To put it simply, a persona is a fictional representation of one of your constituents. When they're based on solid user research, personas can be great tools for helping your internal stakeholders truly understand your audiences.
Personas in the Design Process
My job at Blackbaud is to help nonprofits design things. Whether it's a full-scale website, an event fundraising site, a donation form or a mobile email template, our design process usually goes something like this:
- Stakeholder Discovery
- User Research
- Information Architecture
- Visual Design
- Build and QA
Each phase will vary a lot depending on the type of project, timeline, budget, etc. You get the picture. Personas are a tool that we often use right in between User Research and Information Architecture. They help us synthesize and articulate what we've learned about your constituents through user research.
Anatomy of a Persona
When we create personas for a nonprofit, we try to limit the number to 5 or 6. Each persona should be representative of one audience group for your organization. Even though personas have different demographic descriptions, the key factor that differentiates one persona from the next is what the person needs from your organization. So, if you have a 65-year-old male and a 26-year-old female that are both looking for ways to volunteer with your organization, you only have one persona: a volunteer.
For each persona, I typically include:
- Name
- Photo
- Character description
- Technology profile
- Definition of needs
- Scenario describing how they might use the site/tool/etc.
Also, going back to the research, each descriptor I use would ideally be based on something I learned during the user research phase – an interview response, analytics data, survey data or something else that's real and tangible.
Here's an example of a research-based persona I created for a client:
Socializing your Personas
The final step in the persona development process is to socialize the personas around your organization. Printing them out and laminating them is a good start. A colleague recently shared this blog post from MailChimp with me that showed some amazing posters they designed to show off their personas. Whatever method you use, be sure that folks get excited about them. These personas will be your friends as you write and revise content, plan your email campaigns and optimize your website.
Does your organization have personas? If so, how do you use them?
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