Audience Analysis and Adaptation

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Analyzing and adapting to your audience is one of the most important guiding principle of public speaking. Remember that you're not speaking for yourself; you're speaking to inspire, inform or persuade an audience. On this page, we will offer some strategies for accomplishing your audience analysis and adaptation:

This page will cover:

Think of the audience at every stage

In a way, it doesn't make very much sense to have a separate page of our site to deal with audience adaptation, because gearing your speech to your specific audience happens at every stage of speech preparation. For example:

When researching your speech, one of the things you must think about is, "Which sources will my audience find most credible?" When you are trying to find examples to support your points, you must think, "What will my audience be able to relate to?" When you are trying to find a way to open your speech, you must wonder, "What will get this particular audience's attention?" When you are choosing the language you will use in the speech, you must consider, "What language would be appropriate for this audience?"

Understand your audience

Most of the time, beginning public speakers know something about the group they are addressing. If you don't know very much about your audience, find out from whoever organized the speaking engagement. The more you know about the audience's needs, beliefs and values, the more effectively you'll be able to adapt your speech to them. Find out who the people are who will come to hear you, and why they are there in the first place. Ask these questions:

Use demographic information

Rarely is an audience homogeneous, but rarely is it completely heterogeneous. Often you can use basic demographic information, such as the general age group you are addressing, to help you gear your speech to the audience. For example, if you are giving a speech for a group of people who are between 30 and 60, they are going to have different needs and concerns than a group that is retirement age, college age, or teenagers. They are more likely to be concerned with issues that involve childraising, the future of education, and planning for retirement than people in the other groups. They may also be caring for aging parents. All of this is going to affect which speech topics, examples, arguments and evidence they find compelling.

Other demographic information can illuminate the needs, concerns and values of an audience is the general socioeconomic bracket of its members. For example, if you are giving a speech to upper income individuals, and you hope to convince them to support social programs to help working class Americans, you are going to have to work to get them to identify with the concerns of that group. You are going to have to use supporting materials that illustrate, for example, what it is like to raise children on a minimum wage. This would not be as necessary if you were speaking to, say, members of most labor unions.

Don't make assumptions based on demographics

Do not let the use of demographic information cause you to base your audience adaptation on sexist stereotypes. For example, do not assume that an audience composed largely of women is not interested in, or knowledgeable about, car repair. Do not assume they are nurses instead of doctors. Do not assume they are secretaries instead of executives. Similarly, do not assume men are not interested in, or knowledgeable about, childcare. Do not assume they are not interested in issues of sexual equality. Do not assume they are doctors instead of nurses.

In a similar way, do not make assumptions based on race or ethnicity, and do not assume everyone shares the same cultural history as you do. For example, do not assume that because your audience is predominately white, you can say, "Our ancestors came to this country dreaming of freedom and equality." Regardless of any assumptions you may hold from the demographics of your audience members, you never know if some had ancestors who came here in chains, or if some had ancestors who were here for centuries before Europeans came looking for freedom. In addition, you may offend those members of your audience who did have freedom-seeking ancestors, yet who know this is not the reality of all Americans. You may need to educate yourself to eliminate any sexist or ethnocentric biases you might have, in order to refrain from offending your audience.

Use group affiliations

You are likely to find good information about the beliefs, attitudes and values of your audience members by looking closely at the groups they are affiliated with. For example, members of a church congregation are likely to share common attitudes toward certain topics. (However, it is important to differentiate the attitudes of the laity from those of the church leaders). Also, members of a political and activist group share similar concerns and values. Groups such as this will have literature stating their goals, philosophies and beliefs. You must ask for it and read it.

Address specific concerns

People are primarily egocentric. Their primary motivation for listening to you speak is to find out what they can gain personally by listening to you. They wonder, "How does this effect me and those who are close to me?" Use the demographic and group-affiliation information you've gathered to answer this question. If you are speaking to a group of business leaders about educational reform, you need to mention the ways in which American workers are ill-educated to suit the needs of business. If you are giving this same speech to a group of parents of young children, you may point to the ways in which the school system is not providing for the individualized needs of students.

Find common ground

A key part of adapting to an audience is creating identification between you and your audience. Adapting a speech to the presumed values of your audience does not mean you are leaving your own values behind. There would be no point in your giving a speech that reflected someone else's values, beliefs and concerns. At the same time, if your audience gets the feeling that there are no similarities between their concerns and your own, they will not be receptive to your message.

You need to find the intersection between your values and those of your audience. For example, if you are delivering a speech about Kwanzaa to a multiethnic audience, you can emphasize the ways in which the values the holiday is based upon -- such as unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, and creativity -- make the holiday relevant to many people, not just African Americans, even though that group makes up the primary celebrators of Kwanzaa.

Barbara Bush's challenge

A real-life example of a speaker finding common ground with her audience occurred when Barbara Bush spoke at Wellesley College's 1990 commencement. The choice of Bush to speak, after Alice Walker turned down the invitation, was opposed by many of the graduating seniors. One-quarter signed a petition objecting to her as commencement speaker because, they said, she only became a public figure due to her husband's position rather than her own merit. The controversy got a great deal of national media attention, and by the time Bush got to the podium at commencement, she had quite a challenge ahead of her.

Bush handled the situation with good humor and self-deprecating jokes that acknowledged the controversy but showed no resentment: "Now, I know your first choice today was Alice Walker . . . known for The Color Purple. Instead, you got me, known for the color of my hair!"

But most importantly, Bush found common ground between the values she is known for -- her relationship with her husband and her work in literacy -- and the values she presumed her audience of elite-college graduates held -- succeeding in a career. Her theme was that a graduate of Wellesley should set her own goals rather than bowing to someone else's agenda:

Bush's speech went over well, ending with a surge of applause.

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