 Okay, welcome everybody to the TechSoup special webinar, How to Create Personas for your digital marketing, digital communication, messed up already. I'm Aretha Simons. I'm the webinar producer here at TechSoup. It's always good to have you come on to our webinars and here's how you can engage today, especially if this is your first time, you know that you are muted. We would love for you to put your questions in the Q and A section, because you know, sometimes the chat moves up really, really fast, but you can still put your questions in the chat and we'll try to get to as many as possible. We are definitely recording this. Check your email probably tomorrow, maybe later today, I don't know. I'm gonna give you the webinar YouTube video link. Maybe the slides, are we sharing the slides with? We'll be sharing the slides. So you'll get that. If you hear anything that you think, wow, that was amazing, I gotta share that to the world. Share it on your social media and then tag us at all of our hashtags or add us TechSoup. If you need the CC button right at the bottom of your screen where it says closed caption has CC, click on that and it'll allow you to be able to listen to us and read at the same time. I'm gonna get ready to turn this over to Whit, but I want to just say for those of you who are here for the first time, on behalf of over our 100 partners that provide us hardware and software for nonprofit organizations, TAPS, TAP, Lord, I can't talk. I was gonna say TAPSuit, TAP Network is one of those partners. And so we wanna welcome Whit here and thank you Whit, I'm gonna turn this over to you. Thank you. Thank you, Aretha. Good morning, good afternoon, everyone. I hope you all are having a wonderful day. Can everyone see my screen all right? Aretha, we good? Can you see it? Yes. Perfect, all right, awesome. I'm very excited to dive into this topic today. I think it's a very timely and important one and I see a lot of nonprofits that I work with on a day-to-day basis, kind of tackle these on a regular basis. So, but before we dive too far in, I'm gonna do a brief introduction of who I am and my experience here. My name is Whit Godden. I'm the director of strategic marketing here at TAP Network. I help kind of manage all of our marketing and communications clients that come through, specifically a lot of our larger non-profit government state government agencies. And then a little bit about TAP. So TAP Network, we are TAP, we are TechSoup's marketing technology partner. And as it says here, we strive to empower organizations for good. Essentially, your vision is our mission. And over the past two, now two and a half years, I personally have been leading our strategic partnership with TechSoup, delivering digital marketing and website services through the TechSoup marketplace, as well as developing amazing educational content like this, along with blogs, you might see us in some courses. I do hope I see some of you at the town hall next month. I will be presenting there with Aretha and a few other folks kind of talking a little bit about the breadth of things that are going on at TechSoup and I'm so grateful to be a partner and be able to be a part of all of that. So now that I've gotten this boring part over, let's dive into the discussion for today. We're gonna be focusing on how to create personas and then talk a little bit about how you're gonna use those personas. But first, I wanna kind of dive in and talk about what is the importance of a persona? Why are they important for your organization to be investing the time and dedicate a team member to do it? We'll review the steps on how to actually make a persona or why we make a persona and then we'll discuss what a persona is and then we'll get to how do we make a persona. And then lastly, I'll go through a few key tactics on how you should use your personas in your messaging and end with a brief Q and A to answer any questions that might be lingering. So what's so important about a persona? Before we get there, always wanna start with making sure we all are utilizing and understanding that we have a baseline understanding of all of the terminologies. So here's a few key important definitions to just consider as I walk through some of these slides with you guys today. A target audience, some of you may know these and this is a moment, Aretha, I will say that I wish that I could see their faces because I'd love to be able to see like when I ask a question, do you get this? And they would give a thumbs up. You may already know some of these terms having worked in communications if you work in the communications team. Some of these terms may be new to you. Don't worry. We'll also hopefully it'll all make sense by the end of this hour. But the first term to kind of get our head wrapped around is a target audience. And this is really a particular group of people that marketers are looking to reach and engage with. A lot of times you might wanna think about these in like terms of your donor audience versus your volunteer audience. Perhaps you're also targeting participation in a program, your end service consumers or customers or individuals. And then you have a persona. A persona is a single fictitious person that encompasses the key relevant characteristics of your target audience. We're gonna kind of peel the layers of that onion back throughout the hour but just think through like we're really looking at developing a fictitious person that is based on actual real data and information we have about a target audience. So we can properly develop in this scenario communication materials and messaging. When I use the term user, I want you to think this is the person who is interacting with your marketing materials. So whether or not that's your website, your social media marketers, we tend to use the term user. And so you'll see that term come up a few times throughout the presentation. And then lastly, the term lead. You might know this if any of you have ever worked in sales or are in sales. A lead is traditionally a sales term. But in this scenario or for this conversation today, I want you to interchangeably think of this as a prospect, you know, a prospective volunteer, a prospective participant, maybe a prospective donor. So those are just some of the key terms that I wanna make sure we all sort of have a baseline understanding before we kind of move forward here. So let's talk a little bit about the impact using personas has across businesses and organizations. I think these numbers are fairly compelling. So if you and your organization has not necessarily gone through the process of really thinking through your target audiences and developing an actual persona, maybe some of these metrics will inspire you to take the time and kind of do some of the exercises and the work that's laid out in this presentation. So firstly, that should be 56, not 59, 56% of organizations have developed higher quality leads or prospects using personas. 