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Part IV ✦ Designing a CMS
get more time or funding to expand? On the other hand, can you serve more audiences
than you now have? How would you further subdivide the audiences if you had the
chance?
✦ Goals: How do your audiences support your CMS project goals and vice versa? Are
these the right audiences for your goals? If you could deliver the right content to these
audiences would you really be closer to meeting your organization’s goals? Are any
other goals suggested by your analysis? Are these the right goals for your audiences?
Are any others suggested?
✦ Agreement: Is your organization in agreement about these audiences? What must you
do to see this set accepted as the set of audiences that your organization serves? Are
the stakeholders in your organization all likely to agree with the way that you’ve divided
and ranked audiences? Can you hand off the ongoing audience analysis to a marketing
or public relations group? How will you ensure that other analyses further refine rather
than contradict this analysis?
✦ Understanding: Do your sponsors and project team understand these audiences?
Do they understand and support the value proposition, and are they likely to agree to
abide by it?
Summary
The notion of an audience for the purposes of a CMS isn’t so different from other prevailing
views. What a CMS needs, however, is more than just a good notion of an audience — it needs
a lot of factual data about your audiences that it can use to select content. To analyze audi-
ences for a CMS, you must perform the following tasks:
✦ Name and identify each one.
✦ Collect as much demographic and statistical data as you can on each one.
✦ Understand and account for the attitudes of the audiences in the construction of your
content and publications.
✦ Decide what publications audiences are most likely to compare yours to and make sure
that your publications compare favorably.
✦ Understand the uses that each audience is likely to make of your publications and
make sure that you serve those uses.
✦ Create profiles for each audience that indicate definitively which users are in which
audience.
In the next chapter, I discuss the complex task of fully analyzing and designing your
publications.
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