What doughnuts can teach you about reaching your audience

Content lessons from everyday life

I got a lesson in visualising content from an unusual source today – the eye hospital.

There’s a long history of glaucoma in my family, so even though I’ve only just hit my 40s (well below the age where this condition normally occurs), I get a check up once a year to check my general eye health.

I’ve developed a very basic understanding of what glaucoma is – deterioration of the optic nerve which impacts what you can see. This time though, I learned more in 30 seconds than in eight years of hospital visits.

It’s as simple as this. Your optic nerve, essentially the cable that converts what you see into picture for your brain to understand, is either a pink ring doughnut – the kind Homer Simpson is famous for eating dozens of, or it’s a polo that’s been sucked for so long there’s more hole than ring.

If yours is a doughnut, it’s healthy – mine’s still a doughnut!

Getting your message across

So what’s the lesson here? Know your audience.

I won’t pass any medical exams armed only with a ring-doughnut analogy (although my eye doctor says she uses this when teaching her medical students to give them a simple grasp of the issue).

But then I’ve no plans to become a doctor. However, as a patient, it is important that I know what I’m looking at when I’m shown a fancy chart. Instead of nodding along and taking my medicine without the faintest idea what I’ve been told, one simple analogy has given me a better understanding of my own health.

Getting your message across isn’t about being clever. It’s about knowing the person has understood you. Actually, it’s more than knowing, it’s caring.