Speaking to the Heart and Mind

One of the most important aspects to effective change management communications is meeting the audience where they are - speaking to their heart and mind on the channel that best resonates with them.  One of the ways to help build effective communications is through the use of personas.

A persona is a realistic representation of an audience segment. Using personas can really drive consistency in communications, regardless of where the communications originate.  They enable HR, IT, Marketing, Leaders, etc to develop messaging with a consistent framework.

Here are a couple of tips to get started on your persona development:

• Begin with a blue sky brainstorm of all audience members

• Identify ways to combine similar audience segments

• Interview or conduct small focus groups with each  group

• Use this information to build the characteristics and communications preferences of each persona

• Make it fun and give the personas names and images - Visually bring them to life

• Once the persona is created, share it with members of the original interview/focus group to benchmark accuracy

• Incorporate their feedback

Here are a few ideas on what to include in your personas:

• Job level

• Motivations

• Influences

• Fears

• Pain points

• Channel preferences

• Communication frequency preferences