Why You Need To Know Your Audience

by
The most important thing in lobbying is knowing your audience.
If you don’t know your audience, you are stumped. You can’t tell them the right story.
You can go in and talk about what is important to you and ignore what’s important to your audience. It is the most common approach. It hardly ever works.
What makes lobbying challenging and interesting is that audience changes depending on where you are in the legislative journey, from technical experts and policy officials at the start to politicians, journalists and the public as the issue advances.
Just because you think something is interesting or important, don’t think your audience will. If you talk about what interests you, you risk boring, confusing or offending them.
I find it helpful to have three versions of the same story speaking to the Values of Settlers, Prospectors and Pioneers.  I’ve taken the case against fisheries subsidies to a small cadre of classical free market liberals, citing Mises, to politicians of deep faith, citing his Holiness Pope John II.
What works well with one Directorate-General may well not with another Commission department. What works with Progressive Free Traders is unlikely to land well with Nationalists.
I’ve been in too many meetings that went off the rails when lobbyists pitched their case in what amounted to:
  1. If you do this to protect the environment and improve public health, my profits this year will dip
  2. Insulting someone’s best friend or partner
  3. Being incomprehensible
  4. Using examples and language that seemed designed to anger or insult the audience
  5. Misygonist, bigotry, and anti-European (not smart when you are meeting pro-Europeans)
This list could be longer, but you get the gist.
And, your audience is not you or your client/cause. If you just want to speak to yourselves and ignore the audience making the decisions, your chances of getting what you want are near zero.
What Can You Do
Be smart and understand what drives your audience.
Here are some things you can do.
  1. Create a profile of the audience for your lobbying story
    • Basic information: Position, Role
    • Problem: What solution(s) are you bringing to the table that will help them?
    • Positive: What are their values and positions that could see your idea positively?
    • Negatives: What are their concerns that could put them off your idea?
    • What do they already know and say about your idea and you?
    • Do you or your network know what works/does not work with your audience?
    1. Can you connect with your audience by telling your story that appeals to someone like them?
    2. Who is best to tell your story? Is it you or someone your audience trusts?
    3. Can you tell someone’s else story? Can you be authentic even if you are not directly impacted? Are you being genuine?
    4. What stories (examples) can you draw on to communicate the values of your audience?
This takes time. It is time well invested. The alternative is telling your story to an audience that rejects it out of hand.