I Spoke With a Rwandan, I learnt a Few Things.
A few days ago, I got on a random email from someone who wanted to have a conversation with me. I have never met this person before, neither physically nor online, this would be our first conversation.
She had come in contact with one of my emails and sent me an email to schedule a conversation. She was Rwandan and spoke Kinyarwanda fluently and a bit of conversational English, this I only came to find out later on.
I had anticipated a sort of language barrier when she asked if I was Kenyan, and I had mentioned I was a Nigerian, what I had in mind was a something related to maybe difficulty in hearing due to accent or something else.
We broke into our conversation after an official introduction and that’s where the pieces began falling into place. She began with some generalized questions then through the course of the conversation, narrowed her scope to more personalized questions, here I needed to provide examples and illustrations because I am an expressive type.
In communication, knowledge of your audience is pivotal to whatever message you intend to pass across and it determines the context in which your message would be communicated. Basically, if I know you’re not Nigerian, that’s information enough to let me know Nigerian based jokes or illustrations might not fit in well in our conversation.
Understanding your audience helps you determine what to say and how to say it.
Two factors influenced my choice of words and the illustrations and examples I used during our conversation. These factors were the apparent language barrier and the difference in geographical location. This meant that:
- I couldn’t be fully expressive in the English language so as not to throw her off and look like I babble a lot; I would be doing a lot of talking, trying to explain and describe scenarios using the English language but she would not be able to fully grasp what I mean which defeats the whole purpose of the conversation.
In dealing with your audience as an individual or an organization, it is not really about the show of knowledge. Are you able to connect with them? Do they understand your message in the manner you have chosen to communicate it?
2. I couldn’t use illustrations and examples relevant in my own geographical location. I had to use generalized examples at the start which posed a problem, so I switched to using more direct examples by asking her “so what do you like? What gadgets are you using for this call?” And her response determined the examples and scenarios I created.
Feedback are a very essential part of the communication process. Even no feedback is feedback.
It might mean your audience does not resonate with the message you communicated. However, to not be left with many options to guess from, you could just ask.
Here’s what I did in my conversation.
I am a very fast speaker, but for this conversation, I practically picked my words. For words that were difficult to communicate via speech, I spelt it out in the chat box for her.
I made sure I was getting real-time feedback at every stage of the conversation in a bid to iterate on my process on the go.
Why is this important?
As someone who aims to communicate a message to an audience, you might have ambitious goals and amazingly curated content even before you have defined your audience, yes people do this!
However, if you are not conscious of who your audience all of your communication efforts would just be flushed down the drain, because it is out of context. Context can be cultural, psychological, emotional, geographical etc.
You see why context is king? It informs what medium your content would pass through and what form it would take. Without it, you’d be firing live rounds in the opposite direction of your target.
