The 4 Research Tactics We Used for Community Membership Personas
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Earlier this week, we shared our team’s process for creating our Community Member Personas and why they are so critical to the success of launching our new Pro Membership community. (If you haven’t read that post yet, I recommend starting there before reading below!)
Member Personas keep your team focused on who exactly you are serving and your purpose in doing so. It’s a tool you can return to any time you need to make a strategic decision.
While writing Member Personas may feel like a major step back (“I already know my target market back and forth, gosh darnit!”), many of the assumptions you’re making about future community members are likely clouded by your own bias. The only way to ensure that you build something useful is to engage in member research. Personas are the grounding element for this research, and they help show you where you’re right — and very wrong — about what product to build for your community.
Now that we’ve shared the Why of Community Personas, it’s time to share the How and all the lessons I learned during the process.
My DIY Process in Finding Insights
How do you find all the information you need to write helpful Community Personas?
We recommend conducting interviews with (at least!) 10 community members, data diving, and even getting a group together on a call or in a workshop. To take our first stab at these, we used secondary research (past and current surveys, data from our readers, and insight from our students and community conversations done in the past) to do so.
We were prepared for the possibility of needing to make adjustments to these Personas if a significant trend came out of our upcoming interviews with CMXers. And we have had to adjust as time went on.
In this case, “good is better than perfect” was true — and we even say on this worksheet that the persona is a guess that needs to be validated. You’re probably wrong about something.
So how did I get to the version we shared in Post 2?
1. I Used Our Existing Framework
Our team jokes about how we relearn our own lessons all the time, and I had to laugh at myself for not immediately turning to our own SPACE model. My coworker Erica wrote an article titled “Should I Attend CMX Summit?” where she spelled out who would gain the most out of joining us in LA in September for our annual conference. She organized it by community type, using our SPACE model that defines the business value of communities, and named specific job titles. Instead of feeling overwhelmed by the endless options of job titles in our community, this gave me a focused sample of job titles to get my creative wheels turning. Thanks, Erica! :)
You may not have a model like the SPACE model for your community, but your community influencers have certainly shared their insight in public forums that you can utilize to get your wheels turning. Have influencers in your industry self-published any guides or how-to’s that can inform you? Are there key members who actively share on Medium or LinkedIn their challenges and learnings that you could dissect? Is there an AMA in a similar community (that your members may also be a part of) that you could glean wisdom from?
The Lesson: Use your existing tools and resources about your community instead of reinventing the wheel.
2. I Considered Tenure
While looking at my list of community roles, I kept in mind it was important to reflect diversity of tenure in the industry. Our own Community Canvas teaches that each type of role is vital to a healthy community, and that includes every level of experience or seniority.
Ultimately, we want our Pro Membership to be useful to community builders who are committed to learning, challenging themselves, and moving the industry forward. If there’s a community builder that is newly graduated and eager to invest in themselves, we want to meet that need — but it’s important we know where this person best fits in the membership model so they and our other members have a great experience. We also want more experienced community builders — regardless of title — to have a space where they can connect with peers in a similar career space as them who share the same challenges.
Not all members share the same motivations or challenges, simply because of tenure. Now you can prepare for this landscape so everyone is best supported and wants to return to what you’re building together. If you’re only supporting newbies, your industry veterans will get little out of your programming. If you’re only focusing on veterans, your members who are newer to your industry will feel under qualified to participate — talk about imposter syndrome. And in either scenario, you’ve left out all the folks somewhere in the middle!
The Lesson: Considering tenure keeps your programming honest and gives you perspective on how your members who differ in tenure can teach one another and have their own needs met.
3. I Used Existing Feedback
Even though I wasn’t able to set up interviews or group calls specifically for the Persona exercise (we have been validating these assumptions during our continued research phase and will continue to do so in the application interview stage), I had something on my side. Our team regularly asks feedback in our Facebook Group. It was really easy for me to reference previous threads that covered existing pain points and other topics that overlapped with the worksheet’s content fields.
