Audience & Message

Defining Your Audience

The most important part of writing a report is getting your message across to your audience. The message contained in the report is what makes the report useful, interesting, and effective for the people that read it. It doesn't matter if you include all necessary information in the report. If that information isn't organized, written properly, and fails to deliver the right message to your audience, your report is useless.

Let's take, for an example, a report about why your department went over budget. You can write a report that includes all the purchases and expenses that sent your department over budget. This is the correct information, so you've included the correct information in the report. If you were writing the report for your boss, who is also in your department, this may suffice, because the message you want to give him is what caused you to go over budget. However, if this is going to another department, such as Accounts Payable, that information alone will not deliver the proper message. Perhaps the message Accounts Payable needs to receive in the report is why you went over budget on purchases or expenses.

That said, to deliver the right message, you must first define your audience.

Once you've gathered the information that will make up the basis for the report, ask yourself the following questions:

Will your audience want a detailed explanation or brief facts? Using our example, will your audience need to know the purchases or expenses in detail – or the facts about why you needed to go over budget?

Will your audience need to know how you arrived at the facts?

What does your audience already know?

What's the purpose of your report? Does it need to educate your audience? Does it need to persuade your audience? If you're explaining why you went over budget, you may want to educate your audience as to why. On the other hand, if you are requesting permission to go over budget (before you do), you may need to persuade your audience that going over budget is necessary, or in the company's best interest.

If additional people may read the report (if you'll send copies or the report will be shared) is there any other information you need to add? You'll still want to focus on your main audience, but you might want to add extra information for them. Just don't get sidetracked from addressing your message to your main audience.

Identifying the Message

Next, once you've defined your audience, you need to decide exactly what it is that you want to tell your audience – or the message you need to deliver. The best way to figure out the message you need to deliver is to decide what information will be most important to your audience. It's quite possible that you will have a lot of information you could share with them in your report, but what you need to figure out is what information your audience needs to have.

What information do you have that directly relates to your audience?

If you're having a hard time figuring that out, you can take a step back and ask yourself what the audience will do with the information in the report – or even why they need the report. To do that, complete the sentences below:

"My audience needs the information in my report to ________."

Or…

"My audience needs the information in the report because ___________."

Using the example given in this lesson, you may complete the sentence like this:

"My audience needs the information in the report because they need to understand why my department went over budget, and why going over budget was necessary."

You also need to keep in mind what your audience will do with the information that you provide in the report. This will also help you decide what information you need to include.

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