58% said that targeting cold prospects with persona-based content is more affected than targeting warm prospects without using persona-based content. We have 36% of organizations have actually achieved shorter sales cycles using personas. So consider this, if you have somebody who requests information, you follow up with a donor request. If it's just a blanket generalized donor request, we don't really, you're not really thinking through who that person is and how that person is actually utilizing the information that they initially were requesting or consuming. You might have a longer conversation. It might take a few more touchpoints before that individual says, you know what? I'm gonna give that organization $15, $20, $50, whatever the case may be. And then of course, 24% of companies gained more prospects using personas. If you are writing your long-form content with the perspective and the lens of a persona behind it, that is gonna resonate more appropriately with the existing audiences and more likely to be shared amongst their communities to then reach additional people that your organization might not have a pulse on quite right away. So the numbers are there, right? So let's review some key elements that a persona will help you and your marketing team with. So first off, they're there to help you guys create the messaging that appeals to your target audience's needs, right? We're gonna start to understand who this person is, what are their needs specifically? And in some cases, you may even want to or need to consider where your personas are engaging. For instance, are they primarily on a mobile device or are they utilizing a desktop? A lot of times that can influence the way that you deliver message, the way you design things as well. They can also help your marketing team discover topics to write about for your blogs or your website content. You're not gonna necessarily have the same information on your donation page as you would on your volunteer recruitment page, right? So you wanna think through and in some cases you probably are doing this to some extent but maybe there's an opportunity for you to take it a little bit further and really hit some of those key needs and goals and pain points right on the head and shorten that time of getting an individual to convert or do an action that you're looking for them to do. And then also they'll hopefully, they're there to help you tailor your messaging on social media and email as well. So it's gonna be able to help you understand how can I get small bits of information that are gonna really resonate with this particular target persona within this audience. So now that we kind of understand how they're gonna help help you and what they're gonna help sort of help elicit amongst your teams, let's take a look at what a persona is so that you can understand these takeaways just a little bit better. So let's talk about what is a persona. Aretha and I were talking on here and she's like, I've never even heard that term before and it's a common thing that we hear a lot over at Tap Network. So let's talk through like what makes a persona a persona. The goal of a persona is really to distill your audiences from many to one. So through this process, you're gonna synthesize information about a group of people and develop a single, excuse me, a single fictitious character that includes a name, understanding their behaviors and other relevant and important qualities. So let's, who uses personas? So in a day to day life, you'd be surprised the breadth of professionals and individuals within all sorts of businesses and organizations and government agencies, all the different individuals who use personas to get the work done to meet their business or organization goals. So if you're on the product team, let's say you make a product, some organizations might be making products that are available at significant discounts. So your product team is really using them to remember who the product is built for. Just because you like a feature, it doesn't mean it's gonna resonate with your persona targets, your target personas. So you really wanna make sure you're thinking through and empathizing with the individuals that you're looking to produce a solution for. User experience designers, I wish I could get a thumbs up again on how many people have heard the term. They use personas to design what you would guess is an optimal experience. An example of this is, how content flows on an individual page, like where elements exist on a single page on your website or how different pages flow together so that the designer can thoroughly understand where and how this individual is gonna interact with the content on the page. Your sales teams might also use personas as well. They'll use these to inform and refine their sales strategies. So there are multiple value propositions that you could tailor and that you could create, but it's important to ensure that you're utilizing the ones that really resonate with who you're talking to. So differentiating and understanding this persona versus that persona and really knowing who and how to talk to them is very vital. And lastly, like many of you guys here today are, as I like to say in the nonprofit world, you guys are some kind of marketer everyone in a nonprofit organization is at some point a marketer. So I'll put that hat on and wear it proudly. Personas help us as marketers craft the messaging that speaks on a very personal level and considers all of the nuances of that individual human's behavior. So how many personas should you create, right? So this is a common challenge that we face for pretty much any marketing client we have nonprofit or a for-profit company. When you're looking at a target audience, you could easily say like, if you're looking at a group of 50 people, 100 people in some cases, 15,000 people, those might make up your donors. You can easily say there are seven different, eight different, 15 different personas, but developing that level of specificity in your communications and materials would be really inefficient. And it would essentially like what we like to say at TAP is like the juice isn't worth the squeeze if you've ever heard that term before. So the goal here is how can we create the most comprehensive and clear actionable persona? So at most you guys should consider two personas per target audience. This happens quite often when we talk about our donor personas with our clients. We often create a persona that's really focusing on that like one-time donor versus a persona for a recurring donor. By doing this, we're not sending messaging to the one-time donor that makes them maybe feel like I'm not giving by a monthly basis. And we're also able to tailor our messaging to recurring donors, potentially with continued incentive to maintain their