_posts/2016-04-20-a-clear-audience-makes-for-a-good-blog-post.md
---
title: "A clear audience makes for a good blog post"
date: 2016-04-20
authors:
- andre
tags:
- how we work
- guides
- content design
excerpt: "The most important advice I give 18F staff while they’re working on a blog post is to define their audience as clearly and as narrowly as possible. This focus has helped us overcome numerous hurdles to publishing quality blog posts, and it’s also the part of our new Blogging Guide that I’m most excited about."
description: "Read our new Blogging Guide to see our process, advice we give authors, and how we manage our blog using GitHub issues. "
image: /assets/blog/blogging-guide/blogging-metadata.jpg
---
The most important advice I give 18F staff while they’re working on a
blog post is to define their audience as clearly and as narrowly as
possible. This focus has helped us overcome numerous hurdles to
publishing quality blog posts, and it’s also the part of our new [18F
Blogging Guide](https://handbook.18f.gov/blogging/) that
I’m most excited about.
We use a private GitHub repository to manage our blog editing and
approval process. Blog posts enter as an issue in the “idea” milestone
and exit as a closed issue in the “approved” milestone after they’ve
been edited by a member of our blog team and sent through our approval
process.
*An example of an issue for a blog post.*
Each issue has five metadata headings, including audience, that the
author must fill out before the issue can move through our process.
Here’s what our guide has to say about [the importance of defining your
audience](https://handbook.18f.gov/blogging/#write-a-user-story-to-determine-your-audience):
> It’s crucial to decide on your target audience before you start
> drafting a blog post. Being as specific as you can will help you
> answer a number of questions about what your post will look like.
> “General public” or “the federal government” is too broad of an
> audience to be useful. Clearly defining your audience will help you
> determine length, technical detail, tone, how much background you need
> to include, and what ask you will include at the end.
To help authors identify a narrow audience, we borrowed a technique from
our developer colleagues: user stories. User stories are a single
sentence that helps define a feature for a product by identifying a type
of user, a feature that user wants, and why they want that feature.
We’ve modified the user story a bit to fit blog posts. Our template is:
> As a *type of audience*, I want *to learn something*, so that *some
> benefit is had*.
An example of a good, clear audience story is something like:
> “As a *Chief Information Officer*, I want *to learn about the
> specifics of 18F’s new service*, so that *I can see if it will help me
> modernize my agency’s technology*.”
We value a diverse set of voices on our blog, so we encourage everyone —
developers, designers, product managers — at 18F to write for our blog.
This means many of our authors are more comfortable writing Javascript
than they are at writing narratives. Our staff is also very passionate
about their work, so they’ve always got half a dozen ideas they want to
put into a blog post. Writing audience stories helps make the writing
process much less daunting and helps authors choose the one thing they
most want to convey.
You can read the rest of our Blogging Guide to learn about [how we use
GitHub to manage our
process](https://handbook.18f.gov/blogging/#blog-management) and
to [see the other tips we give
authors](https://handbook.18f.gov/blogging/#writing-a-great-post).
We’re sharing this guide because our [open source
policy](https://18f.gsa.gov/2014/07/29/18f-an-open-source-team/)
extends beyond our code, and because we think our editorial process can
benefit from community input. We welcome [issues and pull
requests](https://github.com/18F/blogging-guide/issues) to the guide,
and, as always, this guide is in the public domain so you are free to
copy it and use it however you’d like.