Audiences¶
Audiences are how Mention scopes 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 one table 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 table of contents, so you control exactly what each group learns.
- 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 an empty table of contents. Its owner fills it 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 table of 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 sidebar with their role, and clicking one switches to it. What an Audience shows depends on that role, and the two experiences do not overlap. Owners (and org admins) get Questions, Curriculum, and People — the tabs for running it, with Questions as the default home for unanswered gaps. Learners get Ask and Hub — Ask when they are current, Hub when they still have lessons or review to do — with their lessons, review sessions, and the final exam running under Practice.
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 tabs. They read the articles they commissioned inside Curriculum, 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 tabs, 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 — a different table of 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 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 People tab (an Audience always keeps at least one owner once it has one). A role change swaps which tabs 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 table of 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 tab 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 Ask tab (or owners use the Ask field on owner tabs), 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 Questions tab of every Audience the question was asked in. 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, listed for both sets of owners with per-Audience counts, 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 Unanswered 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 and need nothing from anyone.