Audience Exercise
Identify the audience(s) that will assist your market in meeting the goals of a project or of your market season. Most markets spend a great deal of their energy and time communicating with audiences that already support the market. While it is important to appreciate existing supporters, it is also essential to reach those who are ambivalent or unaware of the market in their community. A disciplined evaluation project speaks the same language to many audiences, no matter how much they already know about how markets work.
Audience Exercise
Exercise: Using individual post-it notes, have your team write down the people or groups that your market needs to communicate data to in the next few months or season. Audiences to consider include specific extension agents, new farmers, board members, anchor vendors, area funders focused on education or ecological issues, print media, statewide farmers market leaders, at-risk residents, neighboring businesses, town leaders. Have those stakeholders participating in this exercise be as specific as possible when listing possible audiences. Once they write those post-its, have them put them on the spectrum. See if most of your audiences seem to cluster in only one area. For example, if you are mostly focused on talking to “strongly supportive” stakeholders then you may want to expand to others on the spectrum. If you are only focused on “strongly skeptical” stakeholders, you might be expecting too much of your data and your team all at once!After you settle on a few important audiences, try to find metrics that they all (or some) have in common to reduce the number of metrics you will need to collect.
