The journey of an audience: #CRinFlorida Day 2 Reflection

These next few days I’ll be sharing my personal reflection on a climate leadership conference I’m part of; this is the second installment. I do this to capture the raw emotion in my daily reflection in order to help me with my later writing. If these posts benefit you, too, in any small way, please let me know via a comment. Thank you.

A scenic route is the journey of an audience–this was the biggest take away for me from the gathering today. The audience can be made to feel happy, disgusted, empathetic, and emboldened–all these in order to get them to say “Yes” and/or “I will join you.”

There is a way to engineer a presentation so that the audience goes through a variety of emotions that prime it for empowerment, and then mobilization. We can use emotion to leverage the audience’s attention in systematically walking the audience toward action.

There is no rigid or standard formula in building this emotional and cognitive journey by the audience. There is only the practical insight that being an ‘audience expert’ is as important as being a ‘subject matter expert’ in moving an audience toward action. The method is neither exact, nor clearly defined so it is challenging to describe the steps via a blog post. There is a hierarchy of priorities when communicating: the key point, the evidence for the key point (3 take-aways, max), and additional but optional detail that helps drive the message home.

I also share an image I found online to show how an audience journey could be deliberately engineered; see below.

For additional resources, google Anthony Wilson from Executive Influence Pty Ltd; he gave the workshop on communication strategies.

That giving a presentation is both an affective and cognitive experience was/is not a new idea but the engineering of it as a deliberate journey is an interesting idea worth practicing.

Sorry class, you will be my guinea-pigs. It’s for science! And sustainable development! And hopefully also for your empowerment.