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| Civic Awareness Activities Chapter 4 - Analyzing Your Audience Thus far, you have become engaged at a deep level with your issue. If you used the focus group supplementary activity from Chapter 3, you've gotten a chance to look at a small cross-section of your audience as well. At this point, it is appropriate to look even deeper at your various audiences. First, you'll need to determine what audiences you could be delivering your message to. The most obvious, for the purpose of your public speaking class, is the class itself. However, what other audiences might you be able to influence with your message? Maybe the entire student body of your university? Perhaps members of your local city council? Or your state legislature? Or an even larger audience. Given the current state of technology and the communicative power of the internet, there is no limit to what your audience could potentially be. Therefore, it is vital you determine what audiences you would like to prepare for. In Chapter 4, we discuss several methods of audience analysis. You might use different methods for different audiences. For example, preparing a simple questionnaire to determine the knowledge, interest or attitude of your public speaking class is a fairly easy task. Preparing a questionnaire for your entire student body would be quite an undertaking. Knowing the demographic makeup of your audience can be helpful as well. For this activity, determine which audiences you like to analyze. Determine how you will analyze them. Finally, prepare the analysis. Think about how your audience's previous attitude and interest and knowledge in your topic will affect your message. To get even more information about your audience and their attitudes, you can use the links below. Links: http://www.census.gov/ - Census Bureau Home Page - gives basic demographic information http://www.galluppoll.com/ - Gallup Polls - The Gallup organization does polling on many different issues |