Technique 1.102 Target Assessment

Introduction

This is considering your audience's motivation and shifting your thinking away from yourself and your message, to give greater consideration to your audience so that your presentation will be more targeted and effective

Questions

1. Who will be in the audience?

2. What are their roles?

3. What are their style preferences for interacting?

4. What is their experience in this field?

5. What level of knowledge do they have about the topic?

6. Why are these people in the audience and having this encounter with you?

7. Who is/are the most influential person/people in the room?

8. What do you want to achieve from this encounter?

9. What do the audience most value in this topic?

10. What are the greatest challenges facing them now?

11. What resources do they have available to them?

12. Who has successfully influenced them in the past, and why?

13. What have they resisted in the past, and why?

These questions are aimed at initiating discussions so that you can get a better insight into your audience, ie their values and what motivates them. It is a mistake to think that you can understand somebody else's values and motivations by what they say and do. Sometimes external forces are more powerful. For example, some people who hold environmental protection highly, may still drive their car to work as there is no local public transport.

It can be argued that the link between core values and behaviour is sometimes relatively weak. But behaviours can be an indication of people's values. Generally, values to guide people's decision-making.