|
Defining your audience
Editor’s note: Throughout the month of October, the Institute and Canva are offering free bite-sized trainings on tips, tools, and Canva templates designed just for journalists. Sign up now to receive the daily emails.
Understanding your audience helps you craft stories and news products that inform, inspire, and engage. Whether you’re producing an investigation, a local feature, or a TikTok explainer, knowing your audience’s motivations, interests, and barriers helps you craft stories that matter to them.
In today’s installment of Camp Canva, we’re sharing a framework for thinking about who your audience members are ... and showing them why your journalism adds value to their lives.
Who are you trying to reach?
Before you pitch, post, or publish, ask: Who is this piece for? What do they already know — and what might they not understand yet?
A user persona is a snapshot of your typical audience member — a fictional but data-informed profile that represents a segment of your readers, viewers, or listeners. It goes beyond demographics (like age and location) to include their goals, pain points, habits, and news behaviors.
🧭 Step 1: Gather your insights
You probably already have more audience data than you realize. Pull from:
-
Analytics: Who’s reading or watching your content? When and how?
-
Social media comments: What questions or emotions come up repeatedly? And from whom?
-
Community feedback: What issues spark the most conversation?
-
Surveys or newsroom listening sessions: Direct audience quotes are gold.
💡 If your newsroom has audience engagement or membership data, use that to enrich your personas — it shows not just who engages, but why.
📝 Step 2: Bring your audience to life visually
Use Canva’s persona templates to map out your typical audience members.
-
Open Canva and search for “user persona” or “audience profile” templates.
- Select a layout that fits your team’s workflow — one that includes sections for:
- Name and photo (fictional but realistic)
- Demographics (age range, location, role)
- Goals (what they want to know, learn, or do)
- Pain points (what frustrates or confuses them about the news)
- Favorite formats or platforms
- Example quote (summarizing their perspective)
Canva makes it easy to customize colors, fonts, and visuals that match your newsroom’s brand, so you can share and print these personas for team use.
🧩 Step 3: Apply your persona
Once you’ve created your personas, use them in every stage of storytelling:
- During pitch meetings: “Which segment of our audience does this story serve?”
- During editing: “Would this headline make sense to them?”
- During promotion: “Are we sharing this on the right platform for this audience?”
- While conceptualizing new products: “How does this newsletter meet their needs?”
-
Speaking of newsletters, we created a collaborative Canva Whiteboard template to help you define your audience, establish core content pillars, and clearly state your unique value proposition.
Exploring your audience’s needs and habits isn’t just a design exercise — these exercises provide a compass that can help guide your journalistic decisions, from who you include as sources to where you distribute your work. They help ensure your reporting decisions are grounded in empathy, not assumption.
| 
