Tomorrow on the blog, Haila Yates from Greenlights for Nonprofit Success is going to share a great example of how her organization is using personas to make smarter marketing decisions. That made me realize that I hadn’t really talked about personas in awhile.

So, today I am sharing the worksheet I gave Haila as a participant in our Mentoring Program to help her get started on those persona conversations.

Nonprofit Marketing Persona Worksheet (PDF)

What is a persona you ask? Think of it as a description of your imaginary friends who represent the groups of people that your organization is trying to communicate with. Instead of creating content for the mythical “general public,” you create content for a handful of personas. That results in more relevant content that produces results.

Nancy Schwartz has written a nice piece on personas, so I’ll refer you there for more information. You may notice a little overlap in my worksheet and Nancy’s checklist — we’ve developed some nonprofit marketing training together and integrated our ideas on this topic.