Knowing your audience is important!

Making a positive change is difficult to do alone. You need buy-in or engagement from the necessary groups. To achieve this, you need to get a dialogue started and spark people into action. Understanding who you want to hear your message and how to reach them is a critical piece of advocacy planning:

• Know your audience: Consider all the audiences and groups you want to engage with to make a change and list them all out. Your audience may include peers, educators, families, the school board, policymakers, etc.
• Understand what your audience does and doesn’t know: Think about who your audience is, what background information and experiences they have, and what context you may need to share with them. But be careful about making assumptions – think about what information could be important to share with a broad group. Do some research on your audience to get to know them better.
• Determine your message: Now that you’ve decided who your audiences are, what’s your message for them? It should be something that sparks them into action. First brainstorm some ideas and then run them by others to see what their thoughts are.
• Methods of engagement: Decide on how you’re going to get your message out there, e.g. on social media, in a letter, by petition, etc. You may want to use multiple ways to raise even more awareness.
• Communication plan: Once you’ve settled on your messages and methods of engagement, plan out how you will act on these methods and when. Draft a communication plan by detailing a timeline for communication and all the steps you’ll need to take.