recurring giving. And think of it vice versa, right? If you're a recurring donor, you wouldn't want to receive an email or a piece of communication that says, consider becoming a recurring donor. It's like, do you know who I am? You should know that I've already been giving a recurring donation. So that value proposition wouldn't be appropriate for that particular persona. So thinking through sort of your primary persona and potentially secondary persona is an exercise that's gonna be helpful and in some cases necessary to do. So let's take a look at what kind of makes up a persona, what are the pieces? And you do, it's fairly self-explanatory, but you'd be surprised at how challenging it can be once you start to really sit down and try to think through it. You know, as I mentioned before, a persona is a single fictitious person. So we have to literally create a whole human being based off of information that we have, some qualitative, some quantitative information or data. But at a minimum, you'll want to include a name, an image, a quote. So that kind of answers the I am a blank. You'll want to identify behaviors. A lot of times in the bio section, we kind of get to uncover like, what is the day in the life of Frederick? Frederick's gonna be my name for the day. I'm just gonna say that. Who is Frederick? What does Frederick do on a daily basis that are gonna be helpful or relevant for my organization to know? What are Frederick's goals and motivations in life and also in relations to what your organization does? You know, I want to be able to commit some time to an organization or a cause that means something to me. Needs, I want to feel, how do I want, like what does Frederick actually mean in his life? What are his attitudes? I really like this. And in some cases, I don't like that. I don't like this. And then in other cases, you might have some other elements that are gonna be important that are really specific to your organization. And I'll get to that in a later slide. I think it's really important though as we kind of look at some of the three key areas, I think that are gonna be driving motivators when it comes to defining and differentiating our messaging. But oftentimes it is difficult in your head to just sort of like differentiate these. So the goals, when we talk about a persona's goals, we're really talking about what are they ultimately trying to accomplish? So for instance, let's use Frederick again. Frederick wants to be able to support his local community the best way that he can. That's his goal. He's, in some cases, I have an example persona that I'll show you in a few slides. They move around a lot. We've recognized that that's a commonality amongst this one particular community. They kind of have a lot of travelers settle in this one area. So now that they finally got roots into a city, they're like, okay, I wanna know how can I be a participant? How can I help support my local community? When you're looking at the needs of your persona, the needs are, what does this person require in order to accomplish these goals? So in Frederick's case, maybe Frederick needs to know the different ways he can support his local community or engage with a particular organization. Perhaps he needs to know what are the biggest challenges that his community is facing, right? This may be an educational experience. In some cases, you might be like 99% of our donations are online donors, but we don't have an online donation or we don't have the ability to donate online or we know that this age demographic that we're trying to grow around our donation base or a volunteer base really interact with organizations on a digital footprint, but we have paper applications for volunteers or we take, we have like a PayPal account. It's not a very, maybe a user friendly or generational friendly donation platform. So really understanding maybe some of the technical barriers or situational barriers or educational barriers are a way to be able to develop and consider thinking through what type of content are you gonna be developing whether or not that's an email, organizationally, organizational decisions. I mean, really that's why I was saying so many roles in businesses and organizations use personas to help design how they want an individual to interact with their organization. And then lastly, and I would say probably one of the most important ones would be identifying what some of those pain points are. What's preventing your persona from accomplishing their goals, right? So for instance, if we were to look at Frederick maybe Frederick has a really, really busy schedule and he just has a hard time finding opportunities to show up to volunteering events, right? So are we gonna be hitting, you know, Frederick with a bunch of volunteer for us, volunteer for us? If we know that this target persona doesn't have the time we've identified that that's the case may be then there are other ways in which he can help support potentially. You know, is it making donations? Is it maybe in some cases contributing other means of expertise? Other resources serve as like maybe a liaison between his professional career and the community helping build partnerships just being that connector or convener with whatever the case may be that's where you're gonna start to do a lot of the research and kind of figure out, okay, how do we understand this person's goals, their needs, their pain points and then moving into sort of how do we then craft messages around those pieces to really amplify and kind of, I guess, engage and capture. It makes them feel like they're being heard or being seen or being understood. So let's talk about like the do's and don'ts. I always love a do's and don'ts list. It's very helpful sometimes for a marketing here. So on useful personas. So these are some elements that I want you guys to consider as we move into the next phase which is building them, right? These are rooted in reality. They are fictitious, but they are rooted in reality. You wanna be leveraging as much qualitative and quantitative data as you can. And I'll talk through a little bit about research, how to do where you can possibly look to do some user research or audience research that can help influence the development of your personas. It should really have a full 360 degree view of the user, right? We want that day in the life of who is this person? What do they do for a living? Where do they live? What is their age? Do they have a family? What are their needs? What are their goals? What are their pain points? It really needs to be a fully comprehensive living, breathing, human being differentiated. You know, if you have one target persona that just like, you know, they like chocolate or they like to walk outside. Like some of those pieces might not necessarily be much of a differentiator that is, so you wanna make sure that between one persona and