Understand your audiences to create personas
Understanding your audiences is key to building meaningful connections and delivering impactful support. By creating detailed personas, you can tailor your messaging, engage the right people, and meet their needs more effectively. This approach not only enhances your communication but also helps you make informed decisions that drive your charity’s mission forward.
To do this, it’s essential to understand what makes them tick—their needs, motivations, and behaviours. These factors will vary across audience segments, from regular supporters and fundraisers to those who need your support or volunteer their time. By understanding these differences, you can create detailed personas that drive more targeted messaging and help increase donations.
Follow these four steps to identify your different audiences, then create personas for each one:
Step 1. Understanding your audiences
This guide will provide you all the information you need to understand your audience, supporters, and users. We’ve included the why’s, how’s and when’s.
We also share practical tools and methods you can use to collect data providing you with a platform to use the information to refine your marketing efforts.
Step 2. What to user research and when
User research is a powerful tool that can empower charities to make informed decisions, cultivate empathy, and ultimately, deliver more effective and targeted support and services. In this guide, we’ll delve into what aspects charities should conduct user research on and when, providing guidance for maximising the positive change that can be achieved.
Step 3. An introduction to personas
Learn how personas, when backed up by research from your users, turn your existing insights and data into relatable narratives that can promote empathy, increase awareness of your different users, inform design and communication decisions, and support your overall strategy. In this guide you’ll learn what personas are and how to create them.
Step 4. Create your personas with our template
Using your learnings from the first three steps, you’ll be able to download our handy template. In this you’ll find a simple example of what a persona looks like, as well as a blank template that will get you started with creating your own.