You Can Change the People That Matter

• Personas are hypothetical “stand-ins” or profiles for your nonprofit’s actual audiences.
• They enable you and your colleagues (and that includes planners, writers, designers and others) to stand in your audiences’ shoes.
• They enable your nonprofit to launch campaigns to mobilize supporters to move your key issues forward that are shaped around audience needs and interests.
• For each persona, craft a personal profile that typifies the people in each subgroup or segment (folks in a particular segment that share characteristics) of each target audience. Create no more than three segments in each of the (no more than three) target audiences.
• If you have someone in mind, that’s the easiest way to start. But make sure that the persona is an amalgam of the different types of people in that segment.
• Put demographics aside and focus on what your persona wants, loves, does in a day, is interested in, wants to leave behind … all the nitty-gritty you learn as you get to know a new colleague or friend.
• Give your persona a name, face (just pick a photo off the Web, really), and take her or him out to lunch. What would your conversation be?
• Shape your fundraising and marketing outreach to these personas. What would they think and do? Would they open the e-mail or letter, or post a response to your tweet?

2. Listen to the online conversation.