How to understand what motivates your audience

Understanding what motivates your audience will help make your data communication great.

It's easy to default to demographics when thinking about them. What is their job title? How senior are they? What department do they work in? While these are all useful starting points, they won't tell you why someone would bother to engage with your insights, or why they would care enough to act. Two people with the same job title might have completely different motivations to act on the same data.

To be a great data communicator, you need to have an understanding of psychographics: the interests, attitudes, values, and concerns that shape how someone responds to information. The most practical way to develop that understanding is through User Stories.

What User Stories are

User Stories are a tool that has been borrowed from agile software development. There, they're used to capture what an end user needs from a product. In data storytelling, they serve a different but related purpose; they help you understand what motivates a specific audience group to act.

A User Story for a data story audience follows a simple template:

As an [audience group], I want [insert what YOU want them to want], so that [insert what motivates THEM to want it].

The structure might look like it's about the audience, but it's equally about you. You're working out how to connect what you need from them with what they care about.

Why motivation matters more than message

A common mistake in data communication is framing findings around your own motivation rather than your audience's.

Let's pretend you're a data analyst who has analysed the lifecycle of a recently introduced product. You've discovered the product doesn't align with your company's environmental goals. You now need different people in the organisation to understand the implications, but each of your audience groups has a different reason to care.

For a marketer, their concern is brand reputation. A User Story for this audience might read: As a marketer, I want to understand this product's lifecycle analysis, so that I can identify any reputation risk to our brand. That framing connects your finding to something the marketer is already motivated by. Your subsequent data story could then lead with brand context, rather than environmental data.

For a product manager, their concern might be compliance or supplier relationships. Your User Story for them might read: As a product manager, I want to understand this product's lifecycle analysis, so that I can identify which supplier relationships need to be reviewed before this becomes a compliance issue. You could then frame the same finding differently to a marketing audience because it speaks to a different set of priorities.

A note of caution: framing your data story around what motivates an audience works well when their motivation aligns with the outcome you're trying to achieve. Sometimes, there's no motivation you can tap into to get an audience to act in a certain way.

What User Stories aren't

User Stories are not a guarantee. Writing a User Story for an audience you don't know well requires making assumptions about their goals and what they value. And those assumptions might be wrong.

That's fine. Just writing a User Story (actively considering someone else) is itself valuable. It makes you think about why this person may care about what you want to share. Even an imperfect User Story can produce a more audience-aware communication than no User Story at all.

Treat your first communication as a learning opportunity, and take note of how your audience responds. What do they question? What do they ignore? What do they ask for more of? The answers to these questions will tell you more about them. Then, adjust from there.

Start with empathy

User Stories are an act of active empathy. They ask you to set aside your own perspective and consider your audience's instead. You move from communicating what you found (and what you found interesting) to communicating what your audience needs to understand.

The Data Storyteller's Handbook covers User Stories in full, including worked examples and templates. The online course and Rogue Penguin workshops develop the skill of writing them for real audiences.

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.