Who
is watching?
Put your audience first.
Before you begin your content creation journey, take the time to empathise with your viewers.
What is their background and prior understanding?
Why is it relevant to them?
How can you help them access and feel included in the content?
Combining relevance, accessibility and inclusion together creates the “audience-first” approach.
Relevance
For your content to feel relevant, your viewers need to easily relate the content to their own lives.
If you take their past experiences and preconceptions of your viewers, and weave them into the content, they will understand the value of what you’re teaching them and be able to apply the learning.
For example, you’re creating an online course for people retraining to become software developers.
Imagine a busy single parent, working full time and taking your course in the evenings. Seeing relatable examples of developers and hearing about the benefits of the skills they are learning will serve as inspiration to achieve their educational goals.
Accessibility
Education is meaningless if your viewers can’t access it in the first place.
Accessibility is often an afterthought. But considering it at the start of a production is essential to improving the learning experience of your viewers. Of course this means accounting for disability, but it also means making your language as accessible as possible. Consider which parts of the topic are filled with obscure jargon and acronyms and break them down.
Accessibility makes content better for everyone.
Video captions are a vital tool for the hard of hearing, but they are also helpful for a breastfeeding mother at 2am who wants to watch a video but can’t have the sound on.
Captions also help viewers with English as a second language, where seeing the words on screen makes the content easier to understand.
Inclusion
Equitable access to education goes beyond just the physical needs of your viewers. To truly engage your audience and make them feel valued as a viewer, you should endeavour to make content as welcoming and inclusive as possible.
Inclusion can be nuanced and challenge our preconceptions. It means everything from:
Subverting harmful stereotypes
Exploring culturally-relevant analogies
Acknowledging historical and current societal biases
Diverse and authentic representation on screen
It requires conscious and considerate action to address the lived experiences of as many viewers as possible, helping them to feel welcomed and see themselves in the content.
This is one of the reasons that first-hand case studies and authentic interviews are so powerful. Rather than simply imparting the information, the audience can relate to the subject and feel like a part of the story by seeing how it has impacted people who share their own experiences.
