1. Getting to know your audience
Welcome Back!
2. Refreshing ideas
Communication is a multi-faceted process; arguably, the essential facet is your audience. Understanding and anticipating audience need shapes every aspect of sharing data insights.
Let's recap the importance of knowing your audience and then expand on this idea to give you some tools for success.
When we considered the four forms of communication, we focused on understanding the audience's expected format and responding to their feedback to focus on communication. While understanding insights, we talked about keeping messaging around insights simple for your audience and providing them with enough context to understand the value of your insights.
3. Asking questions
Let's zoom out and explore additional considerations we can use to focus our message.
What roles does your audience perform within your organization? What does your audience already know, and what do they need to know? How well does your audience know you? These questions aren’t exhaustive, but they will help get you into the mindset of your audience and provide a spark to add your own.
4. Buildingsway
To explore these questions, we will look to a theoretical company, Buildingsway, a construction company specializing in bespoke treehouses. Harold is an analyst in charge of planning next year's lineup of building options. Harold completes exhaustive market research comprising of customer interviews, social media, competitor analysis, and supply chain considerations to focus his insights.
5. Building a plan
Harold ultimately decided that Buildsway needs to focus heavily on indoor treehouses for customers who want the treehouse experience but don’t have any trees and retractable roofs for their standard designs. Harold needs to nail communicating these insights to the rest of Buildingsway, and he begins by putting himself in the shoes of his stakeholders. Harold must win over three key stakeholders: Paul, Yuri, and Lorraine.
6. Importance of roles
Harold ponders a bit with the questions we outlined earlier and creates a playbook for each of his interactions. Paul is the head of analytics and is skeptical of the new methods of market research Harold employed to derive his insights. Yuri is the warehouse manager responsible for sourcing the materials for each job, and Lorraine is the head of sales for Buildingsway.
7. Need to know
Looking to the next question, what does the audience already know, and what do they need to know? Paul doesn’t know much about the initiative except that Harold is trying some new methods, and Paul wants to understand more before recommending them to the rest of the team. He has a solid technical background, so going deep into processes and analytics is expected. Yuri and Lorraine are much less technical, so keeping things at the results level will be the key to success with each of them. Yuri needs to know what items to get in stock and their expected availability, while Lorraine needs to know the anticipated popularity of the new options. While thinking of what each stakeholder needs to obtain, Harold also comes up with a strategy for using his understanding of the data to explain common assumptions each stakeholder may have.
8. Learning from the past
Finally, Harold needs to reflect on how well each stakeholder knows him to determine if he needs to adjust his communication strategy to accommodate their past interactions. Since this is his first time working with Paul he plans on being more formal and allow for more iterations than he normally would to build a shared bond. Harold’s work with Buildingsway is a solid introduction to trying to understand your audience’s perspective before diving into a communication plan.
9. Let's practice!
Let's take a moment to do some exercises and work through another scenario for Harold and the Buildingsway organization.