This toolkit is designed to cover a wide range of scenarios where public sector organisations will develop effective communication with the public. The complexity of communicating with the public and the variety of organisations involved may present a limitation for some users. We have made an effort to avoid the use of jargon in the toolkit questions, although inevitably some of the materials cited are written for informed or technical audiences. We have used one set of words in a specific sense: ‘involved parties’ and ‘audience’.
Involved parties: By ‘involved parties’, we mean people who are involved in creating and delivering the communication. In some organisations, they may be referred to as ‘stakeholders’. When we talk about involved parties, we mean these people or groups of people in this capacity, who may include part of the audience being communicated with, to distinguish them both from the audience and also from the staff or contractors who are working directly on developing and delivering the communication, but who are not potentially recipients. The involved parties will vary depending upon the situation, and may include representatives of community groups, consumer panels, or charities.
Audience is the group of people to whom organisations aim an advertising or communications campaign. A target audience may be people of a certain age group, gender, ethnicity, marital status, behavioural or risk group, or so on. In this toolkit, the term ‘audience’ means the people you are trying to communicate with: whether the targets of an advertising campaign, or the ongoing users or customers of a department’s services.
Within the guidance and cases that we link to there will inevitably
be some material which is written for informed or technical
audiences. In order to use a common language in developing
approaches to communications we direct you to the glossary of terms
produced on the Office of Government Communications website.
