Who is your audience?

When preparing for a public speech, one of the most important challenges is to know who will be listening to you. What is their background? What are their interests? Why are they there? And, what do they know about your topic? One of the biggest mistakes is that we presume our audience think like us and have the same experience and information that we have, so we can easily lose them. We witness this situation very often when, for example, NGOs and the profit-oriented industry try to communicate with each other or when scientists try to reach out to the public.

So, it's worth it to pretend to be a CIA agent and research your audience or simply contact a representative of them and have a chat about their interests, challenges and needs. We can save a lot of time and target our presentation much better.