another, there is some differentiation. There may be some crossover, but you really wanna get through and dial in on what those differentiating elements and components are. This should be inspired by multiple users. That's a very important thing. You know, Frederick is a facsimile of, let's just throw a couple more names out. Aretha, Witt, you know, Lauren and Jen, right? Like let's say we have like these four real people and then we created Frederick as a representation of those four individuals. You don't wanna make Frederick just another replica of Aretha. That's not helpful. It's not gonna be fully encompassing of all of the overlapping qualities and characteristics of the four of us, of me, Lauren, Aretha and Jen. And they really should be able to help your teams answer questions about the user, right? About the end of individual who's engaging or interacting with your organization. What are the not useful personas? What are the don'ts? As you said, it should not be based on a single user. It's not based on direct feedback. So direct feedback could be something like, and I'll get to the research piece, like you haven't looked at your Google Analytics, you haven't looked at your social media and analytics. In some cases and some organizations, they'll do surveys or they collect information at events. You always want it to have some sort of a direct feedback. You want them to have, you want to make sure that they are not lacking in clear differences between other personas, right? We don't want the donor persona and the volunteer persona to be pretty much the same person. If they are, then there was either, there wasn't enough research done or there wasn't enough synthesis of the data to really identify what those differences might be. But as you can probably imagine, a volunteer and a donor, there are gonna be quite a lot of overlap and relatable qualities. But you have to make those personas actually different than one another. So you can really make actionable discernments in your messaging decisions. And then, of course, you don't want to include irrelevant details. Again, is including that they have a cat helpful? Maybe not. If you run an animal foundation, it definitely does. So thinking through like what's relevant and maybe what's irrelevant because you really want a nice little snapshot of who this person is for your entire organization to sort of go, okay, I know how to think and move forward with engaging and talking to my audiences or my personas. So now we kind of got a good picture about like what makes up a persona. Let's talk about the steps of like, how do we build one, right? What are the pieces? What are the stepping stones to actually going from all of these ideas of like, okay, this is a persona, this is what a persona is, this is what a persona isn't. Now let's start to bring it to life. So the four key steps of developing a persona is conducting your user research first, right? You want to discover those goals, those needs, behaviors and pain points of your target audience. On the next slide, I have a few ways in which we have worked with our nonprofits to conduct user research to get a better understanding of who these individuals are that are existing and engaging with your organization. The second step is synthesizing that research. You want to uncover common themes and patterns across your target audiences. Some of that might just be a very sort of a yes or no type of answer, right? Are they on mobile? Are they on desktop? Are they in my city? Are they outside of my city? Do they speak English or do they speak, are they bilingual? Understanding some of those underlying patterns and themes. So taking all the notes and the information and starting to clump them together and synthesizing that into information that you can start to bucket. Cause idea, right? You have 100 people, what makes up those 100 people? How can we start to make commonalities and identify those themes? And then we document those patterns from your synthesis into a persona. So this is that third step is really where you're going to create that document that we're going to look at in just a couple of seconds. So I'm sure you're like on your edge of your seat like waiting to see what does a persona look like. You're going to document those patterns and you're going to build that into a persona. Templates are very useful for this. And I do have an example template that I'll share that I'll show you guys. And as Aretha mentioned at the beginning of today's presentation, we will be sharing this presentation to you guys. So you'll have the slide decks. You'll be able to replicate the persona template that I have included in here. And then lastly, in some cases if you have the ability to validate your personas, but most importantly, keeping them alive. Validation is some in some cases like you might be able to do some field research or have responses or conduct a subsequent surveys. But most importantly, it's just continuously understanding who they are and how they're engaging and do like a six month or a one year check-in. Does this persona still reflect this target audience? People change their persona as a human. We are human. We change. So making sure that you consistently kind of go back and forth and do a check-in to make sure that your personas are up to date and accurate. So research takes time. It can be exhausting. It can be a little daunting in some cases. And I know it at nonprofit, some of us sometimes may feel like we lack the resources in some cases to conduct those research, right? So we may not have access to these expensive databases. Joining a Facebook group of your target audience is 100%. Thank you, Risa. That's a great, great call out. Google Analytics, I'm gonna quickly touch on that one. This gives some really great generalized demographic information about the visitors that are going to your website. Who is going to your donation page? Who is going to your volunteer page, your programs page, maybe your enrollment page? You can get a breakdown of gender, of location, of age. You can kind of get to understand a lot about the user traffic on your website. As Risa said, social media insights, but I love what you said here. We've done this before as well for clients. Perusing, it's amazing. And it's 2022 now. We should all kind of say we're used to it, but it still surprises me as a marketer how much information people give up about themselves on social media platforms. You can really synthesize a lot of detail around individuals by being able to look into their personal profile pictures or personal profiles and other conversations that might be happening as Risa pointed out in a Facebook group. So utilizing your social media insights as well. So on the back end of your social media accounts, you can also in some cases get demographic information and further details around who is actually engaging and