Audience & The Master Key!

Who is she?
Who is he?
Who are they?

Sherlock Holmes would rummage through his untidy inventory of detective tools, find his lens and analyze the footprints, or get into his rumpled trench coat and disappear for days into his lab – to find an answer to the above questions…and he would.

Hercule Poirot would twirl his inimitable moustache, smile ever so condescendingly and drawl, “let your gray cells act – you can find all answers sitting in your arm chair!” He would let the logical connections build, and tell you everything that you need to know about him, her, or them.

But then, if you are neither Sherlock Holmes nor Hercule Poirot; nor any of the other fictitious or real detectives who make this world appear more interesting and life more adventurous than it probably is – you will have to use a fair mix of the action-oriented Holmes’ approach and the deductive reasoning oriented Poirot approach to arrive at a correct answer to the question – who is my audience!

Understanding the audience is probably the trickiest, most difficult, but also the most rewarding task that an instructional designer ever does. If you disagree with the latter part of the preceding sentence, reflect upon some of the recent training programs that you have either attended or delivered. If you can recall boredom, yawns, infinite requests for indefinitely long breaks…you’ve probably felt the need of audience analysis. There is a possibility that you had attributed the reason behind the training’s failure to rouse interest, to the lackluster training style of the trainer; or to the presence of too many PowerPoint presentation; and so on. Yet, at the heart of it was probably the absence of the most important preparatory exercise – the Audience Analysis!

When you know your audience, you can route your content to their minds and hearts; if you don’t, the content loses direction. It doesn’t reach its destination. It is the outcome of the audience analysis exercise that helps the trainer determine almost everything about the training – except, in some scattered random cases, the content. It is your audience, which determines how you should break the ice, how you should introduce the new concepts, how you should make the audience practice their learning, how you should evaluate them, what kind of humor should you use, what kind of image you should portray…and so on. The list is long…very long, for it covers almost everything that you do in the training hall.

But then, we aren’t Sherlock Holmes…nor are we Hercule Poirot. How are we to discover who our audience is? How do we find out what kind of activities will help them learn faster? How can we determine what will thaw their minds and help them become ready to receive new information? Is there a method to solving this mystery or is it completely intuitive?

Let us begin at the beginning. We all are different. We look different, we all have had different experiences, and we have different preferences (as well as prejudices.) We don’t like to be trained unless the decision to be trained is ours (andragogically yours!) We are like onions, with layers of privacy settings. We don’t open our hearts to strangers. We don’t want to tell others who we are and what we like, but we also expect that the training will sweep us off our feet and will entertain as well as educate us. With all such hang-ups, variety, and expectations; the adult learner, who is our esteemed audience, is a tough nut to crack.

Academically, we are first expected to identify the demographics of our audience. This, as we all know, is the easier part. When we conduct trainings within our own organization, we have sufficient data to tell us all about our prospective trainee. If the trainee is a new hire, the HR department can furnish us with the demographic details of our learner; if he or she has been with the organization for some time, demographic data once again is not an issue. When we conduct trainings for other organizations, we can request the organization for the demographic data.

The problem centers on the other two dimensions of audience analysis, which are the pyschographic analysis and the entry behavior analysis. I’ve always found it easier to focus on these two by keeping in mind the need for these two analyses. Whenever I have training program scheduled, I find myself asking the question – Why do I need this data? And when I begin to write the questions down for my audience profile questionnaire, after writing each question, I try to answer the question – Do I need this data?

Let me analyze these two questions and their genesis for you. “Why do I need this data?” is the question that enables me to zero in on the areas from which I should frame my questions for the questionnaire. Here’s an example. If I know that I would be addressing a group of trainers, one of the reasons behind my asking questions could be the need of data to confirm or negate the hypotheses that I made through stereotyping. One of the assumptions that I had once made about a group of senior trainer audience (education directors in the age group of 40 years to 50 years) was that they would be extremely serious individuals who would not be interested in dramatized role-plays. Their answers to some of my questions in the questionnaire hinted at the inaccuracy of my assumption, but I chose to ignore it. The first few hours in the training program were enough to dispel my erroneous notion – and I found myself making frantic changes to my design document! Activities that I had earlier pulled out of the program, found their way back.

Your questionnaire for the pyschographic profiling should include questions that tell you about:

• What the learner prefers to do when he or she is not at work?
• What kind of books the learner likes to read?
• What places the learner frequents?
• What is the lifestyle of the learner?

Answers to the above questions help the trainer or the instructional designer determine what kind of a person the learner is. It helps the trainer know his or her learner better. If you know what kind of movies the learner likes to watch, what kind of books the learner likes to read, what games he or she likes to play; you know whom you are talking to.

Remember that a successful training is all about keeping the learners motivated all the time. Also remember that learner motivation is a function of their unsatisfied curiosities. If you can find answers to some or all the questions above, you will be able to find what kind of curiosities your training should arouse in their minds. Of course, we shouldn’t forget the fact that if we generate a “desire to know” in the learner’s mind, we should also be able to satisfy that desire by providing the corresponding knowledge to the learner.

Well…now let us look at the second question that we should answer before we finalize our questionnaire. After we have designed all the questions, we should review each question and try to answer the question “Do I need this data?” It is important to make sure that each question should generate information that is useful. A long questionnaire is a pain to complete. I go by a simple formula – as the length of the questionnaire grows, the validity of information shrinks. When the prospective trainees look at a long questionnaire, they switch off mentally. The ticking/filling up the questionnaire becomes a mechanical process at best. At worst, the questionnaire never comes back to you.

My suggestion to is - try to make your questions easier to answer. Try to frame them in a manner that improves the visibility of the answer. For example, instead of asking them – “What kind of games do you play?” ask them “Which are your two favorite games”? Don’t expect them to do the analysis for you; you do the analysis for them. Let me extend the above example. When you ask the prospective trainee, “What kind of games you play”, their thought process begins by remembering the name of the game. “Oh! My favorite game is Monopoly.” “But then,” the trainee muses, “What kind of game that is? Is it an indoor game? Yes, it is. It is also a board game. Great! So I play indoor board games.”

Now let us analyze the answer. Our prospective trainee plays indoor board games. This means that the trainee probably doesn’t like a lot of physical activity. Then you shall analyze further and depending on what kind of board game you play, you will draw an image in your mind. Well, Snakes & Ladders, Ludo, Chess, Chinese Checkers, and Pachisi are all board games – but each is of a different kind. Had you asked your learner for facts and not interpretations, you would have had a clearer picture of what kind of games your learner likes.

The approach that I recommend for audience data gathering and interpretation is - Get the facts from your trainee, then interpret them by building clearly logical connections. I would call it the Holmes-Poirot approach. First work hard, lie prone on the muddy grounds of the prospective audience’s likes and dislikes; check out the footprints, find where the audience has been; be Sherlock Holmes. Once you’ve found everything, change into the natty Hercule Poirot and use your gray cells to deduce your audience’s profile logically.

Author: Shafali R. Anand