Block 3

Know Your Audience!

In this block, we share how we think about our audience (their needs, skills, and everyday situations) so you can design activities that truly work in practice.

In this block, we will discuss the importance of knowing the audience you plan to work with. Each library participating in the LIBRA.I. project worked with different target groups and AI contexts, including young adults, seniors, creatives and storytellers. This meant going from initial assumptions about our workshops’ participants to organising practical sessions and reaching the audience both physically and with the information we provide. Therefore, we can confidently say that knowing your audience, their needs, digital skills, and experience goes hand in hand with finding the best format and content for any activity.

START WITH YOURSELF: CAPACITY AND RESOURCES

Before analysing the potential audience, it is necessary to evaluate your own capacity. What are your strengths? What topics are professionally and personally close to you? Which topics can you talk about confidently? What kind of audience do you have experience working with? Do you have experience in teaching? Maybe you feel more comfortable giving one-on-one consultations or using other formats? Not every educator can work with every audience, so it is important to be aware of the resources available to you, such as time, knowledge, technical support, space, communication channels, and human resources. It is also essential to recognise the possibilities of partnering with others as collaboration allows you to reach audiences that might otherwise be difficult to access.

DIRECT AND INDIRECT AUDIENCE

When planning an activity, it is essential to distinguish between the direct and indirect audience.

• The direct audience consists of individuals who are addressed and engaged in a specific event or activity.
• The indirect or intermediary audience consists of those who benefit from this process but are not addressed directly.

For example, if the audience is teachers, the indirect audience is students for whom the developed materials or lessons are designed. To reach the students, teachers must first be addressed and engaged. In contrast, if the target is young people, an effective solution may be collaboration with youth centres or spaces where young people already gather. In this case, the direct audience is the members of the centre, but in a broader sense, the entire local youth community. This separation helps more precisely define communication channels and collaboration partners and can also be helpful when you are thinking of ways to build, grow and sustain a wider community. When thinking of community building, the direct audience can be your basis, while a future goal through your AI literacy (or any other) activities can be to involve your indirect audience as well. Use the strengths and opportunities of the online presence of your community members to communicate what you do, thus allowing broader audiences in the community to continue learning about AI and its creative possibilities.

UNDERSTANDING THE NEEDS OF YOUR AUDIENCE

As librarians, we work with the questions, needs, and lived realities of those we serve. This keeps library work grounded and prevents the creation of abstract programs that lack real-world relevance. Library staff already meet readers and event attendees on a daily basis, so it is important to start with basic interactions. Strike up a conversation, make observations and gather feedback on the activities your library already provides. These conversations should explore the objectives and motivations of our readers, their habits, challenges or unmet needs, and their desired level of commitment. This phase is essential. It prevents false assumptions and builds trust.

The next step is a more structured approach. We advise you to create a potential participant profile using one of our offered methods found in the Printable Materialssection of the methodology (e.g. Persona profile). If the event is planned for a group size of up to 20 people, profiles of 3-5 of your participants could provide a good impression of who you are working with. These profiles can then represent groups of people with shared characteristics, needs, and motivations. By grouping these, we can align our messaging and select well-targeted formats. While individual members may change, the personas remain stable. This approach allows us to grow and adapt without losing focus.

After that, conduct a targeted survey within your community group. When it comes to AI literacy, this helps determine participants’ expectations, digital skills, motivation, and interests. Remember to tailor the content and format of the survey to the specific age group and accessibility needs. A physical survey printed on paper should be provided if you are working with seniors or any other audiences with lower digital skills.

SEEK ALLIES

Working together with local leaders, organisations, or interest groups makes it easier to organise events and build trust. Later in this methodology, we will discuss communities. If your desired audience does not exist naturally within your institution, it is worth looking for new part ners with already developed and flourishing communities where members of your desired audience of students or readers gather (be it a senior center, youth center, artist community or any other organization). For example, including a new community in activities that exist in your event cycle (read more in BLOCK #5) or collaborating with local organisations might be a way to reach the selected audience more quickly and purposefully. Partnership also means intertwining generational experiences – creating situations where people of different ages and experiences can learn from each other.

BE FLEXIBLE AND READY TO CHANGE DIRECTION

As you evaluate yourself, make the separation between the direct and indirect audience, and look at the results of your audience research; you may arrive at a conclusion that previous as sumptions about your future participants may have been wrong. This calls for a change in the activity plans and approach. Here you must understand that this is not an indicator of failure, but rather an opportunity to refine the offering. As you take a step back and rebuild the con cept of the session from scratch, you may end up creating something even better, based on real needs.

PRACTICAL EXPERIENCE WITHIN THE LIBRA.I. PROJECT

As the LIBRA.I. activities and formats were developed, we had an opportunity to practically understand the needs of different audiences in the field of AI literacy. For instance, young creatives are already actively functioning at the intersection of culture, technology, and digital communication. They are characterised by their openness to experimentation, rapid adaptation to new trends, and high presence in the online environment, where artificial intelligence is in creasingly becoming both a tool and a challenge. Their educational needs therefore concern not only “how to use” AI, but above all “how to understand” its operation and impact on culture, public debate and their own work.

Adults involved in storytelling, meanwhile, include people developing their literary and linguistic competencies, as well as readers who treat the library as a space for meeting, dialogue and exchange of ideas. This group operates based on trust in the written word, the authority of the author, and the cultural institution of the library, which influences their way of receiving content and sources of information. Their needs are primarily related to understanding how AI influences the process of writing, editing and interpreting text, as well as how to recognise linguistic manipulations, fake news and seemingly „authorial” content. Educational activities aimed at this group should respond to the need to build a critical and informed relationship with text.

Seniors with lower digital skills, in contrast, are characterised by limited digital competencies and less confidence in using new technologies. With the growing amount of AI-generated content, this group is particularly vulnerable to disinformation, manipulation, and digital fraud such as fake news, voice deepfakes, and carefully crafted messages impersonating individuals or trusted institutions. Developing AI literacy among seniors means, above all, strengthening critical thinking, the ability to verify information, and the awareness that not all digital content has a human author.

If you are developing a plan for which group to work with in your classes, we encourage you once more to check out BLOCK #5, where you can find our ideas on topics worth discussing with library users as part of existing workshops. Remember, you don’t have to create your entire schedule from scratch. Sometimes it’s enough to adapt preexisting material to new subjects.

As you conquer the challenge of working with your specific audience, you may soon find yourself thinking about the wider community around you. Find out more about community building in the detailed Community Building Plan that has been added as a bonus chapter at the end of this methodology journey.