Assessing your audience's awareness

Communication has never been a strong point of many IT personnel. However, the easiest way to determine the awareness of any topic is to simply ask audiences what they know, or how well they know it. Here are several bullet-points about how to gather information (and then to formalize the reporting of it so that you can present your awareness findings). They are broken out by the maturity level that the organization should be at before you can successfully employ them.

Method	Insight into the method	L1	L2	L3
Interviews	You'll have to write up each response into a cohesive whole.	X	X
Surveys	There are tons of survey tools available that can cross-correlate their responses.	X	X	X
Newsletters	As long as you can have a call-to-action in the newsletter that elicits a response, you can get their attention.	X	X	X
Memos	More formal than the newsletters, memos should be written to gather responses and can act as either a formal interview or survey.		X	X
Posters & screen savers	These should only be used for short messages or attention-getting devices and should direct the reader somewhere else for more information.	X	X
E-mail blasts	These are fairly useful if you can get your point across to the reader in the first few sentences. Messages with multiple "to" or "bcc" addresses get paid less attention than one-to-one messages.	X	X
Group decision making	Many organizations already have in place various group decision making processes, such as regularly sponsored roundtable meetings, regular conference calls, and internal webinars. As one of our distinguished field editors, Commander MS Raghunath (Retd), stated," These are great forums to bring up new issues such as Metrics and introduce them in a forum where people can be expected to embrace new ideas."		X	X

How you determine your communication methodology should be based upon an analysis of the type of information you need to gather and how far along in the maturity model your awareness of the topic has progressed.

The goal of assessing your target audience's level of awareness is to take them from the level of maturity they are currently at, to the desired level of maturity that is right for your organization.

Normally, the level of maturity you really want to achieve is the third level where not only does the target audience recognize the need for the topic at hand, but the organization has also formalized its view on the topic at hand. With that said, introducing a topic like "which metrics should we use?" doesn't have to reach that third level of maturity - yet. Your real goal here is to ensure that your target audiences are firmly aware of their need to act, their need to determine which of the metrics they are going to put into place, and why. Once that has been achieved, only then will your organization be ready to formalize its communications about the metrics that you are going to be implementing and reporting.

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