by Esteban González and Hilary Marsh
Correctly done, the process of creating personas is a transformative way for organizations to shift their perspective on their relationship with their top-priority audiences.
Internal stakeholders can identify the audience groups that are most important to them. It’s critical to uncover details about those audiences, collectively prioritize various audiences, and articulate what they want most from the organization. The overall goal of empathy-based personas is to tie the organization’s content to its goals by delivering it in a way that best meets the audience’s needs.
Empathy-based personas and audience journeys help the organization’s staff tap into their experience with the audience and their knowledge of human nature to develop a deeper sense of who they create programming for and who’s reading and using the content they produce. The collaborative process for this work ensures that the outcomes are owned and used by every department in the organization, not just the single group that decided to do it.
How organizations currently use inside-out thinking, and where it falls short
Almost all organizations undergo a regular process for strategic planning, where they map out their objectives for the coming year and create tactics for achieving those objectives. They may invest substantial time or money in the strategic planning process, involving multiple departments and outside facilitators.
For membership and trade associations, the strategic plan’s objectives and initiatives usually come at least in part from volunteer members. Because of this, associations believe that they are delivering programs, products, and services that members want. But organizations don’t often ask themselves the most critical question: Do the larger-scale audiences want these initiatives, and will they use the products and services we create for them?
To be successful, organizations need a deep understanding of and empathy for their top-priority audiences. They need to see that the organization can succeed only if audiences get what they want and need.
Why most personas don’t work
Most personas are created from demographic data about an organization’s audiences. This data may be combined with information from other sources, and may even include psychographic information like values, attributes, behaviors, and media usage. When given a face and a tagline, these humanized audience segments are called personas.
Personas built like this fall short because they are created with the assumption that the audiences’ focus is the organization. This maintains the organization’s perspective that they are the center of the audiences’ world. This type of persona sometimes even goes as far as mapping audiences to the organization’s internal processes, goals, and biases.
Significantly, because this type of persona is created by an external group and handed off to the organization, the organization itself misses the chance to use what they know about their audiences – and about people like them – to experience insights about the connection between what they do and what the audiences want.
This point may seem subtle, but imagine a precision right-handed instrument in the hands of a left-handed virtuoso: there will be no music until we bridge the gap that keeps them apart.
Ah, but what if there were a way to make the persona development process look inward as much as outward? What if the point of the process was as much to understand how to internalize an understanding of audiences and how to interact with them, as it was to describe and capture a picture of those audiences? This is exactly what we speak of when we talk about shifting the organization from inside-out to outside-in thinking.
Empathy makes all the difference
Adding empathy to the process changes the dynamic. Empathy lets us balance analytical thinking with emotional intelligence and intuition. It gives us context for separating what’s meaningful from what’s just information, what’s signal from what’s noise. Not just about our audiences, but about how the organization forms and responds in a relationship with them.
Empathy-based personas are powerful because they help us connect with personas as we do with real people, not made-up averages of characteristics. We get a better feel for audiences’ rational and emotional drivers, and what they’re truly looking for in a relationship with us. At the same time, they’re powerful because they equip us with an empathy for our own organizational strengths and limitations as we create experiences to deliver that relationship.
Understandably, empathy-based personas aren’t created in a vacuum. We use a collaborative series of structured brainstorms in work sessions conducted with the people with first-hand knowledge of real audiences. These sessions are designed to spur experience sharing, knowledge sharing, and latent internal insights. We create common ground across stakeholders, bridging differences and fostering consensus.
How the magic happens
Empathy-based personas are composed of two parts: the personas themselves, and the journey framework. The personas draw on the organization’s data and knowledge about the audiences. Through a set of two interactive brainstorming sessions, organization staff members identify the organization’s highest-priority audiences; provide key contextual information about the audiences’ challenges, fears, and hopes; and articulate strategic opportunities for the organization to serve them.
The work sessions must include a cross-functional set of participants who know the audiences and the issues and appreciate the challenges of responding to audience needs. Participants prepare by reviewing relevant research, articles, survey data, etc. Ideally, they will have had opportunities to observe or interact with audiences themselves, either through primary research, interviews, or focus groups.
The work sessions start by identifying the organization’s most important audiences: the three or four most important kinds of people who deliver the most value to the organization. Next, structured exercises flesh out each sketch into imaginary “real” people, adding layers of detail to their stories. By putting themselves in the personas’ shoes, participants will find they actually know a great deal about their motivations, their aspirations, their fears, and frustrations. The session closes solidifying the emotional connection to each persona by giving them a name and a face.
Having created a set of solid, “real” people, the discussion turns to how they interact, engage, and develop a relationship with the organization over time. As participants dive deeper into the experiences the personas go through, however, they increasingly see the organization’s capabilities from the personas’ “outside” perspective.
This is a crucial transformation. In work sessions, participants’ knowledge about how the organization works prompts empathy for the challenges they, their colleagues, and the organization experience as they create and grow a relationship with audiences. Brainstorming about expectations for baseline experiences, as well as what might truly delight and be exceptional, participants develop a deeper connection with each persona. Participants also develop a greater appreciation for how touchpoints ultimately affect the relationship with each persona, whether live in person face-to-face, through representatives, at events, online, or in social media.
The end result
The output of the personas and journeys are depictions of the personas, with brief stories and taglines, information about what they want from their lives and what drives them, and descriptions from their perspective about how the organization could provide them value along their journeys from awareness through advocacy.
But they are so much more than that: Because the organization created them together, they own them together. And because they are based on collective first-hand knowledge of the organization’s audiences, they feel like three-dimensional human beings. “I know this person!” is a common refrain.
It’s key to put the personas to use regularly. Many organizations “introduce” them to their staff at a meeting, and others create leave-behind artifacts to keep the personas top of mind when thinking about new products, programs, or services – and the content of and about them.
For a visual version of this article, feel free to download the slides.
About the authors
Esteban González is chief strategist and planner of Brand Therapy, an insights-driven strategy and ideas workshop devoted to helping companies create unique, healthy, and sustainable relationships with their audiences. Esteban is a thought leader on issues of how consumers connect with brand experiences, expert at developing valuable and actionable insights about audiences, their motivations, needs, and decision processes. His specialty is in using these insights to produce creative, compelling digital and offline experiences. He has led award-winning design assignments for associations as well as other brands such as Kimberly-Clark, CVS, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Adobe, Hologic, United Airlines, Kraft, Samsung, and HP.
Hilary Marsh is president and chief strategist of Content Company, a content and digital strategy consultancy that helps associations, nonprofit organizations, and corporations get better results from their content by improving their practices for content creation, governance, management, and promotions. Content Company’s clients include the American Bar Association, American Medical Association, Estee Lauder, Endocrine Society, Institute of Food Technologists, Intuit, and Walgreens. You can find her on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Slideshare.