Defining the audience is an essential step in developing a communications plan.

For an electoral management body, this might seem too obvious to need doing: the audience is the electorate, of course. However, there are three reasons in particular why defining the audience is indispensable:

• In practice many EMBs do not follow the logic of tailoring their communications strategy to their audience. Instead they take the easiest opportunities to communicate their message through the media without considering whether they are really reaching the people they want to speak to.
• Equally, many EMBs tend to talk not to their primary audience but to many other audiences – political parties, the media themselves – who are more demanding and often easier to reach.
• The audience is not a single undifferentiated mass. Breaking it down into its component parts will help EMBs to devise the different messages that are required by these different sections and identify the different media that should be used.

In general terms, then, defining the audience is not difficult. An EMB will wish to communicate information to the entire electorate at different points during the electoral process. The messages will vary, as will the means of communicating these, but this something to consider later in the planning cycle.

However, it will be useful to break this primary audience down into a number of sub-categories. These are defined by the fact that they either require different messages or can only be reached by different media than the main electoral audience as a whole. Examples of important sub-audiences might include:

• Voters outside the country.
• Voters with disabilities.
• Illiterate voters.
• First-time voters.
• Members of linguistic minorities.

In each of these examples it is clear that there is likely to be a distinct message, as well as a different medium to be used. Hence, for example, voters overseas will need information about casting a postal or proxy ballot. They cannot be reached through the national media of their home country, so other channels of communication must be found. First-time voters may require detailed information about registering to vote, as well as the mechanics of voting. They are likely to be reached more effectively through those media targeted at young people. And so on.

A clear example of an important secondary audience is the candidates and political parties. The media themselves are also a secondary audience for the EMB, both because they are a means of getting the message across to the primary audience and because there are specific messages that the EMB may wish to communicate to them.