 In this video, we'll develop strategies for recognizing and predicting potential audiences, identify audience needs in poster organization, practice ranking and organizing resources to compose a story. Ready to design a research poster but not quite sure where to start? No problem. To begin, we will take a look at answering two questions. Who is your audience? What could you share with them? Let's walk through some ways you can answer those questions and how that can help with creating your poster. Just like when you're chatting with someone or typing out a message, the information you share with your audience will change based on who they are. For example, if someone offered you a new job, you might share that information differently on a phone call to a family member, an email to a professor, or a text to your friend's group chat. The same works for academic posters. For example, if you are presenting a poster to an audience of experts, you might use technical vocabulary or abbreviations common for experts in your field to explain your ideas. But, if you have an audience that doesn't know a lot about your field, you'll need to be ready to explain your research with terminology anyone can understand. So how do you find out who your audience is? Well, while you can't know for sure who will see your work, you can predict some things about your audience to help you design a more effective poster. A good place to start looking is at the location of the presentation. For example, if you are presenting in a classroom, the audience will probably be your classmates and teacher. At a national conference, the audience might be experts in your field. In at an undergraduate research fair, the audience will often be many different people from various academic backgrounds. Once you have an idea who your audience might be, you can start thinking about other questions to help shape content like, why is my audience here? What is my audience's background? Which parts of my research might the audience be familiar with? The answer to these questions will help you think about what type of content your audience will need to know. You can also think about your relationship with the audience. Does the audience know you well or not at all? Will you be close to the poster or will it be standing by itself? And how will your audience be giving you feedback? Will there be judges? The answers to these questions aren't always concrete. Thinking about them will help you to start predicting what type of information your audience might want or need and how you can organize your ideas to communicate with them most effectively. You're probably already thinking, so I have an audience, but what will I actually put on my poster? And that's a great question. Whether you already have a ton of information or you're just getting started, it's important to imagine what story you want to tell so you can start deciding the most effective way to tell it. Typically, posters are created after you have conducted some sort of research or ideation. That means you might already have a paper, project, or idea you're working on, but now by creating a poster you are switching mediums. And switching mediums requires altering how your ideas are communicated. You can't place a big poster design inside a tiny term paper, just as much as you can't copy and paste a research paper onto a poster. So where do you begin? The best way to start is to look at the information and ideas you already have and begin organizing those materials or thoughts into a story. Let's walk through what that might look like. First, take stock of what you have. Maybe you already have a research paper, a stack of materials from a project you worked on, or brainstorm some ideas. And if you feel like you don't have anything, don't fret. Knowing what you don't have is just as important as knowing what you do have. Identifying gaps in your materials will help you set the roadmap of what you need to complete the project. Examples of resources you might take stock of include ideas, models, visualizations, contextual information, issues or research gaps, hypothesis, methods, citations, data or results. Next, you can organize this information to start telling a story. There are a couple of things to remember for this part of the process. First, this is just a planning stage and the way you organize your information can be changed as you go along in the project. Second, remember that you are just planning how to organize your information, not designing the layout of the poster. That will come later. Third, there are many ways to organize your information, and everyone does it a little differently, so don't be afraid to experiment. Here are a few ways you might organize your poster. Some poster creators like to organize their posters like a paper. You might sort your information into traditional sections, like introduction, methods, results, conclusion and citations. Another style is to split your information into three categories. Information you must include, should include and could include if you have space. You can also try writing out all your information and then ranking it from most important to least important to include. You might also be asking how do I know what information is most important or how do I know what goes where? Remember your audience. Your poster is here to start a conversation with them so decide what story you're going to tell and sort and rank your information based on the needs of your audience. This part of the poster design process is a lot like writing your thesis statement for a paper. What ideas do you want your audience to walk away with? One cool trick is to try to describe the story of your research in one minute. Not only will this help you plan your poster, it's good practice for when it's time to present. Creating a research poster can be a big task, but you've just completed a major part. At this point, you've identified who your audience is, collected what you have to put on your poster, started planning how you might organize your content, decided what story you are ultimately going to tell. Remember answering the questions of who am I talking to and what do I have will help make your poster more effective for your audience and will guide your decisions as you begin to design and create a research poster.