What's your go to framework for defining personas?

I’m fortunate to work with a well-established community of practice. We have folks on different career journeys. Individuals face work challenges and they also have career goals – and some are part of the community for that reason. Some just wanna hang out for a bit. There are all sorts of folks involved in some way.

We’d like to define some personas to help us build out some landing pages. We want the landing pages to speak to those who aren’t familiar with the community, who we feel would get the most from certain parts of the community. And perhaps also help those who are already part of the community to reflect on why they remain part of the community.

From your work with user experience (UX) professionals, what frameworks have they used to define personas?

I’m not after old-school personas by demographic such as “Brian is on $300k a year and drives a white Tesla, etc” – I’m more interested in problems-to-be-solved style personas, where we dive into identifying problems/pains that people face and the gains they desire.

I have an idea already about how we might define personas yet I’m super curious what persona frameworks already exist, particularly those outside of the community world.

And for the benefit of us as a community of community professionals, I’m curious how we might adapt existing frameworks and apply them to our context as community professionals.

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Not 100% just community related but really enjoyed following along this article when I was working on building personas: A Framework for Building Personas | by Saad Ansari | Medium

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Thanks for sharing, @maxpete.

I had a read and this looks super helpful. Nice one!

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I tend to create personas based upon real people within the community. Reviewing interviews and interactions with community members I can create a more suitable, usable persona based on why they are in our community space, and it tends to not only create a stronger rapport, but actionable activities based on actual community members.

Example: I interviewed 30+ community members in one of my charity fundraising communities and noticed several distinct behaviors that I could categorize as “the curious do-gooder, the invested activist or serial fundraiser”. Pairing this with bi-annual surveying helped us understand what they needed from our team and how we could improve our product/platforms.

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Hi Simon, I am currently in the process of creating those - starting out with doing UX research first. I also have a community of practice. Happy to get on a call with you to see how I can help you more and share what I am building to see if it could help you too.