Know Your Audience When Communicating

Jerry: It’s two things you need to find out as you’re approaching the presentation. You need to find out what you need to say, what you need to get across.

Jerry: And you need to intersect that with what your audience actually needs to know and what they’re interested in.

Jerry: So finding out what you need to say, you have to ask yourself, what’s the purpose of the presentation? What do you wanna achieve? What key things do you want the audience to learn or take action on?

Jerry: And a way to do it is to list the points that you have to make in order, and then start reducing them down to one. And think about what’s the one message to get across in the presentation? What’s your absolutely central point?

Jerry: And if the audience could only remember one thing, what should it be?

Jerry: OK. The second part for goals is to find out what your audience needs to know.

Jerry: Ask yourself, like, demographic information. Who is your audience? Where they’re coming from? What’s their experience? How are they approaching this? What are their needs?

Vocabulary:

approaching the presentation – preparing for or dealing with a talk as the scheduled time gets closer, “As you are approaching the presentation, make sure to double-check that your slides work correctly.”

get across – to communicate an idea clearly so that other people understand it completely, “He used a simple drawing to get across his plan for the new office layout.”

intersect that with – to connect, combine, or balance two different ideas or pieces of information together, “You need to find out what you want to sell and intersect that with what people actually want to buy.”

take action on – to do something specific in order to deal with a situation or a piece of advice, “The city council promises to take action on the complaints about the broken streetlights.”

reducing them down to – making a long list of items smaller or simpler by removing the less important details, “She wrote down five different project ideas before reducing them down to the best one.”

central point – the core, main, or most important idea in a speech, conversation, or piece of writing, “The central point of the meeting was that the company needs to save money.”

demographic information – basic facts about a specific group of people, such as their age, gender, background, or job, “The website asks for demographic information to see if its users are mostly teenagers or adults.”

where they’re coming from – a person’s unique background, past experiences, or point of view that influences how they think, “To understand why he is so worried about safety, you have to look at where he’s coming from.”