participating in your conversation. So you can start to get that snapshot of like, these are the people who go to our donor page and these are the people who respond to our donation requests. How do we start to synthesize this into a person so that we can continue to elevate our messaging to reach more and hopefully grow that audience and invite more people through actual messaging? Lead forms are another great way of collecting information about it, about your target audiences. So it can be a little bit tricky. You don't wanna have a lead, a form on your website that's 150 questions long because no one's gonna end up filling that out. But I will say there's a webinar next month that I am doing with one of my fabulous colleagues, Janelle, on leveraging your CRM for messaging. And we will be touching on some really unique technical capabilities that some platforms have called responsive forms where if it will know I've already given you my name, my first name, my last name on my email. So maybe the second time I come, maybe you ask for my position in my company, other information that might be relevant. Surveys, these are a great way to collect qualitative and quantitative data about maybe for events. If you have an engaged volunteer group or if you have an engaged existing donor group, you can also just ask them, hey, we wanna know more about who you are so we can better our work here because you already have shown yourselves being supportive of us. So if you wouldn't mind taking five minutes and filling out this survey to give us some more information about who you are and how you currently or historically interact with our organization, that can help you guys gain insights as to who those individuals are and then synthesize that data and build it into an actual persona. And then lastly, and probably the most overhead heavy is conducting interviews. Some organizations spend the time and the resources to actually go out and speak with people face to face to really understand what are your needs, especially if you're a program coordinator or if you're a program developer, you've probably had a lot of face to face time with maybe the end user of your services where those end services happening. So making sure that you're collecting a holistic data around that individual that can maybe then go back and influence the larger conversation of what that program is looking to achieve and then how can you develop the personas based off of that information so that you can reach the additional individuals who might fall within that target audience through really targeted and specific and meaningful messaging. All right, so here we go. This is the template. I saw someone saying, I love that they thank you for sharing the slides and templates. It's not fancy. That doesn't have to be fancy, but this is a very basic one and there's not a one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to personas. And also remember this kind of encompasses what I would say is the minimum of what you would want to be able to include in your target persona. But as I said too, there may be some additional information that is really important that maybe you didn't even realize was actually a major commonality across the target audience that you feel is really relevant to incorporate or include in your target personas. I have seen to some brands, like retailers might include like brands that this target persona has actually shown that they like. If you feel like it's really important or it's a helpful tool for you, maybe there's some similar nonprofit organizations that your target personas have considered or have in the past supported that helps align, that maybe you have a lot of synergy and an alignment with. So you might see in the bottom corner of a persona if you Google search personas, you might see like brands in the bottom of their little logos, visual like pictures worth a thousand words, right? We want to keep this as synthesized and as simple as possible. So if you can include any sort of like visual component that may be able to elicit further. May personas be synonymous with the term avatar? That's a great question. So an avatar is more or less just a cartoonish character that people use traditionally when they're like on online presence. It's not necessarily the persona, let's just say this, if you have like a creative like my old company, I worked for Exploding Kittens, my personas were actually cartoon characters from our game. And then I would give them a name and I would kind of build them out from that way. I'd say that like that cartoon non-human looking icon or that image is more of an avatar. The persona is who is that avatar, right? Who is, what makes up Polly, what makes up Polly and what makes Polly Polly, right? So, but that's a great question. And I think that term gets thrown around a lot, but it's sort of like is a square quadrilateral but not all quadrilateral or squares. That's kind of the situation we're talking about here. So take this, you'll have this. You can also, if you have a design degree, make it pretty. I'm gonna show you an example of one that we've done for an organization through TechSoup called the Center for Community Transitions. And as you can see, we have like all the elements we've covered today. I also wanna say, I don't know if you see his name, Garrett Giveback. I started at TAP about two and a half years ago and I sort of laid the foundation and I'm really happy to see that my team has continued to use my tradition of alliteration when coming up with persona names. I think it's always fun and it kind of just like has a little levity to the conversation in some cases. But as you can see here, we have his age, where he lives, what he does for a living. We have a bit about the day in the life and some of the background of who Garrett is. Oh, thanks, Beth. I very much appreciate that. Wonderful, what a wonderful piece of feedback. Thank you so much. So this kind of gives us the day in the life. It also gives some behaviors, like what Garrett listens to podcasts to get his news and spends his free time trying out new restaurants and breweries in the area. Some of that might not be relevant, but some of it, for this client, apparently it was. If we were to run, if we knew that this persona listens to podcasts to get his news, maybe we decide we're gonna set aside a $100 budget to run podcast audio advertising to build awareness and to get into the ear of Garrett Giveback. But as you can see too, at the bottom here, we've got those three key big needs, right? Those components, the goals, the needs, and the pain points. This is always helpful for us as we, as then our strategists, our content strategists come up with our monthly content calendar and we think through, hmm, what blog should we write about this week? Well, maybe we write a blog about, you know, what our organization has been able to achieve