Target Your Audience
The educator who claims, "I'm communicating with the general public" is probably not delivering a message to anyone.
Today there is no "general public"—no one single audience. Instead, there are numerous smaller, specific publics, each of which has different information needs, relies upon different communication vehicles, and attaches different degrees of credibility to each source. To be effective, we must target our messages to those specific publics.
Identifying a middle level school's important publics can be an intimidating task since there are so many of them. However, there is an approach that makes the job manageable. Consider these four steps:
- Bring together a group of trusted colleagues and brainstorm with them the key publics that impact your school and students. Brainstorm in two categories—internal and external—first one then the other. Internal audiences are those closest to the school, such as students and staff. External audiences are groups such as state legislators and realtors.
One hint: it is important to focus on the internal audiences. They have great credibility when speaking to the community because they are in the school and have seen for themselves. Start with the most important internal audiences when developing new communication programs. If they don't understand and support the activity, they are likely to communicate negative messages to your external audiences and destroy your good work. (see "What’s Right with Your School.") - After developing a long list of internal and external audiences, prioritize them. Since time and resources are limited, don't set yourself up for failure by trying to do too much. Determine the three or four most important internal and external audiences.
- Review the communication program you already have in place for those six to eight audiences. Most importantly, ask representatives of those groups how the school is doing in meeting their communication needs. This effort will help develop credibility with those groups. Then look at your list and determine which audience is the most important for your new communication activities.
- Select one audience and focus on that group this year. Build communication activities with that group in year one; then focus on a different key audience in the second year. Continue that approach. Within six to eight years, you will be communicating effectively with your most important audiences. As you become more adept, you may be able to improve communication with more than one audience each year. Obviously, the more audiences you can reach within a year, the faster you can establish quality communication. However, remember not to attempt to do so much that you will fail.
There are a number of important concerns to make this process work:
- Don't forget about the priority audience for year one and year two. This approach allows you one year to implement a communication program for a specific group, but after that year, you must continue with your communication efforts.
- When starting a program, ask representatives of each audience key questions which will allow you to communicate effectively. This can be done in a focus group, through informal conversations or with a short survey. Questions to ask include: How do you receive information about this school? Do you believe each of those information sources? What are the areas where you need more information? How would you like to get information? Once the development year is completed, survey members of the group again to see how you did. Remember that evaluation is not to determine whether you did a good or bad job; it is to ensure that you don't potentially repeat the same mistakes in year two.
- Use the idea of super-targeting—communicating with an influential sub-group of an audience. If you don't have the resources to deal with an entire group, you can super-target. For example, you may not be able to have personal conversations with every member of your state legislature, but you may be able to schedule such conversations with education committee members.
- Keep in mind the importance of interpersonal communication. Educators tend to be very effective at mass communication—newsletters, annual reports, calendars, letters, and handbooks. Such communications are effective in creating awareness, but useless in actually shaping attitudes. We should continue mass communication because awareness is the first step in forming attitudes. Then, we must build in interpersonal communication activities with each audience whose attitudes we want to impact.
Targeting the school's most important audiences will help educators shape attitudes which will improve learning opportunities for young adolescents. As Ken Weir says, "An invitation to everyone is an invitation to no one" (from the National School Public Relations Association's The Wit and Wisdom of PR Success).
Provided by National Middle School Association's Public Relations Network