In my last blog, I explained several factors that get in the way of your audience receiving the message you send. Not all is lost! You control the message. You can learn how hurtful jargon is to your message. And then by and working to create relatable talks, blogs and social media posts, you will gain more traction in your goal to have the public understand the importance of you work.
Learning a few more characteristics about your audience will help you tailor your message. You don’t want to have to create a new PowerPoint deck every time you give a talk – so changing up analogies or examples can help you reduce the amount of work you do in your outreach. Let’s look at a few more audience characteristics.
Demographics and Psychographics
Disciplines outside the “hard” sciences also use identifiers and markers to describe their audiences. They help predict how an audience will react to various messages.
Demographics refers to concrete attributes regarding a person, like their age, gender, education level, income level, etc. Psychographics refers to their lifestyle choices or hobbies. Do they garden? Contribute to environmental causes? Are they new parents? Marketing professionals determined that this second identifier was just as valid – or even better – predictor of behavior as demographics.
When I worked at a hospital as marketing director in the 1990s, we were doing direct mail communications campaigns (yep, I’m old, I know, but I’m always learning!) I’d buy mailing lists and was frustrated that one could only buy lists based on demographics. On average (even in the 90s), a new parent can range from late teens to forties. Besides being a new parent, a group with this wide an age range most likely doesn’t have a lot of other hobbies in common. (Wait, do new parents have hobbies?)
Of course, with the advent of Facebook and online data mining, advertising is a very different thing these days. That’s why marketers like online tools – to help predict what will interest you.
Hopefully, you see that looking at your audience’s hobbies and interests is very important. It helps you find a common ground with them – common values. The more you have in common, the easier it is to communicate.
Examples: Parenting. Not parenting. Hiking. Cooking. Photography. Gardening. Contributing to environmental causes. Sewing. Knitting. Games. Running and fitness…Do a quick survey of your audience before you start a presentation so you can tailor your talk to different lifestyles.
The importance of learning styles
Most of this blog focuses on two types of content – written/verbal and visual (photo and video). Since this blog is for scientists, the reader is familiar with learning scientific topics. You most likely had textbook, lecture, and lab experiences while learning.
Together, the written or spoken word and demonstrations can reach all types of learners:
• Primarily auditory learners
• Primarily visual learners
• Primarily experiential learners
• Any combination of the above
The more types of materials we can give to our public audience, the more they will be able to learn about our important sciences. You’ll see an emphasis on not only writing blogs or social media posts, but of creating photos that help explain your topic.
Example: I’m a mix of visual and experiential learner. My physical therapist not only tells me to rotate to the right, but she also moves her hands to the right! When I pointed this out to her, she realized it was unconscious – but what a great idea! She also explained my injury (Achilles) by drawing tendon fibers to illustrate my injury and the intent of each method she was going to use. She met me at every learning level to help me recover. Can you do the same to explain your scientific topics? I bet you can!
What you control
Communications as a major is a four-year degree at most institutions, so you can’t expect to learn every tool out there to improve communications in one book. Good communications skills also take time to practice.
Hopefully, this quick review reminds you that just because you think you send a good message, that doesn’t mean your receiver “got the message” as intended. As this study cited shows, scientific journals have become more jargon-laden over the centuries. I suspect much of that is in the last few decades. Take some time to think of how differently your language is when speaking to co-workers versus your friends, neighbors, and family. Hopefully, there’s quite a difference!
The good news is that you can learn ways to make communications to non-scientists (or those outside your field of study) much better. You control the message. By taking the steps in these blog posts you will make the best message possible, which is the biggest variable you control. You also control the energy with which you deliver your message, and the tactics you choose to communicate. These are all good things that we’ll explore.
Written by Susan V. Fisk, BS(Chem), M.Ed., MBA. Copyright by author. @susanvfisk (Twitter, IG) Be sure to subscribe to my blog to get the latest updates and thank you for reading!
Remember to explore the different tabs of my blog – audience, writing and visual for more communications tips!
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