due to the financial donations of the local individuals. For the persona workshop, oh, I should have done Percy persona. That's a good one. I mentioned Polly earlier. Maybe I should have done Polly too or Percy and Polly. Maybe they're a married couple. That could be one of our personas. So this is our design kind of like pretty version of this lovely template, right? It doesn't have to be perfectly box. And if you go and you search, there's so many options out there. I mean, I'm telling you, there are so many different ways that companies and individuals kind of do this. You might even see like trackers. So like how are they lazy or active? Are they, you know, all sorts of, so they might have different like visual components. There could be scales. There could be keywords. So, you know, thinking through and do some research, see what works, see what you like. This is, we find that the simplest version right now for nonprofits is usually the best and most least confusing and least challenging to implement into the day-to-day operations of marketing. And of course, like really wanna make sure that we keep our personas alive. So once they're developed, you really should use them. I know this is silly, but I have some UX designer friends who if they have a really big client or if they're an in-house user experience designer for a tech company, they literally have their personas and their cubicles. So that as they're developing and coming up with solutions and identifying and addressing problems that come up through a user experience, they're like, okay, this isn't my problem. This isn't about me. This is about other people. We really are looking to empathize and see things through. So you guys might not have to print them out and post them if you're really avid a marketer or really avid UX designer, the maybe you would, but it's something to consider. I put it out there just for you guys to consider. It is very, very helpful to refer to them in presentations and documentation. This we do a lot when we're thinking through our content development. So when we sit down as a strategy team and we're thinking through, okay, for this month we have to write four blogs. All right, so what has Frederick been up to? What does he do? How can we maybe get him? Maybe that month isn't about donors. Maybe we're really focusing on volunteer acquisitions. So we would talk about our volunteer persona. How do we kind of look through the lens of that? As I said, use them in meetings and in casual discussions. I won't like, we don't make a Slack channel or a Slack name for our personas at TAP, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are some design companies out there that go that far. That's how important personas are in our industry. Continue to refine them, right? So continue to look through. As I said, we're all human. Your persona is a human. We change day to day, month to month, year to year. Your personas from 2020 pre-pandemic are probably very different now than they were then. So think of these as living, breathing documents to continue to update. And when possible, validate them. You can get feedback. If you finish one, if you've gone through this exercise a lot of you might be working as a single team, which is totally fine, but don't be a single team and then say, I'm done, I got this. Turn to your development team. Ask your development team, hey, does this sound right to you? I've done this research. Could you just take a look at this and let me know if I'm kind of on the right path? I wanna help your work by being able to develop the messaging that's appropriate for donation. You can, in some cases, go out and actually interview them and validate in that process as well. So make sure you keep them alive. They're humans, take care of them. They're like your little, like the egg that we all had to carry around in high school and we had to keep it alive for 24 hours. Think of that as this, you have to take care of it. You have to stay on top of it. Sometimes we'll actually walk through, like as a marketer, like my team will actually have worked on the development of the persona together so that when we refer and we come back in, we go like, hey, don't forget about Frederick for this one, like, let's talk through. Just a reference point. If it could even be, Allison, it could even be like having this in some way in your meeting agenda. Like before we start talking about what we're gonna write, let's just quickly recap who we're writing this for, right? Just making an intentional recognition, in-house only. Yeah, so in-house, yeah. So you traditionally only have them in-house only. Correct, you wouldn't use this. That's a great question. Sorry, I apologize. Yeah, this is for your internal team only. You wouldn't traditionally share your persona profiles with your audience as a whole. But this is great. So if you end up like getting to a point where you wanna hire an agency or hire a contractor, a designer to design your next website or a contractor to help write your social media or an intern or a volunteer, you know, in some cases you might share with your volunteers if your volunteers are focusing on in the communications department, it might be helpful for you to say, hey, I just want you to take a look and understand who it is we're talking to. Our goal here is to serve the needs of X, Y, and Z within these communities. Here are those individuals and the research that we've done. So this will help you do your volunteer work better or do your design work better or do your copywriting better or your blog writing better or your email writing better or whatever the case may be. But good question, Allison. Yes, in-house, traditionally, yep. So now we've kind of gone through the steps of how to build one. I'm gonna just kind of touch on a few interesting and important elements in places where these personas are actually utilized. And Allison, you kind of helped me segue perfectly into that next step, which is sort of like where and how do we use our personas when it comes to our communications, right? So for social media, you, this is, you know, you really wanna consider your personas goals, needs and pain points. So I think that is so important. I will answer that in just a minute, Alex, but that's a good question. So when you're dealing with social media, you wanna consider their goals, needs and pain points. You know, think of social media as short form content, right? You have, yes, on Facebook, you can write a long, long, long, long post. Your generally audiences aren't necessarily gonna sit and read six or seven paragraphs on their Facebook feed or they're not always gonna expand the information or the description on Instagram. So you're having to really tailor in your messaging and get to the nugget, get to the clear piece that's gonna resonate with them and push them to take the next step that you're looking