The Importance of Our Audience
Audiences, these nebulous people who we are trying to reach, can be difficult to imagine at times, and yet they are the crux of all that anyone does. Without each other there is no buying or selling, sharing or servicing, educating or learning. They are the most important part of the stuff we create. Frequently we only hear them from faceless recesses: as text on Facebook, an emoji, or from the dark of a theatre, and we forget that what we are making requires them to be on the receiving end.
Once, when I was still acting, I was bowing for the curtain call with sweat rippling down me. The play I was in required that I be proficient in basketball and had to dribble and sprint continuously over the course of 90 minutes. Exhausted, I bent forward hoping my effort had been worth it, that the audience would tell me they appreciated my work by way of applauding. Instead of clapping I heard a sob. It wasn’t uncommon for this play to elicit strong emotions. It was about a father and a daughter and the limitations of life’s choices. This sob, however, was not the kind of crying you usually heard from the audience. It was the kind of crying that usually happened on the stage, perhaps during a production of Romeo and Juliet. It was in this moment that I finally had an image of what it meant when I had told myself and others “the audience is the most important part of creation”. That these humans we were encountering were not there to just applaud (or not applaud) for us, or to read my written work and critique it, they were truly a part of the process, whether they knew it or not. Without an audience, a play isn’t really a play, and writing without anyone to read it is called keeping a journal.
As I talked to my friends at non-profits and in the corporate sector, I realized thinking about the audience was often either glossed over or placing them in the category of consumer. That just makes me think of a garbage truck chomping down on whatever is thrown its way. Our interchanges need to feel as though they are more than one-way streets: messages being sent out into the void. We can all do better in acknowledging the humanity of our audience. All it takes is a little bit of vocabulary shifting, if instead of an audience who stereotypically sits there anonymously in the dark “consuming” whatever it is they are being presented, begin to think of the people you are trying to reach as your community. The same goes for the people you encounter every day, sometimes as colleagues, but often as Sally over in that department that I never really talk to. If we think about them; where they are coming from, who they want to be, and what we can do for them, our products and our messages become dialogues and acts of invitation to continue a relationship.
The adjective creative means “relating to the imagination or original ideas” and a “change that unleashes people’s imaginative energy”. Redefining a word is a simple way to begin. Take the idea of your customers or audience out of the cloud, put faces to them and be specific about what they mean to you.