Our team also did something very right that came in handy here: as soon as we knew we wanted to do a Membership model, we opened up limited seats to be a Founding Member. This group consists of some of our most engaged and invested community members. We then created a private Facebook Group just for those members, and use that space as our personal advisory group as we build out this program. I had direct access to the feedback from some of our most insightful partners who reflect a variety of industries, role titles, and tenure. (Our COO, Carrie Melissa Jones, dedicated a whole post to the value of a Founding Members Group!)
The last thing you want to do is make stuff up or use your own bias. It doesn’t have to be formal feedback in the form of a perfect survey. Hop on the phone, pose a question on your active social channels or other communities you’re in, buy someone coffee. Lean on the people already on your side.
The Lesson: If you aren’t regularly collecting feedback — even informally — start doing it now. It’s not only a good way for your community to feel heard, but it might also save your ass when you have to put together a framework on a deadline that maps out who they are.
4. I Looked Inward
I’m a relator by nature, so this was a fun exercise for me, but I really wanted to get this right. I found myself overthinking things and getting flustered when it was a Persona I didn’t feel familiar with (like a developer evangelist or director of community). So, I tapped into my greatest personal strength — empathy.
It’s fairly easy for me to put myself in the shoes of someone very different than me, and it was really validating this came in handy here. I thought back to my own challenges in a previous community management role and came up with some really quality pain points that our membership could solve. It reminded me I have more in common with a developer evangelist and director of community than I gave myself credit for. We all know what it’s like to have cool work assigned to marketing instead, or have to explain our job to our direct supervisor.
Your natural strengths don’t have to look like relational qualities like empathy. Maybe your strengths are rooted more in strategy or data; you can plot qualitative feedback into categories to look for trends to help inform your Personas.
The Lesson: One of your greatest tools in this process is you. Take an honest look at the things you’re good at and tend to inspire you, and use that as fuel. You’re wanting to create great work here, and that process should feel true to how you work best — it will show.
Mistakes I Made & What I’ve Learned
We promised from the beginning we’d be honest about our mistakes and how we’re growing, and the Personas portion is definitely included! So, what did I learn along the way?
1. Keep It Neutral
My coworker Erica came in handy a second time for giving me feedback to keep our Personas gender neutral by using gender neutral names and pronouns (they, them). She’s found that if a Persona is gendered, it can alter a person’s thinking about the Persona unconsciously.
I originally had a balanced number of traditionally male and female names (totally leaving out non-binary!) and diversity in name origin, and Erica’s feedback was a great reminder that there was still some improvement I could make. I’m not totally satisfied with the diversity of name origin, so if you have feedback for me on this, please let me know! I welcome it.
2. Approach From The Right Angle
When I first sat down, I was overwhelmed by the unending possibilities of personas I could create based on the diversity of roles in our community. This clouded my vision and I found myself trying to outline why a developer in our community would benefit from the membership. Whaaaaat? Square peg, round hole. I quickly realized: the membership is for folks building community — period. That ah-ha moment is what brought the developer evangelist persona to life. They work in development, but they’re the person building community who would benefit from the membership. Remember who your community is serving. It can’t serve everyone.
3. Multiple personas might be necessary
I broke our own rule and instead of creating one persona for each membership level, I created six total — three for Basic and three for Premium. I struggled to create only two because we used this Persona framework to identify who our most engaged customers are. It seemed counter-intuitive to not capture all of our potential qualified customers, so I decided to create a good mix that we could either use, or decide to pare down. So far, it’s been the right decision to have multiple personas, because we found the motivations overlapped despite their variety in role and tenure. This validated our work. It also led us to making the decision to have one membership level, as we want to make sure a premium membership tier is done right when and if we do it.
There’s our take on using our own Members Persona exercise to build a new community! We’ll report back here on how effective/accurate these personas were in the coming weeks, and how we evaluated that success. If you use this practice in your own work, let us know below!
