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Audiences

Audiences are how Mention scopes learning content to specific groups. Each Audience represents a team, role, or cohort that shares a common body of knowledge.

What is an Audience?

An Audience is a named group of members who share a specific set of learning content. When you create an Audience, Mention automatically provisions two things for it:

  • A Glossary — the collection of concepts (key terms) the group needs to learn
  • A Playbook — the collection of processes the group needs to understand

Every piece of learning content in Mention is delivered through an Audience. Members only see the Glossary and Playbook for the Audiences they belong to.

Audience kind

When you create an Audience you choose its kind, which sets what its Playbook contains:

  • Workflow — the group is a team or role, and its Playbook holds the operational procedures its members perform.
  • Capability — the group is a knowledge domain about your product, and its Playbook holds the product capabilities its members must understand and explain (handy for sales or customer success audiences). Both still have human members and personalized progress.

See Playbooks and Processes for how the kind shapes each Process and its SOP.

Why Audiences matter

Not every team member needs to know everything. A new hire on the engineering team needs different knowledge than someone in customer support. Audiences let you:

  • Scope content to roles — Each Audience gets its own Glossary and Playbook, so you control exactly what each group learns.
  • Personalize learning paths — Concept ordering and dependencies within a Glossary define the recommended sequence for each Audience.
  • Track progress per group — See how adoption is progressing for each Audience independently.
  • Prefer the right sources — Each Audience can rank which connected sources it should favor, so an engineering Audience can lean on GitHub while a support Audience leans on Intercom. See Source preferences.

Creating an Audience

Admins create Audiences from the Audiences section or during the onboarding wizard. To create an Audience, you provide:

  • Name — A descriptive name like "Engineering Team," "New Hires," or "Customer Support"
  • Description — A brief explanation of who this Audience is for and what they will learn
  • Kind — Whether the Playbook should hold operational workflows the members perform, or product capabilities they must understand (see Audience kind above)

Right after you create an Audience, Mention sketches a persona — an internal profile of a typical member — and builds the first version of its Glossary and Playbook from that persona plus the sources you've activated. Mention often has enough from the name and description alone; when it doesn't, it asks one or two multiple-choice clarifying questions. From there you refine which concepts are in the Glossary, which processes are in the Playbook, and which members belong to the Audience.

Members and Audiences

People are assigned to an Audience with a per-audience role:

  • Owner — curates the Audience: its glossary, playbook, questions, persona, adoption dashboard, and its roster of members. An owner can be an org member — running an audience does not require org-admin rights.
  • Learner — receives the Audience's learning content and works through it.

This audience role is independent of the org-level admin/member role: an org admin can administer any Audience without being listed as an owner, and the same person can own one Audience while learning in another. A person can belong to multiple Audiences — every one they belong to appears in the sidebar with their role, and clicking one switches to it. What an Audience shows depends on that role: learners see the learning home filling the whole page, with no tab bar; owners (and org admins) see it as the Learn tab alongside the management tabs.

Each Audience provides a completely separate learning experience — different concepts, different processes, independent progress tracking.

Who can manage the roster

Audience owners and org admins assign people to an Audience and set their role:

  • While creating an Audience — invite users by email at that step of audience creation (in onboarding or after)
  • Adding existing members — add existing organization members to an Audience from its Members tab, as owner or learner
  • Via invitation — send email invitations from the audience; new users are assigned the chosen role when they accept
  • Changing a role — promote a learner to owner, or demote an owner to learner, from the Members tab (an Audience always keeps at least one owner once it has one)

External tool access

External tools can also read an Audience's Glossary and Playbook through the Mention MCP server: a tool connects and signs in with a member's Mention account over OAuth, and then sees exactly the Audiences that member belongs to. Membership is the only access control — there is nothing extra to grant per tool.

An Audience cannot be deleted while it still has members or pending invitations. Remove those first.

For more on connecting external tools, see MCP Server Overview.

Frequently Asked Questions

As members learn and ask questions through the Q&A footer, Mention tracks those questions. When multiple members ask similar questions about the same Audience's content, Mention aggregates them into FAQs on the Audience's FAQs tab. This helps admins identify knowledge gaps and areas where content may need improvement.

The FAQ list is rebuilt periodically — roughly every ten new member answers — rather than in real time, so it tends to lag live activity by a small window. See Managing Audiences for how to review and resolve FAQs.