How to prioritise your audience when communicating data

Most data professionals think about their audience after they've built something. The report is finished, the dashboard is live, the presentation is ready—and then they think about who's going to see it.

This is the wrong order. Audience decisions made too late produce communication that's designed for the wrong people, pitched at the wrong level, or sent to too many people with too little focus.

Understanding your audience starts with a more fundamental question than "who needs to see this?" It starts with: who has the power to act on what I'm communicating, and how much do they care?

Why prioritisation matters

In most data communication scenarios, there's more than one potential audience. A finding might be relevant to a team manager, a senior leader, a project sponsor, and an external stakeholder—all at once. Trying to communicate everything to everyone produces work that resonates with nobody.

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 data professionals prioritise their audience groups before building any communication.

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 your data story 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, sharing your work, building enthusiasm, and helping you 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

Consider a data analyst presenting findings on employee wellbeing to a large organisation. Their potential audiences include a chief executive, HR leaders, a finance team, and a staff representative group.

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 to act and the motivation to do so. They get 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. Keeping them informed builds 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 the analyst 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 audience thinking to happen early, before the data story is written and before any visuals are designed. Different audience groups have different levels of familiarity with the data, different motivations, and different communication preferences. Knowing who your priority audience is shapes every subsequent decision.

Once you've identified and prioritised your audience groups, the next step is to understand what motivates them, which is where User Stories come in. 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 and Rogue Penguin workshops 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.