Suppose you are giving a presentation and want feedback on your work. But afterwards, your audience only asks you irrelevant questions. Or you try to get a grant, but your audience doesn’t award you the money. Maybe you are looking for collaborations with other parties, but no one is interested.
No matter how clear your goal is, your audience doesn’t always respond the way you wish. What exactly is the problem?
We don’t involve our audience enough in our professional communication
Our presentations and texts are often about the work we have done, the results we have found, and our own role in it.
But why all that information is useful for the audience, they have to figure out for themselves. And that is difficult.
Let’s look at an example.
Jennifer is a biomedical researcher. She studies genetic resistance of humans to malaria. She wants to get funding and submits a research proposal.
The mission of the call where she submits her proposal, is to reduce child mortality in Africa. This mortality is largely caused by malaria. With her research into malaria resistance, Jennifer thinks she has a good chance of winning the grant.
She makes it through the first round and is invited to present her proposal.
Coincidentally, Jennifer gave a wonderful presentation to her research group last week. Everyone was on the edge of their seats. And afterwards, Jennifer received countless interesting questions and suggestions. She can perfectly use that presentation for the proposal committee as well.
Jennifer starts her story with a description of the genetic variants that play a role in malaria resistance in humans. She talks about the ‘genome-wide association studies’ that discovered many of these variants. And she describes the polymorphisms that cause adaptations in the membranes of erythrocytes and the immune system.
She goes on to say that no functional validation has yet been done for the genes that cause malaria resistance. She wants to carry out such a validation. She explains which innovative methods she wants to use and what results she expects. She briefly mentions that the validation can help vaccine development.
At the end, she says that she hopes that the committee will grant her the funding. But she has a bad feeling about it. The committee looked distracted and there were no questions afterwards.
A few weeks later she receives a message: she will not receive the funding.
Involve your audience in your story
Jennifer doesn’t understand what went wrong in her presentation. After all, the same presentation did lead to success in her research group.
The problem is that Jennifer has not given enough thought to what the assessment committee considers important in a research study.
She has told the committee all about her research and her role in it. But they had to figure out for themselves how Jennifer’s research would help them achieve their goal – less child mortality in Africa. That clearly did not work.
How could Jennifer have ensured that her story did meet the needs of the assessment committee?
In other words, how do you involve your audience in your story?
With the IKEA method! IKEA is not just a retail chain that sells affordable furniture, but also an acronym for ‘Interests’, ‘Knowledge level’, ‘Experiences’ and ‘Ambitions’. By adapting to these four characteristics of your audience, you ensure that your story becomes relevant to them. You can read how to do that by clicking on each of the IKEA elements below.
Interests
Spark your audience’s interests. Is there something about your work that interests your audience immensely? Then give this a lot of attention in your story.You can read an example of how different interests can lead to different stories here
Jennifer’s presentation was successful when she did it for her research group. This is probably because her research group is super interested in genetics and cell biology and the methods that Jennifer wants to apply. And that is exactly what Jennifer paid a lot of attention to.
The problem is that the funding committee does not share this interest. What interests them is the eventual application of the research in practice. So that’s what Jennifer must focus on.
Knowledge level
Estimate the knowledge level of your audience and adjust your story accordingly. Avoid difficult terms or introduce them gently. You can read how you can do that in our article about the ‘stringing method’ and our article with tips for vivid and engaging stories.
Jennifer began her story with genetic terms such as ‘polymorphism’ and ‘genome-wide association studies’. But the committee members were not from the biomedical field. This made it difficult for them to follow the story from the beginning. Jennifer should have avoided these terms, or explained them first.
Don’t you know if your audience understands your story? Then find a test subject who resembles your intended audience (and who honestly says it if something is gibberish to them!). Because of the ‘curse of knowledge‘, you often overestimate the knowledge of others about your research. A test person can help you discover your blind spots.
Experiences
What experiences does your audience have with your topic? Do they recognize your subject from their daily lives? From the lives of family or friends? Do they ever come across it in the news or in movies? Or do they have to deal with it in their own work?
The committee for which Jennifer had to present, consists of scientists who work on reducing child mortality in Africa in all kinds of ways.
For example, there is someone who works on drought tolerance of food crops. And there’s a tropical doctor who is involved in improving hygiene in hospitals.
All these people have little or no experience with genetic malaria resistance and cell biology, things Jennifer focused her story on.
However, these people do have direct experience with malaria. They often go to the African countries where they do research. Or they come from there. So there is a good chance that they have seen with their own eyes what malaria can do to a child if it does not receive medication in time.
If Jennifer had related to these experiences, she probably would have grabbed the attention of her audience.
Ambitions
What are your audience’s ambitions, and how can your work help fulfill them?
Relating to your audience’s ambitions is often a good choice in a scientific setting. For example, at a scientific conference. Often you have a common goal, for example to cure a disease or to unravel how the universe works. If you point out this joint ambition, and explain how your research helps to achieve that ambition, your research will be perceived as more relevant.
The goal of the call in which Jennifer participated was to reduce child mortality in Africa. Her audience probably understood that there was a link between Jennifer’s work, malaria vaccines and child mortality.
But Jennifer could have made that link much more concrete and urgent by telling the extent to which child mortality is due to malaria. And by specifying the percentage by which child mortality could be reduced with 100% effective vaccines.
Jennifer would approach the presentation very differently now
If Jennifer could do her presentation again, it would look very different. Something like this:
She starts with a story about Joseph, a 3-year-old child from Sierra Leone who gets malaria. He lives in a remote village and his mother makes the long journey with him to the hospital for medicines. But upon arrival at the hospital, the medicines are not available and Joseph dies. Jennifer asks her audience if this story sounds familiar to them. She then links the story to the bigger picture: 20% of child deaths in Africa are due to malaria.
The deaths of children like Joseph could be prevented with vaccines. But the vaccines that are already available are not effective enough.
Jennifer explains how her research can help to find the missing pieces of the puzzle to make malaria vaccines 100% effective. And how many deaths those vaccines could prevent. She does mention genetic and biomedical terms, but she explains them clearly and does not go into too much detail.
In conclusion, Jennifer says that her research is only possible if she gets funding. She hopes that the committee will grant it to her. In doing so, they would boost vaccine development against malaria. And with that, the death of children like Joseph can be prevented in the future.
There is a good chance that the committee would now be convinced that Jennifer’s research should be funded.
Some final tips
- When creating your story, keep an (imaginary) person from your audience in mind. Maybe someone you know. That way, you automatically adjust your story more to this person. And therefore to the rest of the audience as well.
- Use ‘you-messages’: try to incorporate the word ‘you’ into your story. For example, ‘your ambition is to reduce child mortality in Africa’, or ‘you have seen children die of malaria yourself’. By using you-messages, you stimulate yourself to involve your audience in your story.
- Don’t be afraid to come across as too informal when creating an audience-oriented story. The norm in many work situations is to be very formal in your presentations and texts. But this does not mean that this is also experienced as the most pleasant. So just give it a try.Read more about breaking academic style conventions in this article. Many people will thank you for doing things differently!
Marieke is a trainer at Analytic Storytelling. She helps people to make stories with attention for their audience.