for them to do. So you wanna make sure you're hitting on that. And you also wanna make sure you're diversifying your messaging to each of these, like through the headlines, maybe the infographic and post copy, right? So like, I don't know if there's an opportunity to talk about, you know, the number of types of volunteers that may be volunteer for your organization. That might be, like maybe my pain point is like, I don't like meeting new people, but I wanna volunteer. So if I know that the people that are already working or volunteering at these events are like me, then I'll feel a little more comfortable and I might sign up to become a volunteer. When you're writing blogs, you know, blogs are your long form content, you know? Looking at behaviors and other aspects of your persona can be a great place to create a series of long form that they'll find interesting. You know, I think one thing to note on, and I've shared this in previous presentations in the past around marketing and communications, I try to use the term communications, but is, you know, the 80-20 rule. You wanna spend, you wanna publish about 80% of your content is really just about the topic of that your organization might exist in, but it's not really specific about your organization. And really only about 20% of the stuff that you publish should be about your organization specifically, including like, you know, donation asks, you know, updates. But like if there's a, who was I talking to recently about it, it was like, oh, I was working with an organization that's building an application for cancer patients to sort of help manage their journey through cancer. And I was talking about their content strategy and I said, you know, we could, one thing is to talk about the product and say how fabulous this product is. The other thing could be like, you know, five top, top five symptoms that oncologists tend to miss during cancer treatment. I might find that very interesting and compelling and I would wanna read that. And then at the bottom, it could say, you know, by utilizing this app, you're able to continuously update your provider on your symptoms on a day-to-day basis. But we didn't capture them by saying, track your daily symptoms. It's like, oh no, first we're planting the seed that like these are miss symptoms, right? These are symptoms that are consistently overlooked by oncologists for email. I mean, I think we talked a little bit about this when it came to the donor side, but it's really a great opportunity to elicit a change in a persona. This is where you can really incentivize someone to go from A to B, B to C. So it's really important that you don't mess it up, but it's also really important to take advantage of that moment of sitting in their inbox. And if they're looking at it, you wanna make sure that that interaction is as valuable as humanly possible. So segmenting your email marketing materials to address each target audience and persona, it's really important and vital. And that comes down to two sides, right? It comes down to the messaging, but it also comes down to your sort of your database capabilities. Do you have the ability to actually segment and tag your audiences and your individual personas to kind of help follow through on that. And as I mentioned before, if you join us next month in March, we'll talk a lot about how to leverage your CRM to create more effective messaging. And then lastly on your web, we did talk about this as well, while your organization will probably have its own tone of voice, you wanna be sure you hit the key components of each persona and target audience, right? So again, I think I mentioned this before, you wouldn't put the same messaging or think about the person in the same way on the donor page as you maybe would a program participant page. So that's kind of all of my information for today. I hope that these tactics are a great place for you to start to think through. And as you develop your personas, be able to kind of step in and bring them to life and put them to work. Cause it's a lot of work to get there, but that work pays off when you're sitting at a meeting and you're like, I don't know what to write about. I don't know how to think about this. I don't even know how to organize my messaging for my social media. Like we sometimes will say, okay, we're gonna hit this persona four times this month. We wanna hit this persona three times this month. We wanna hit this persona six times this month. There's like 30% of the work done for you. Now it's just a matter of what are we gonna talk about? Oh, thank you, Holly. I don't know what your real name is, but OPA admin, thank you so much. I appreciate it. So I do wanna open up, Aretha, I have two slides for after the Q and A, if that's all right, but I'd love to open up for the Q and A portion of that. Do you wanna do my slides and then we do Q and A? Whatever you're comfortable with. I've been enjoying this. This is great. Oh, thanks, Aretha. I'll just pop in and then we can pop back. Again, I mentioned I kind of plugged it a couple of times. I'm very excited. So we at TAP, we are a very avid proponent of HubSpot and very excited that they have partnered with TechSoup to provide some pretty significant discounts. So Janelle is one of our HubSpot ex-liberts and so she will be joining me. What we'll be talking, it's not gonna be specifically, I mean, it will have the specific use case of HubSpot, but a lot of the strategies that we'll be discussing are kind of overarching when it comes to a CRM. For those of you who may not be familiar with CRMs, a customer or contact relationship management system. Where do I keep my basically my contacts? Some of you might use Google Sheets. Some of you might use Excel Sheets, but some of you might use Salesforce. But how do you leverage that information into your communications effectively? And then lastly, I wanna thank all of you for attending today. Also, I really appreciate all of your kind feedback. I appreciate it. I love being able to do this with Aretha on a monthly basis and you guys make it worth it. If you for whatever reason have more questions, you can always reach out to my team directly at techsoup at tapnetwork.com. The link here is also a link through the form on TechSoup where you'll be able to request a discovery call with one of our team members. We do provide a plethora of services. I think that's another great thing that TechSoup is sort of evolving into. They're not just a hardware and software solution. They have a lot of ongoing services like paid services like tapnetwork does, also free services like these webinars and courses. So I hope to see you at the webinar in March on the 22nd. The link is here and this will be included in the follow-up email from Aretha. And also come to the town hall on March 8th with Aretha and myself and some other folks. All right, Aretha, let's get into