Understanding User Personas as a Tool to Engage Youth During COVID-19
How cities can partner with young people to pinpoint coronavirus-related needs & craft public health messaging
This resource is a part of The Guide to Remote Community Engagement by What Works Cities. This collection of resources is designed to support cities that wish to create and maintain strong, institutionalized practices of community engagement during periods of remote working and in an increasingly digital world.
Government-led youth engagement throughout the COVID-19 pandemic has been difficult. As early data indicated that young people seemed to be less likely to catch or become seriously ill from COVID-19 than older adults, cities quickly directed their limited resources to those thought to be most vulnerable. Research from the University of California San Francisco Benioff Children’s Hospital now indicates, however, that as many as one-third of Americans between the ages of 18 and 25 are at risk of severe complications from COVID-19. In addition to the direct health consequences of the pandemic, young adults are also facing a negative economic outlook. The disconnection rate — the percentage of youth between the ages of 16 and 24 who are neither enrolled in school nor employed — doubled between February and June 2020, from 12 percent to 28 percent.
As new data reveals that youth are more vulnerable to the virus than previously thought, and that young adults may be key players in stopping the spread of the virus amongst each other and older adults, cities can now act accordingly. This resource will outline how cities can partner with young people to create user personas that pinpoint coronavirus-related needs and shape public health messaging specific to teenagers and young adults.
User Personas & Their Value as a Community Engagement Tool
User personas are fictional characters based on real, anonymized traits compiled through interviews with a target population. While they have their start in the private sector, over the last few years, user personas have become a popular tool for cities that want to understand the motivations and needs of their residents. Detailed user-personas help cities better target interventions to improve public services, remove barriers to accessing services, or better communicate what services are available and why residents may want to use them.
Cities can think about user personas in the context of COVID-19 as a way to understand specific resident needs when it comes to public health messaging, economic relief services, and other pandemic-related information like new voting procedures. User personas can also be used to better understand the most effective methods of communicating essential information to specific, target populations.
Creating user personas for teenagers and young adults is particularly important because youth can be difficult to reach with traditional city communication methods like long-form informational flyers and posters, press releases, or cable news. WWC partner, the Behavioral Insights Team (BIT), recently found that young adults in the U.K. under the age of 34, particularly young men between the ages of 18 and 24, are the least engaged with coronavirus communications. They are the least likely to recall coronavirus health guidance and the least likely to express intent on following through with said guidance. It is unclear why this is the case, but the study’s researchers suspect it is related to the form and channel of communication itself.
BIT expects that the same trials would produce similar results in the U.S. This means that a large portion of our population may be failing to fully comply with advice on how to slow the spread of, and stay safe from, coronavirus because current communication strategies do not resonate with young people, particularly young men. Young adults between the ages of 20 and 34 make up an estimated 20 percent of the U.S. population. Male youth between the ages of 20 and 24 alone account for about 11 million Americans. Investing the time in creating representative user personas can help local governments determine how best to reach their community’s young people.
Creating User Personas & Gathering Insights During COVID-19
To make user personas that specifically target teenagers and young adults, a city may consider the following steps:
- Partner with local youth organizations, universities, and schools to set up interviews with residents within a specific age range; the U.S. government defines “youth” as those between the ages of 16 and 24, while other entities may use a broader age range.
- Draft an interview sheet that can be used across all participants, asking specific questions to uncover attitudes towards coronavirus, social distancing and other health measures, and information needs both directly and indirectly related to the impacts of COVID-19.
- Conduct interviews and record observations on the interview sheets and, if possible, in a spreadsheet in order to better identify common themes across interviewees.
- Identify common themes across interviewees. Once observations have been grouped into themes, try regrouping them into different themes to see if there are more appropriate patterns or more closely matched themes.
- Collate these themes and observations into distinct personas, like “Social Sonia” below.
For a more detailed step-by-step instruction on how to create user personas for the public sector check out this resource. (While this resource specifically references open data, the process for creating user personas for any government service or information campaign is the same.)
Once a city has created a set of user personas, it can then choose which ones to target in an intervention and apply insights from the selected personas to build the intervention itself. Using the sample user persona “Social Sonia” as an example, one important insight is that the best way to reach youth like her is through friends and social media. To apply this insight in a targeted intervention, the city may consider launching a social media campaign or a youth ambassador program where young people volunteer to factually inform their friends about coronavirus and direct them to essential city resources. Drawing from another important insight from this user persona, it may be particularly useful for such a campaign to highlight mental health resources.
Social Sonia is also telling us that there is an important disconnect between what the government is saying and what the government is doing in regards to social distancing. It may fall on local governments to bridge this disconnect and explain, in a relevant way, why it is important for people like Social Sonia to keep social distancing even when bars in her community have opened back up and what social distancing looks like for youth like her.
Recognizing that User Personas are One Step in the Engagement Process
Creating user personas requires time and resources, both of which may be particularly challenging to procure during COVID-19. However, even if cities do not create a full set of youth user personas, simply engaging diverse youth throughout the community in a conversation about their COVID-19 related needs and preferred communication channels will result in more effective city response, recovery, and messaging than would otherwise exist in the absence of these conversations. Even a quick survey, like the one Baltimore, MD issued to its public school students to gather their insights on school re-openings this fall, is a fantastic step towards understanding youth needs and involving their insights in decisions that directly impact their well-being.
Partnering with teenagers and young adults to understand their coronavirus-related needs and preferred communication methods is an important step in the youth engagement process, but it is just one step. Moving forward, cities should consider furthering their partnership with youth to co-design solutions and empower them to be change agents and message carriers during this pandemic.
In Alaska, the state is patterning with local youth to do exactly this kind of work. Young Alaskans are creating their own public service announcements through graphics, meme, and video that the state then shares across social media using #AKYouthCombatCOVID. Cities can adopt this state strategy to fit their own jurisdictional needs. Partnering with youth to combat public health crises and improve local response has worked remarkably well during other public health crises, like the 2014–2015 Ebola outbreak, and it can work for COVID-19.
When cities create user personas for youth, they learn directly from young people how this pandemic has impacted them, how the city can better provide essential information and direct them to needed services, and how the city even design better services and strategies to meet their young residents’ needs.
Charlotte Carr was the primary author of this installment.
The Guide to Remote Community Engagement is written and compiled by Charlotte Carr, Becca Warner, Greg Jordan-Detamore, and Owen O’Malley. This collection of resources is designed to support cities that wish to create and maintain strong, institutionalized practices of community engagement during periods of remote working and in an increasingly digital world.
What Works Cities is a national initiative that partners with cities as they tackle pressing community challenges and improve residents’ lives through data-driven decision making. Learn more about the program and how to get access to support, here.
