Audiences¶
Audiences are the readerships of your product story. Each Audience represents a team, role, or cohort that needs the same things explained to it.
What is an Audience?¶
An Audience is a named group of members who share one set of Contents — the entries its owner writes, each of which Mention turns into an article and a lesson built from that article.
All content in Mention is delivered through an Audience. Members only see the articles and lessons for the Audiences they belong to.
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 has its own Contents, so you control exactly what each readership is told.
- Track adoption per group — See how much of each Audience has been finished, and who is still current, independently.
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 need to know
A new Audience starts with empty Contents. Its owner fills them in — one entry per thing the Audience needs to know — and Mention writes each entry into an article from your activated sources, then composes that article's lesson. See Curating Contents.
An Audience can hold at most 100 articles.
Members and Audiences¶
People are assigned to an Audience with a per-audience role:
- Owner — curates the Audience: its Contents, its lessons, its adoption figures, and its roster of members. An owner can be an org member — running an audience does not require org-admin rights.
- Learner — works through the Audience's lessons and reads its articles.
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 audience switcher at the top of the sidebar with their role, and picking one switches to it. What an Audience shows depends on that role. Owners (and org admins) get Chat, Lessons, Gaps, and People — the pages for running it. Lessons is the owner's view of the articles, grouped by topic and filterable, with the affordances to author them; the FAQ beside the Chat conversation is the Audience's most-asked answered questions with their counts. Learners land on Chat, with Lessons, Review, and the Exam once the final exam opens. Open questions are on neither surface — they wait on the owner's Gaps tab.
Owning an Audience is not learning from it. An owner is not tracked as a learner, holds no progress in the Audience they run, and does not get the learner pages. They read the articles they commissioned inside Learn, on each entry's page, and to see a lesson the way a learner meets it they walk through it there, which records nothing — see Curating Lessons.
Org admins get the owner's view of every Audience, whether or not they are on its roster — and in the web app that is the only view they get: even an admin enrolled as a learner is sent to the owner pages, not the learner ones. An enrolled admin can still work through an Audience as a learner via the MCP server, which follows their audience role rather than their org role.
Each Audience is a completely separate experience — different Contents, different articles and lessons, independent 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 People page, 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 People page (an Audience always keeps at least one owner once it has one). A role change swaps which pages that person sees, and preserves their learning progress: an owner is not tracked as a learner and stops appearing in adoption figures and nudges, but everything they completed is kept and comes back if they are made a learner again. Only removing them from the Audience clears it.
External tool access¶
External tools can also work through an Audience's Contents, lessons, and articles via 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. The same Learn and Read modes apply there, reported by the tools so an agent knows whether a member still owes an Audience's exercises. The MCP server is not split by page the way the web app is, so an owner can still run a review or record progress through a connected agent.
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.
Questions members ask¶
As members ask questions on an Audience's Chat page (or owners use the ask field on owner pages), Mention tracks the ones it couldn't answer from your activated source material. Those misses stand as knowledge gaps, and owners work them on the Audience's Gaps tab. Mention groups questions that mean the same thing and counts how often each is asked, so the gaps worth filling first sort to the top — grouping is org-wide, so the same question asked about two Audiences is one record, shown to both sets of owners, and answering it once closes it for everyone. Closing a gap by answering it adds what you wrote to the organization's knowledge base. See Answering Questions.
Every question asked is recorded, but only the ones Mention could not answer are listed as gaps for owners — the answered ones are already grounded in your sources, file under their topic, and need nothing from anyone.
Asking is the only way a gap appears — but not the only way an answer does. When an Audience is created, Mention seeds up to ten questions someone in that audience will need answered to do their job, grounded in your organization's topics and informed by the questions the owner gave the Audience (never restating them) and your industry. Each seed is written for this Audience and tried against your sources: the ones Mention can answer are kept as ready inventory, served instantly when somebody later asks; the ones it cannot are discarded silently. Nothing seeded ever shows up as an open question, so every gap an owner sees was actually asked. See Topics and Questions.