Reaching Your Audience

Thought for the Fortnight

We all know that people who write or lecture – and, doubtless, engage in other activities – need to know their audience.  They need to know what that audience already knows and assumes, what people are interested in learning or engaging with and how they are likely to respond to new information. And much else besides. Those of us writing for Substack should be well aware of these issues.

Buy not everybody gets it right first time. Certainly not me.

This post is not about writing but about giving talks. I have been doing this for over fifty years. 

I have spoken to numerous professional conferences of healthcare workers on some aspect of my research likely to be of interest to them. I have spoken to small groups of women about being a grandmother (I wrote a book on the subject), ranging from community groups in poor areas to the London Ladies Club, which is as elegant as it sounds. I even spoke to a crowd of several thousand people in the Covent Garden area on World AIDS Day about living with AIDS (I wrote a book on the subject), where I was the only non-celebrity on the podium.

But two talks stick in my mind – one where I didn’t make the correct call and one that was a surprise success.

The first was to a group of tenants on a council estate in the early 1970s. As part of my PhD research, I had undertaken a survey about the practices of different local authorities on involving council house (the American word is ‘projects’) tenants in management decisions. This was a new idea and I wrote a paper on the subject and found myself in the vanguard of information. Because I had a long-standing interest in political theory, I had added some ideas about the nature of consumer participation to the resulting paper. Not a problem for the academic audience for whom it was primarily intended.

But one of the porters at my university somehow heard about my research and suggested I should give a talk to his local tenant association about it. Like all speakers at the outset of their career, I carefully wrote out a talk of the required length about the policy and practice of tenant participation. It was not full of academic jargon – that has never been my style – but it did have some analysis and, worse, theories. I did think about the nature of the audience, but decided I didn’t want to ‘talk down’ to them. I hate condescension in any form.

And I got it very wrong.

As soon as I got there, I was mildly aware that it was not the right talk for the occasion, but had no ability to change tack at that point. So I did my stuff. At the end, some people asked questions, which I answered and it all ended quite amicably. Much to my surprise, a large bouquet of flowers emerged from nowhere and was handed to me. Off I went into the night with my flowers, vaguely aware that this had not been a shining success.

Two or three weeks later, the porter who had asked me to give the talk gave me a clipping from his local newspaper about the occasion. In retrospect, I am surprised he didn’t simply keep quiet about it. It was a very short piece, mainly comprising a picture of the place where the meeting was held, with the strap line: “The questions were more interesting than the talk”. 

Not my finest hour.

Skip to two decades later, when my parents were living in a rather intellectual retirement community. The residents loved having talks from assorted people, including their own grown-up children, many of whom had some particular expertise. I had just written my book about people living with AIDS (and this was the early 1990s, when almost everyone was dying from it) – and my father was eager to see me on the platform talking about it.

I was sure that this community of very affluent and rather proper residents would not be interested in hearing about AIDS, considered a slightly sordid topic because of its association with gay sex and drug-taking – and said so. But he would not be budged. And knowing that the material was very human and and also very moving, I agreed to do it. I was fairly certain that most residents would not want to attend, but I also thought the topics covered would resonate with them. They too, after all, were facing a fairly imminent death. It would not be difficult to engage this audience in the issues.

It so happened that my father was very popular in this community, helped in part by his very clever dog who everyone knew. I arrived for the occasion to discover that the auditorium was, to my surprise, full to the brim. Indeed, in my introduction I said something to the effect that they had probably been commandeered to the talk by my persuasive father – and there was a slightly embarrassed tittering in the audience.

My book, published in 1992, consists of passages from interviews with mostly young people living with AIDS or HIV from all over the world. It is easy to give talks from the book, as I simply read out some carefully chosen passages about the difficulties experienced. They talk about the lack of understanding among doctors and others about the disease. They talk about the stigma attached to the condition, affecting their relations not only with outsiders but also with friends and relatives. And they talk about the fact that they knew they didn’t have long to live and how this affected their lives. A lot there to take in, but also to capture an audience.

It is the only time in my life when the end of one of my talks was met with a stunned silence. (I had only recently seen Derek Jacobi in Cyrano on the London stage and there was very much the same effect on that occasion.) One of my parents’ friends said that where she was sitting, everyone was so fully engrossed that they ‘just couldn’t applaud’. Eventually, of course, there was applause, questions and the odd admission that it hadn’t really been what they wanted to do that evening, but they were very glad they came.

And afterwards, I was surrounded by people who wanted to talk to me. One woman said that her son had died from AIDS and she had never told anyone. (It is hard to remember in these enlightened days quite how incredibly strong the stigma associated with AIDS, not to mention gay men, was at that time.) Another asked me to visit her so she could talk about the issue as she had a relative who might have it. And the following day some cash had been left in my parents postbox, asking me to donate it to an AIDS charity.

I think I could safely say that I had reached the audience.

One learns over time.

Over to you: Do you have examples of how you reached – or didn’t reach – a particular audience?