3 Understanding your audience

When you begin preparing to communicate, you should be thinking about who your audience is. Put yourself in their shoes.

• The general public is interested in how your research affects their lives or society today, tomorrow or in ten years’ time.
• Funders are usually interested in how they may get a return on their investment.
• Your peers will want to know more about how you work, what your findings are and the possibility for future collaborations.
• Industry partners will look for technologies that can help propose products or services that will become a commercial success.

Make sure you understand what your audience is interested in, and adapt your communication accordingly.

Science communication is often based on specific research outputs – usually technical journal articles. However, the best science communicators find a way of placing technical research in a larger narrative context: they tell a story. Sometimes, the most effective way to tell a science story is to focus on the process.

The difference between a good science story and a great one often comes down to the quality of its visual assets. The best science stories are truly immersive, with rich photography, videos or illustrations, and sometimes other visual effects.

In the previous section you saw examples of AMR stakeholders at the global and regional level, and how they can be mapped at the national level. These stakeholders could be categorised by their strategic objectives, which included:

• policy
• advocacy
• innovation and research
• surveillance.

In this section we are going to consider how stakeholders involved with advocacy and innovation & research communicate with their audiences. Stakeholders involved with policy will be covered in the AMR data for policy-making module. Stakeholders involved in surveillance are covered in the Sampling (human health) and Sampling (animal health) modules.