PILLAR 3 — Messaging & Narrative Development

Audience Understanding Is Found, Not Assumed

Many communication efforts begin with a defined “target audience.” These definitions are often useful at a high level — but they can quickly become abstractions. When audience understanding is reduced to generalized categories or internal assumptions, communication begins to drift away from the people it is meant to serve.

In practice, meaningful audience understanding is not something declared at the outset. It is something discovered, tested, and refined over time.

Moving Beyond Assumption

Assumptions about audiences tend to take familiar forms:

“Prospective students want to see career outcomes”
“Patients are looking for clear, trustworthy information”
“Readers want engaging stories”

These statements are not wrong — but they are incomplete. They do not account for:

Differences in knowledge level
Emotional context
Decision urgency
Barriers to understanding or action

To move beyond assumption, the question shifts from who the audience is to how the audience behaves.

This includes:

What they are actively searching for
How they navigate information
Where confusion or hesitation occurs
What signals trust — or undermines it

Audience understanding, in this sense, is grounded in observation rather than projection.

Audience as Context, Not Category

One of the most important shifts in my approach has been recognizing that audiences are not static groups — they are situational.

The same individual can engage with content in entirely different ways depending on context:

A prospective student casually exploring programs behaves differently than one making a final enrollment decision
A patient researching a condition behaves differently than one preparing for a specific procedure
A reader encountering a cultural essay for leisure engages differently than one seeking insight or interpretation

This means communication must respond not just to who the audience is, but where they are in their interaction with the information.

In institutional work, this often translates into aligning content with stages of a decision journey. In narrative work, it shapes tone, pacing, and depth.

Application in Institutional Contexts

At Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, audience understanding was closely tied to enrollment behavior.

Prospective students and families were not simply looking for information — they were evaluating risk, opportunity, and fit. Their questions were often implicit:

Will this degree lead somewhere meaningful?
Is this institution credible and supportive?
Can I see myself here?

Understanding this required looking beyond surface-level content requests and focusing on:

What information reduced uncertainty
What narratives built confidence
What structure supported exploration without overwhelm

This informed how content was framed, sequenced, and connected across platforms.

At UC San Diego Health, audience complexity increased further. A single site needed to serve:

Medical professionals
prospective trainees
patients and families
donors

Each group brought different expectations, levels of expertise, and reasons for engagement.

Rather than attempting to create one-size-fits-all messaging, I approached this as a problem of audience pathways:

Where does each audience enter?
What do they need first?
What constitutes clarity or credibility for them?

This allowed the same body of information to be structured in ways that felt relevant to each group.

Listening in Community and Cultural Work

In community journalism, audience understanding is inseparable from listening.

Unlike institutional settings, where goals are often predefined, community-based work requires a more open-ended approach:

Allowing stories to emerge rather than imposing a narrative
Understanding how individuals see themselves and their communities
Recognizing the broader systems shaping those experiences

This is particularly important when working with:

Underrepresented voices
Local organizations with limited visibility
Complex social or cultural issues

Audience understanding here is not just about effectiveness — it is about accuracy and integrity.

In cultural and creative work, the audience becomes more interpretive. The task is to:

Anticipate where readers may need guidance
Provide enough context to support understanding
Leave space for ambiguity where it is meaningful

Signals, Not Assumptions

While audience understanding is often framed qualitatively, it is supported by observable signals.

These can include:

Patterns in how people arrive at and move through content
Points where engagement drops off
Recurring questions or gaps in understanding

Used carefully, these signals help refine communication without reducing audiences to data points. They provide a feedback loop — indicating where alignment is working and where it is not.