10.7 Preparing Presentations: Purposes, Audience, Situation

When preparing your presentations, keep in mind the purpose, audience and situation or context, along with available resources and knowledge about the subject. These considerations, taken together, will help inform how you can craft your presentation. Purposes center on general (What is the broad focus or intent of your speech—to persuade? To inform?) and specific (considers the topical area you’ll speak about, e.g., you will inform the audience about the evolutions of artificial intelligence or persuade the audience that EV technology should be adopted in all cars manufactured in the U.S.).

Once you know your general and specific purpose, consider your audience. You should likely have a target audience (those for whom the message is intended) and a global or universal audience (anyone who may encounter the message but to whom the message is not directly targeted). It is also important to consider demographic and psychological characteristics of your audience and the audience’s likely attitude toward your topic and toward you as a speaker. The book Stand Up Speak Out offers the following guidance to help understand audiences:

Demographic characteristics include factors such as gender, age range, marital status, geography/location, race and ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. You can often research these ahead of time if you do not know the audience personally by asking others, or by researching a group online. If you can, conduct a survey to ask the audience members specific questions, which may provide you with precise information. Learning about demographics can give you a sense of the historic and social events of which the audience may share a common understanding. Knowing about the education attained by an audience or the occupations of the audience members’ work can help you determine the level of language to use and how technical you want to be in discussing subjects.

Psychological characteristics include such values, opinions, attitudes, and beliefs. Grice and Skinner (2009) present a model in which values are the basis for beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. Values are the foundation of their pyramid model. They say, “A value expresses a judgment of what is desirable and undesirable, right, and wrong, or good and evil. Values are usually stated in the form of a word or phrase. For example, most of us probably share values of equality, freedom, honesty, fairness, justice, good health, and family. These values compose the principles or standards we use to judge and develop our beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors.”

We acknowledge that people inherit some values from their family upbringing, cultural influences, and life experiences. The extent to which someone values family loyalty and obedience to parents, thrift, humility, and work may be determined by these influences more than by individual choice. Psychographic analysis can reveal preexisting notions that limit your audience’s frame of reference. By knowing about such notions ahead of time, you can address them in your speech.

An audience’s attitude toward you and your presentation topic are also important to consider so you can adjust your message and approach to engaging the audience. Conor Neill, Senior Lecturer at the IESE Business School and President of Vistage Spain outlines the four types of audience as (Neill, 2018):

• Friendly. Your purpose: reinforcing their beliefs and sense of shared interests.
• Apathetic. Your purpose is to convince them that it matters for them.
• Uninformed. Your requirement is to educate others before you can begin to propose a course of action.
• Hostile. Your purpose is to respect them and their viewpoint. The most you may be able to gain is their respect and an openness to listen to your perspective. It is key that you can present some information that is viewed as new to the audience before asking for any change in their position. This is not only courteous, but also gives the listener’s ego room to change without feeling demeaned (“based on this new information, I ask you to change”)

You can view Neill (2018) summarizing the four types of audiences with examples in the video below.

To connect these audience types with other ideas in this book, if the results of your audience analysis suggest that the audience is favorable to you and your message, use the direct approach to structure it. If the audience is likely to be hostile or oppose you or your message, you’re encouraged to structure your message using an indirect method.

Another important consideration when preparing your message is the overall situation and context. The situation considers the occasion on which you are giving your presentation, where and when you are giving the presentation, the length of time and modality in which you are presenting. Modality includes in-person, recorded, using electronic means such as a televised presentation or via an online meeting platform. The context includes social and political issues and events, including those which are historic, which the audience will be aware of, and which could impact on how they receive and process your message. Be sure that as part of your speech preparation you are considering all these important factors to help you prepare the most appropriate presentation possible.

This section is adapted from “Three Types of Audience Analysis” in Stand up, Speak out – The Practice and Ethics of Public Speaking – Social Sci LibreTexts authored, remixed, and/or curated by Anonymous via LibreTexts Project licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 License, unless otherwise noted.