How to prioritise your audience when communicating data

When do you consider the audience for your data? If you're like many data peeps, it's after the heavy lifting. The report is finished, the dashboard is live, the presentation is ready. Only then do you think about who will see it.

This is the wrong order. These decisions made too late produce data products designed for the wrong people or pitched at the wrong level.

Understanding your audience starts with a simple question: who has the power to act on what I'm communicating, and how much do they care?

Why prioritisation matters

When you communicate data, you'll have more than one potential audience. You might have found something that would be relevant to a team manager, a senior leader, a project sponsor, and an external stakeholder—each depending on how it's packaged.

Prioritising your audience means being deliberate about who gets what kind of communication, how often, and at what level of detail.

The Stakeholder Matrix

The Stakeholder Matrix is a tool from The Data Storyteller's Handbook that helps you prioritise your audience groups before building any communications.

It maps audience groups across two dimensions: influence and interest. Influence refers to how much power an audience group has over the work (whether they can start it, stop it, fund it, or act on it). Interest refers to how much they care about the topic or the findings.

The four quadrants produce four different communication strategies:

High influence, high interest: Engage. These are your most important audiences. They have the power to act and the motivation to do so. Communicate with them regularly, involve them in decisions where possible, and make sure any data story you share with them is tailored to what they care about.

High influence, low interest: Satisfy. These audiences can significantly affect your work but aren't deeply invested in the detail. Anticipate their needs, keep them informed, but don't overload them. A concise, well-framed summary will serve them better than a detailed report.

Low influence, high interest: Inform. These groups may not be able to act directly, but they're engaged and they talk. A highly interested audience can become a strong ally. They can help share your work, build enthusiasm, and reach people with more influence. Keep them informed and consider involving them as consultants.

Low influence, low interest: Update. These audiences need minimal communication. Provide essential information only, and don't spend significant time or resource trying to engage them beyond that.

The Stakeholder Matrix in practice

Let's look at an example. Pretend you're a data analyst presenting findings on employee wellbeing to a large organisation. Your potential audiences include a chief executive, HR leaders, a staff representative group, and a finance team.

The chief executive has high influence but limited time (and therefore interest), so they sit in the Satisfy quadrant. They need a concise summary tied to organisational risk, not a detailed breakdown.

HR leaders have high influence and high interest, so they're in the Engage quadrant. They have both the power and motivation to act. Give them regular, tailored communication.

The staff representative group has low influence but high interest, so they're in the Inform quadrant. They care deeply about the findings and will talk about them. In keeping them informed you build allies.

The finance team has low influence and low interest in this particular topic, so they sit in the Update quadrant. They need essential information only, and no significant effort beyond that.

The Stakeholder Matrix helps you decide who gets what, rather than sending the same report to everyone and hoping it resonates.

Starting before you build

The value of the Stakeholder Matrix is that it forces you to think about your audiences early—even before the data is analysed. Different audience groups have different levels of familiarity with the data and different communication preferences. Recognising this upfront will help you with downstream analytics and communication decisions.

When you've identified and prioritised your audience groups, the next step is to understand what motivates them. See How to understand what motivates your audience

The Data Storyteller's Handbook covers the Stakeholder Matrix in full, including templates to help you apply it to your own work. The online course develop the skill of using it in practice.

Kat Greenbrook is a data storytelling consultant, author, and workshop facilitator based in Wellington, New Zealand. She is the founder of Rogue Penguin and the author of The Data Storyteller's Handbook.