A Change of Audience

Organisations often produce information for one purpose and then discover that somebody else needs to read it. A report written for a board may later be sent to members. Research prepared for specialists may need to appear on a website. An internal description of a project may become part of a funding application, public consultation or information pack.

The information may still be correct, but that does not mean the document still works. An editor looking at material for a new audience has to consider what the original reader was expected to know and whether the new one knows it too.

Who Was It Written For?

Internal documents accumulate shortcuts. Project names need no explanation, departments become initials and references to the programme, the committee or Phase Two make perfect sense because everyone involved knows what they mean.

Move the same material outside the organisation and those assumptions become visible. An editor coming to the document without that background is in a useful position. If they cannot identify which programme is being discussed or why Phase Two matters, there is a reasonable chance that the new reader cannot either.

That does not mean everything needs an explanation. It means deciding what this particular audience needs in order to understand the information.

The Useful Information May Change

Different audiences can need different things from the same subject. Trustees may want to know whether a project met its objectives and stayed within budget. People using the service may be considerably more interested in what the project provides, whether they are eligible and how they can access it.

Simply shortening the trustees' report will not necessarily produce useful public information. The problem is not its length; it was written to answer different questions.

An editor can identify information that has been given too much prominence for the new reader, information that needs explaining and places where the document assumes knowledge the audience is unlikely to have.

Internal Language Travels Badly

Organisations develop their own vocabulary remarkably quickly. Programme names, abbreviations, job titles, funding terminology and phrases borrowed from policy documents become ordinary language inside the organisation.

Outside it, they may mean very little.

Some of that terminology may have to remain because it has a precise or official meaning. Some can be explained when it first appears, and some may be unnecessary outside the organisation altogether. An editor should be able to tell the difference rather than simply replacing every unfamiliar term with something simpler.

Changing the Audience Can Change the Tone

A document written for a regulator will not necessarily sound right when it is given to volunteers. Information prepared for professionals may feel unnecessarily distant when addressed to members of a community group. Material written for supporters may be completely inappropriate in a formal report.

Changing the tone does not mean making every public document cheerful and informal. A bereavement charity, government body, sports association and arts organisation are speaking to very different people in very different circumstances.

The editor needs to look at the relationship between the organisation and the people reading the document, not apply a standard idea of what an organisation ought to sound like.

Start Again When You Need To

Sometimes adapting an existing document saves a great deal of work. Sometimes it creates a peculiar collection of sentences that were perfectly sensible in their original home but have no business being in the new one.

An editor should be able to recognise the difference. If most of a document has to be explained, rearranged or qualified before the new audience can use it, the organisation may be better off going back to the information itself and producing a new document for the people who are actually going to read it.