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Part IV ✦ Designing a CMS
Plan
The following sections break your audience analysis into a set of design constraints that you
should collect and account for from each audience you intend to serve.
Identification
Begin your analysis by charting the main identifying characteristics of your audiences. Come
up with a response to the following audience design constraints to help you keep track of and
rank your audiences:
✦ ID: Assign each audience a unique identifier so that you can later use it in the CMS for
profiles and rules.
✦ Name: Choose a descriptive but memorable name for each audience so that the staff
accepts the name and uses it consistently in conversation.
✦ Rank: Give each audience a priority rank. You rank audiences relative to each other if
possible. (Members are priority one, for example, and in-country staff are priority two.)
If you can’t reach agreement on relative ranking, rate them all according to an external
scale. (Members and staff are high priority, for example, whereas the press is a low
priority.)
✦ Key member: For each audience, identify an exemplar to whom you can point as a
concrete example of the group. The person may or may not be available to your group
on an ongoing consulting basis, but you should at least meet with the key member once
to get a solid feeling for what people of this audience are like. If your audience is in more
than one locality, can you get a key member from each main locality?
Demographics
Beyond simple identification, you should study the kind of people you expect to be in each
audience. The following constraints help you get to know the kinds of people who are in a
particular audience:
✦ Personal description: Craft a short essay that gives someone who’s never met any
members of this audience a clear idea of who they are. The essay should give a sense
of the kinds of people in this audience and what they stand to gain personally from an
affiliation with your organization. Make sure that your entire team reads and agrees
with the description.
✦ Job description: What kind of job (or jobs) do people in this audience hold? Do they all
share similar job tasks or responsibilities? What can these people gain professionally
from an affiliation with your organization?
✦ Full size: How many people in the entire world fit into the description of this audience?
✦ Current size: How many people who fit into this audience does your organization cur-
rently communicate with at all? How many do you communicate with on a regular basis?
✦ Demographics: What ages, sexes, races, regions, languages, and other such data
describe people in this audience?
✦ Localities: In which of your localities do people from this audience reside?
✦ Published data: Are any sources of data on these people available for you to access?
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