Buyer personas are a semi-fictional representation of a business's ideal clients or target audience. The personas are created by conducting market research and analysing real data about existing customers.
Persona representations are based on market research and real data about your existing customers, considering elements such as customer demographics, behaviour patterns, motivations and goals. Building accurate buyer personas and understanding them is vital to creating content that appeals to your target audience. Understanding your personas also helps in service development, providing effective follow-ups and other donor acquisition and retention processes.
Non-profit organisations benefit from understanding the personas of prospective donors, members and supporters as it helps them tailor their experience and meet their specific needs or expectations and address or solve their concerns. The most effective personas are developed via market research and insight from existing customers, such as their feedback or survey answers. Buyer personas can not only help the non-profit organisation attract the right customers, but can also help identify which customers would not be a good fit; these are called 'negative' buyer personas.
How to create a buyer persona:
1. Define your audience
To create a buyer persona, the organisation must first start with in-depth research into their current donors, members and supporters to record measurable information such as demographics. The relevant data can be gathered either from existing CRM systems or, if the organisation does not have a CRM system in place, through customer surveys or by using the web and social analytics tools to see who is interacting with your organisation online. Newsletter subscribers and event sign-ups are other valuable sources of information about your organisation's audience. Once the relevant insights are collected, competitors should also be analysed to see any missing target groups or segments. Conducting keyword research such as Google search terms will facilitate the persona profile as it allows the non-profit organisation to see how their prospects research, what words and phrases they use and enables the organisation to rank highly by implementing the appropriate tags.
2. Outline the audience's pain points
The persona must capture the problems faced by potential customers, what needs to be solved, what barriers are they encountering and what is stopping them from achieving success and supporting the organisation. Social media channels can be monitored to capture mentions of your organisation, competitors, services and keywords related to your industry or cause. An internal survey from various departments or teams, such as volunteers, marketing or event managers, will also uncover donors' most common questions. The data gathered from the internal and external analysis will help identify any patterns in the challenges faced by people concerning your organisation.
3. Outline the audience's goals
The audience's goals and aspirations are positive outcomes that donors, members and supporters wish to achieve; thus, the persona should also capture them. For non-profit organisations, they are usually personal or social goals related to making a positive impact, being part of the group making a difference by improving and giving back to society. The persona's goals focus on getting to know one's audience, but the goals should also be directly related to the solutions provided by the organisation whenever this is possible.
Suppose the persona's goals cannot be explicitly linked to what the non-profit organisation is offering. In that case, they can also become the basis of marketing campaigns, informing the tone or theme of the approach taken. Goals and aspirations can be identified through social media listening, and the organisation's volunteers and customer service team can also provide insight into customer goals.
4. Outline how your organisation helps
Once the persona's pain points and goals have been identified, the organisation must create a clear picture that showcases how the non-profit can help. Non-profit organisations must focus on the positive impact and the progress made towards the goals or cause, showcasing how the donations were invested and the impact made by the supporters and members. The organisation must consider the audience's point of view and focus on making their donors, members, and supporters feel valued throughout their journey and support for the non-profit.
5. Convert research into personas
The common characteristics identified from research must be grouped to form the basis of each unique customer persona, turning insights into accurate personas for the organisation. Each persona created should have a name, a job title, a home, pain points, goals and other defining characteristics to make it seem as real as possible without getting too specific.
An example of a customer persona would be:
Jolly James
- 40 years old
- Lives in a medium-sized urban area in England
- Works in the family business ran together with his spouse
- Likes to give back to the community and supports local charities
- Has an active social circle, participating in various physical activities or events
- Financially well-off, with an active lifestyle and strong online presence
Personas are the semi-realistic descriptions of people who represent segments of a customer base. Not all customers in a group will fully match all of the characteristics of their assigned persona, and that is not an issue as the personas' purpose is to allow your institution to think about clients in a human way, rather than a collection of data points.
6. Use personas to plan marketing efforts
Organisations should provide at least five pieces of content that showcase how they provide value to their donors, members, and supporters, how they help solve pain points, achieve goals, and the impact made for the cause. The buyer personas should be considered for every decision concerning the organisation or their marketing strategy, as the content and the services must be valued by customers and help the organisation build long-term relationships with the donors, members and supporters they represent.