How to educate a lay audience

That could mean explaining your latest data analytics findings to your boss, who doesn’t understand the first thing about data analytics. Or it could mean trying to persuade an unfamiliar audience that they should care about an important political issue.

How can you educate an unfamiliar audience without going over their head?

Understand Your Audience’s Perspective

As much as possible, try to understand your audience’s perspective. How much do they truly know about this subject? What is their education level? How do they currently see the world? You may not have the answer to all these questions, or the answers may be different for different members of your audience. 

But it's still a good idea to start with some fundamentals. What does the average person understand about this concept and what are the most important pillars you'll need to establish first when educating them?

Use the Right Supplementary Materials

No matter how good of a teacher you are, you're going to need some supplementary materials to make sure your message hits home. The better those supplementary materials are, the more effective your communication is going to be.

·   Booklets and handouts. Printing booklets or handouts before your teaching opportunity is one of the best ways to make sure that people have full access to all the information you want to convey. This way, students will be able to follow along with you as you talk about this topic, and they'll have something to take home with them so they can review the information later.

·   A slideshow. It's also helpful to put together a slideshow, though it may not be necessary in all situations. In the background, you can cover your most important points and the overarching arguments you're trying to make. In the foreground, you'll be covering all those points in much more detail.

·   Visuals. Most people are visual learners. They find it much easier to learn through photos, illustrations, and videos than through written or spoken words. Accordingly, you should include as many visuals as possible in all your educational materials and approaches.

Start With the Absolute Basics

Return to the absolute basics when you start educating a lay audience on a given topic. For example, if you were teaching a totally unfamiliar audience how basketball is played, you wouldn't start with the mechanics of dribbling or even the scoring system. 

Instead, you would need to explain that this is a physically active game played by two competing teams; depending on your audience, you may even need to define what a “game” is. Only when you establish the true fundamentals will you be able to move on.

Illustrate Concepts With Metaphors and Analogies

Metaphors and analogies make abstract concepts and challenging ideas easier for lay audiences to digest. Get creative and use these tools to distill important concepts down to a much more understandable format. For example, it might be hard to explain how spacetime “warps” in response to significant gravitational fields, but it's pretty easy for people to understand how a bowling ball can warp an otherwise taut rubber sheet.

Reword and Approach From Different Angles

If you feel your audience isn't fully understanding what you want to say, consider rewording and approaching the concept from multiple different angles. For example, let's say you're describing how to bake a cake. You could start by explaining that a cake is a dessert product with a crumbly, bready interior and sweet icing on the outside. 

If that straightforward explanation doesn't work, consider comparing it to something else or describing it differently; you can ask if your audience has familiarity with cupcakes, pies, or other desserts, then compare cake to those other desserts.

Avoid Jargon

Technical jargon has no place in educating a lay audience. If some terms are exceptionally important to understand the concept, feel free to define them – but for the most part, you should talk to your audience as if they have a middle school reading level. 

Keep your vocabulary simple and straightforward, even as you're describing complex concepts.

Allow Time for Questions and Answers

No matter how clear or articulate you are, there's a good chance at least one person of your audience will be confused by the end of your educational event. That's why it's important to always allow time for questions and answers.

Get Feedback and Improve

Finally, consider getting feedback from the people you're educating and use that feedback to improve. Are there any concepts that your audience still doesn't understand after your explanations? Are there any strategies you could have used to be more effective? Educating a lay audience isn’t always easy, but it’s much easier when you focus on consistently refining your approach. 

_----_

#FeatureByprintingcenterusa