You know that having an audience persona in place for your non-profit's communications is important. Having a persona can help you set better communications goals, create content that aligns with the audience, and more.
If your non-profit does not yet have an audience persona (or two, or three!) in place, check out our guide to building audience personas as well as our guide to audience research.
I've worked with many organizations who have successfully put together their audience personas. But usually they reach a point in the process when they say, "This is great and all, but what do we actually do with this persona?" Such a good question! After all you've poured a decent amount of time and resources in to creating this persona. Now, it's time to put it to work.
In this post we've put together a helpful list of ways that non-profits can use their audience persona.
1. Review relevant website pages through the eyes of your persona
Part of what you do in putting together a persona is get a high degree of clarity about your target audience. If you know that one of the key channels your target audience interacts with is your website, think about which pages they are likely to visit and give them an audit. For example, if your audience persona is for a current or potential program participant you'll want to review any pages relevant to your programs. Take what you've learned about this audience and make strategic revisions to the pages.
2. Craft social media posts specifically for your persona
If you're ever short on social media content ideas or just want to add a little more strategy to your posts, try creating a series of social media posts specifically for your persona. Once you've posted them all, take a look at your analytics to see how they stacked up against other things you've posted.
3. Create a communications campaign for your persona
Creating a short-term (or long-term) communications campaign is no easy feat. But having your audience persona on hand will improve your planning and decision making along the way. Based on your target audience's goals and motivations, you can design a strategic communications campaign to move them closer to that goal.
4. Test segmented email content for your persona
In case you haven't got the memo, segmenting your email list is a must. No more sending blanket content to every single subscriber. If email is a key channel for connecting with your target audience, start by identifying who on your list is part of that audience. You can send a simple one question survey to tag subscribers based on interests (or some other factor) to segment them. Then, follow up with content specifically created for that audience.
5. Review and update your style guide
If your organization has a communications style guide or branding guide, take some time to review it given what you've learned through creating an audience persona. Perhaps it's time to revamp the tone and style you use for writing, or maybe update your approach to graphics and images.
There are so many ways to put your audience persona to work. I hope these five ideas help you make the most of your audience persona. As you can see from this list, your audience persona can inform many levels of your content creation. If you're looking for most ways to bring your content in line with your target audience, be sure to grab a copy of our Monthly Content Planner Kit below.
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