Why audiences matter

When planning to engage the public, one of the key things to remember is "the public" does not exist. We are all members of the public, we all have our own separate interest and our own lives. If you plan to engage "everyone" it's very easy to find you've excluded vast swathes of the population because your event or activity is inaccessible to them. As a minimum, if you don't narrow down your audience then how do you know at what level to pitch your activity at? Are you speaking to people who are already interested and have some background knowledge? Or do you want to bring in people who don't already care about your topic and therefore you need an event designed to hook them in and grab their interest?

Ask yourself why you want to do this engagement activity, who you want to speak to, and what can you run that's going to interest them. Good engagement comes from planning this way round, rather than coming up with the activity you want to run and then trying to find an audience who might also be interested.

Find your audience

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