Choosing an Audience

No matter what type of content you want to add to the website, you have to decide who your intended audience is. Picking your audience is different from picking your topic. When you pick a topic you want to be as specific as possible. When you pick an audience, you want to be as general as possible. .

There are sixteen possible audiences from which to choose. You want to choose the one that describes who will be interested in your content and choose the one nearest the top that does so. When you do this you are saying that the group that I selected and all of the groups that fall below it might be interested in this item.

• General Public
  • Perspective Families
  • Lincoln Lutheran Community
    • Alumni
    • Faculty & Staff
    • Friends
    • Current Families
      • High School
        • Seniors
        • Juniors
        • Sophomores
        • Freshmen
      • Middle School
        • 6th Grade
        • 7th Grade
        • 8th Grade

While there are sixteen choices, you will usually choose one of the following three:

1. Current Families: this is our audience for all announcements. There are the kind of announcements handed out during the day and read over the intercom). These are things that are really only interesting to our parents and students. If an announcement is specific to high school or middle school or specific to a grade level then you can be even more specific with announcements. Items marked for Current Families may be restricted so that only our parents and students can view them.
2. Lincoln Lutheran Community: this is our audience for nearly all of our news items. These are things that we would put in our weekly and monthly newsletters. This is information that is of interest to anyone who already has a connection to Lincoln Lutheran. this would include our Alumni, Faculty & Staff, Members of Association Churches as well as our Current Families.
3. General Public: this is our audience for press release type matterial. These are the news articles that people who have no prior connection to Lincoln Lutheran might find interesting. You would use this audience for items that you would make interesting reading in a newspaper. naturally, this sort of item would also be of interest to our Lincoln Lutheran Community and our Current Families, so it also includes them.

There are also three other audiences, but they will be used in specialized cases:

1. Faculty & Staff: content marked with this audience in mind will be restricted so that it can only be viewed by Faculty and Staff member. You would not mark content about faculty & staff with this choice. Only consider who should be viewing the content when you choose this item.
2. Alumni: reserved for future use. For now, please consider anything of interest to our alumni as also interesting to our Lincoln Lutheran Community.
3. Friends: For now, please consider anything of interest to our friends as also interesting to our Lincoln Lutheran Community.

Multiple Audiences

It is also possible to pick multiple audiences. If, for instance, you are adding content about a middle school fun night and you wanted middle schooler who might go to the event and seniors who might work at the event to see it. You select the first item normally, then to select the second (and third...) items you hold down the ctrl key on a PC while clicking on the next audience or hold down the command/apple key on a Macintosh while clicking on the next audiance. Note that if you are selecting two audiences that are the only topics under a main topic (High School and Middle School for instance) then you should select the main topic (Current Families) instead of both subtopics.