some questions. Thank you guys. All right, yeah, this is great. I put the link for the next event for the HubSpot event that's in the chat room. So OPA asks, I think you mentioned this earlier, is Persona the same as Avatar? But you can mention it again. I got that, yeah, so the Avatar is, I would say the Avatar can be a component. Like you might, as an organization, you might choose to personify, visually personify your persona with an Avatar or just a character, right? But traditionally it's more like my profile picture on Reddit or an avatar on like a gaming platform. Thank you. And Alex asks, how do you find relevant Facebook groups? Is there a Facebook portal that lists all by interest, et cetera? No, unfortunately there's not. You could Google Facebook group blah, blah, blah, blah, and see what comes up. The search functions via Google and also the search functions within Facebook are pretty robust. So if you're looking for something, it just might take some time to find the right ones. David asks, will the March session go beyond CRM's to Data Lakes? I think he might have meant Leaps, maybe. Data Leaps? Not sure what you mean. Yeah, David, type in the chat room if you're still here. Sure. And Angela, yes, the recording is available. We'll be emailing recording probably later today or tomorrow. Susan asks in the chat room, can you say more about gender or non-binary persona? That's a great question. As a member of the LGBT community myself, it's something that I'm constantly considering as I work through different clients and different marketing strategies. It is definitely when relevant, gender is an important piece. It's not always, but it is an important piece. And it's more important when and if a non-binary individual makes up a full persona. So I'll give an example is, I'm launching right now a, I hope this is appropriate, an STI sexually transmitted infection campaign within the state of Delaware here. It's called Erase the Stigma. And we want this to be an inclusive conversation. So we do actually have a target persona that lives within the LGBT community so that we're not always referring to sexual health in the terms of heteronormative dialogue. And in some cases that allows those individuals to feel included and inclusive. So I think it really is dependent on the marketing strategy and how that presents itself. More often than not, I will say, I hate to say this, but more often that it is a male or female type of just for the persona perspective, but I would say fewer than, it's fewer than far between where the gender is a major component to what you're gonna actually be executing at the end of the day. I think with David, he said about the CRM, he said, I mean data lake houses that integrate all data from analysis and business process. And he gave an example like data bricks. Yeah, so it's not gonna get that far. There are ways in which, using HubSpot as a use case where it's a centralized CRM, we're gonna be looking at it primarily through the lens of your communication. So like how are you using your CRM to actually communicate? Cause I think that's the biggest opportunity that I see a lot with the nonprofit space. But like a solution like HubSpot has additional hubs that you can attach to that CRM. They have a sales hub and a service hub. Actually service hub is another one that we've explored a lot with nonprofits who deal with like social work type of dynamics or they're kind of like using, like they have like different caseloads and they're managing a participant through a particular program. But we're not gonna go that far into like the data data data side of it. And this is the last question from Amanda. We're a librarian have two podcasters. How can we use persona to help them stay on voice for our organization brand? Very good question. Okay, that's a good question. So are they, a couple of questions I would maybe ask is, are they, are the podcasters podcasting as like a central role within your organization at your library? If so, I would have, I would identify who are your participants and now your personas. And this is something else that's a little bit interesting. Your personas on your podcast, if the goal is to get them to come into the library, that's one thing. If the goal is to get them to donate or to consume the content, I think it kind of goes back a little bit to what is the goal of the podcast and understanding who those individuals are that are listening, who are the individuals who are coming into the library and then being able to kind of cross-share that information so that as your podcasters are developing more information and more content, they're being aware of who's actually the foot traffic day to day in my library. And then vice versa, you know, they also need to know like who's consuming, you know, it may, if your library is located in, you know, Wilmington, Delaware, you might have a bunch of listeners all over the United States and they have a whole set of other things and they just really enjoy the content that's being created. So I think it kind of goes into what is the purpose of your podcast and who is your podcast really serving to be able to kind of help align those two pieces together. Okay, I said that was the last question but I'm gonna take this last one in the Q&A from Emily because I think it's a good one. I have a mailing list of 1,000 plus with no segments. Where do I start? Are there any resources? Can we read that one more time? I have a mailing list of 1,000 plus with no segments. Where do I start? Are there any resources? So it's depending on the platform that you have and I've done this before with organizations and I've also done this before with like a for-profit company you can sometimes it's like for MailChimp for instance you can send them an updated form like a form update like update your information with our organization and then they go in and they might be able to fill out a few more things like where did you hear about us? How did you find us? Whatever the information that you might be looking for I wouldn't go too far down but like have you ever attended any of our events in the past? You know, if they're in your list you run the risk of attrition if you do that because but if you're really needing to get more information or detail on that you can do sort of like a follow-up kind of form to collect more information about those ones. Yeah. Thank you so much Whit. That was amazing. I really enjoyed that. I know there are a lot of feedback in the comment section, very helpful. Thank you lots of feedback in the comment section. Look, I wanna thank you all for being here. Look forward to seeing you in our next webinars. Please fill out the survey. I'll be sending you the YouTube link and the presentation. Yeah, the slide deck within a day and maybe later today and have a great day everybody. Thank you. Bye everyone. Thank you so much.