methodology for coming to understand the audience
segments that you must create. In addition, I supply some logical design criteria that you can
use to fully describe each segment. As I do with all the entities in your logical design, I break
the analysis into questions to get you to think, methods that you can use to plan, and ques-
tions to help you integrate your audience analysis.
The key to finding the right set of audiences is to look within your organization to see how it
divides constituents now in order to be sure that you’re making the most of what your organi-
zation already knows. Find out how your organization communicates with each audience now
and what feedback it receives from those audiences.
For each audience, you construct the set of personal traits (for example, age, interests, and
so on.) that select a person into the audience. These traits later serve as the user profiles on
which you can build your personalization module. To most effectively speak to each audience,
you must create a set of assumptions about what members like and dislike (for example, what
motivates, impresses, and offends them). You should find publications that they know and
trust now and make sure that you’re providing content that’s consistent with their aims. These
assumptions give rise to the metadata that you add to your content so that the people who
want that content the most can find it and get it delivered to them.
After defining all your audiences, decide how they relate to each other to determine whether
simultaneously serving the variety of audiences that you want is possible and to determine
the kinds of metadata that most effectively capture the essential needs of each audience.
Think
To help you ease into the analysis, you can ask yourself and your organization the following
set of questions:
✦ Who is the primary audience? Do you want to serve one group of people much more
than the others? If so, how much are you willing to sacrifice the needs of the lesser
audiences to those of the primary audience?
✦ Do you have too many audiences? Can you really expect to serve the range of people
you’ve identified?
✦ What are your current communications? How well and in what ways are you in touch
with your audiences now? Are they satisfied? What are the opportunities to increase
satisfaction? Are any feedback channels established? If so, what feedback has come
through?
✦ Who are the key members? Can you find members of key audiences to review your
work as the project progresses and help you ensure that your CMS produces the right
publications?
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