Who is My Audience – It Helps to Know

 You would not present content the same way to a group of nurses, and to a group of hospital bookkeepers. Both audiences have different needs, stemming from their different roles and responsibilities.  Surprisingly some people basically do just that whether it is in writing, in person, or in a presentation.

Knowing your audience is an integral part of making a good impression. If you do not know your audience, you will have a hard time connecting with them, your content will fall on the proverbial deaf ears, and you can look bad. This can hurt your reputation, and potentially the reputation of your entire team or department. Reputation has value, so you want to maximize every opportunity to make a good impression with your audience.

Always take your audience into account when you are delivering content, regardless of venue.  To help tailor your delivery, ask yourself the following set of basic questions:

  • What are this audience’s roles and responsibilities?
  • What are their interests with regards to my content?
  • How can my content help them?
  • What are they going to do with my content?

Some of the answers to these questions will be your best estimate of your audience. In other circumstances, you may be able to ask them ahead of time. Ask them ahead of time when you have the opportunity. Having a firsthand report of their wants and needs is valuable.

You could have many other, pertinent questions. These ones I list above are just to help get you started in tailoring and customizing your content to your specific audience.

To learn more about how you as a health care professional can learn and refine your business writing, please check out my book: A Business Writing Toolkit For Healthcare Professionals

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Presentations – How to Approach Them

A well-done presentation reflects well on you. Those who do not see you in your clinical work usually have no other way of judging your competence, intelligence and abilities. In business, judging someone’s value by their presentation is common. When you have a presentation, consider a couple, basic, but easily overlooked questions: Who are you presenting to? Different audiences will have different needs, different backgrounds, and different uses for the information you bring. For example, presenting the nursing workflow to senior nursing leadership will be different than presenting the same workflow information to a group of consultants who are engineers. Different audiences may even speak a different professional language. For example, physicians will use a different terminology than the hospital finance department. Whenever possible, learn: Your audience’s needs Your audience’s background(s)   How they may use the information you give them What is your main takeaway ...
Read more

Writing Like A Businessperson Is Important If You Are A Healthcare Professional

Changes in modern healthcare have made the field more like a business than it had been in the past. As part of this change, people with a business background have entered healthcare. Businesspeople  bring with them their own language and style of communicating. This includes a style of writing that most of us in healthcare are not familiar with from our training. Most of us in traditional healthcare roles have little to no experience with this kind of communication. For the traditional healthcare professional, skills like writing a business email or putting together a smooth presentation are unnecessary – at best  these are extras, not essentials. However, this lack of experience can put your average healthcare professional at a disadvantage in the modern setting, especially for those who want to expand their careers into the nonclinical aspects of modern healthcare.   To navigate the landscape of modern healthcare well, healthcare professionals should learn to communic...
Read more