You understand how personas can help you with your design, product, and marketing strategies.  You made the significant investment to develop personas.  Now what?  Do internal stakeholders know they exist and understand the power in using personas?

If you are struggling with how to get personas socialized and at the forefront of driving strategies throughout your organization, you are not alone.  The following ideas are some of our favorite ways to immerse teams in the persona work.

Idea #1:  Host a Persona Fair

Hosting a persona fair allows large teams to become completely immersed in the personas. Stations representing each persona are set up in a large conference space. Teams visit each station and experience each persona through posters and cards detailing facts about each persona, objects that represent the persona, and often custom games that are designed to help them gather insights about each persona as they move from station to station.

Interactive exercises and workbooks can also be incorporated to guide learning, highlight the most relevant insights and provide a place for viewers to capture their own thoughts and personal action items as they visit the stations.

Idea #2:  Create an Artifact Gallery

Artifact galleries are another immersive technique for socializing personas and the research behind them. Posters and/or tri-fold boards filled with images, key findings and quotes from the research bring each persona to life.

Artifact galleries can be shared with teams as part of a larger workshop that includes activities designed to engage the team such as empathy exercises based on design thinking  or role-playing in which participants adopt the perspective of a specific persona and think through sales processes, marketing efforts, product solutions, etc. from their unique perspective.

Artifact galleries can also facilitate unstructured browsing when placed in common areas such as break rooms or meeting spaces.

Idea #3: Develop Digital Assets

Bringing personas to life using digital assets can be especially valuable if teams are geographically dispersed. Some of our favorites are:

• Creating short videos or vignettes for each persona with stock footage and professional voice over that tells their story.
• Recording podcasts based on each persona that people can download and listen to on their own time.
• Placing a persona site on your intranet and including images, findings, quotes, and more.

Idea #4:  Generate Immersion Materials

Creating well-designed print materials makes a difference when socializing insights. They can be used in Persona Fairs and Artifact Galleries and then placed around the office. Some of our favorites are:

• Persona Quick Cards – Printed cards on heavy stock or laminated for each persona, including an image, quotes, fast facts, etc.; these cards can be put on a binder ring for quick reference.
• Persona Photo Essay – Created like a feature in a magazine, including stories about the personas with stock footage and quotes to bring it to life.
• Life-Sized Persona ‘Standees’ – A life size image of the persona with facts and quotes. This can also be printed in a smaller scale if they need to be more portable.
• Persona Posters – Created like movie posters and include images and compelling quotes.

We love getting creative to make insights actionable. Reach out if you want to chat!

Sara Dougherty
sara@clearworks.net

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