Know Your Audience

By Sruthi Sadhujan, Senior Strategy Director at Hyperakt

In this final installation of our “Know Your Audience” series, we present one last approach to building a deeper understanding and empathy for the audiences on the receiving end of your communications content. Last time, we covered jobs to be done, a simple but not simplistic approach to clarifying what value your audiences need from your content. In this final chapter, we’re talking personas.

By Sruthi Sadhujan, Senior Strategy Director at Hyperakt

As expert communicators, what steps are you taking to understand who is on the receiving end of your content? Who is your audience? What do they care about? What challenges are they facing? How can you tailor what you are creating in a way that is both useful and resonant to them. How do you move from talking at your audiences to talking to your audiences?

In this second installment of our “Know Your Audience” series, we lay out the second of 3 strategies for understanding who you’re talking to and how to design your communications with them in mind.

By Sruthi Sadhujan, Senior Strategy Director at Hyperakt

Many nonprofits are driven by a valiant impulse to tell stories, as often as possible, to as many people as possible. But a story on its own can only go so far. Like an arrow without a clear target, a story without a clear audience is in danger of missing its mark.

In just the past decade, as design and business have become increasingly intimate bedfellows, the gospel of “knowing your audience” has seeped into the mainstream. Innovative companies like Airbnb and Capital One have proven that knowing your audience, inhabiting the spirit of the people on the other end of your work, is a strategic asset and continue to raise the bar for deploying smart design and communications.