When Paul Gionfriddo took the reins four years ago at Mental Health America, an advocacy group founded in 1909, he made a lot of changes. One big shift: He insisted that his staff learn exactly who they were serving.
The organization, with a budget of $4 million, offers online screening for depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and other mental-health conditions as well as resources for connecting with treatment and support. About 7 million people a year were visiting the charity’s online portal, with web analytics generating a host of data about them.
“It’s a daunting task to try to go through 7 million people and figure out what the patterns are there,” Gionfriddo says. But, he decided, it was just the sort of task his staff must tackle.
So, over two days, his headquarters staff of fewer than 30 people sorted through all that data. Employees discovered enough patterns among the analytics they examined to segment the website visitors into 13 “personas” — a marketing term for how a collection of traits shared by many individuals can help an organization customize communications. Identifying personas can help charities raise money more successfully and provide more relevant services more efficiently.
Mental Health America’s efforts contributed to its increasing success at fundraising. “This is paying dividends, financially, for us,” Gionfriddo says. Online giving to the advocacy group jumped nearly 100 percent from 2016 to 2017, he says. In January 2018, fundraising on Facebook tripled compared with August and September of 2017, from about $10,000 to $30,000.
Identifying personas, he says, “is one of the safest ways to evaluate the ways you’ve been doing things as an organization, whether it’s fundraising or outreach in general.” For a small charity, he says, it can be a way to avoid spending money on surveys and consultants’ fees: “The information’s all right in front of you, if you just go and take a look at it.”
Your Data Can Reveal People’s Behavior
A couple of the personas Mental Health America discovered include: a young female student who uses the website’s screening tools, does not have much disposable income, and is interested in movies and entertainment; a grandmother who cares about mental-health policy and advocacy efforts, and her family and has a higher net worth. “These are high-level examples,” Gionfriddo says. “Then we get even more detailed in our descriptions.”
One insight Mental Health America gleaned from the staff exercise: Understanding more about why men visit the charity’s website.
“We think men are less likely to come to sites like ours and take our screens,” Gionfriddo says. That instinct was right — about three times as many women were taking the screening tests. But those men who did take them were usually middle-aged men, and the persona exercise helped the charity profile them.
For men, “their 40s and 50s are the ‘sweet spot’ — they have families and concerns about being breadwinners and concerns about their kids. For men, their concern was about taking care of others.”
As it updates its website this year, Gionfriddo says, the insights the organization gained from identifying personas are shaping the redesign with a goal of making the site more useful to visitors. The work on personas is already having an impact. For instance, the site now allows users to screen themselves for an illness, such as depression, and search for ways to deal with specific symptoms, such as chronic anger or insomnia.
Previously, the site did not customize the screening options by the type of illness or by specific symptoms. “It was hit-or-miss whether the information you got was what you wanted, just like it is with using search engines,” Gionfriddo says. “This is the next step forward. Now we customize by what people want, and we anticipate what they want by using customer feedback, broken down by demographics.”
To avoid mission creep, the organization holds fast to its 13 personas and keeps them in mind in everything it does.
“We’re actually quite insistent that people don’t stray from these,” the charity leader says. “You’re either building something for a constituency we have — or, if not, then you’re reaching out to a new constituency.” In the latter case, Gionfriddo says, he asks employees to find a partner organization to help reach that new constituency or abandon the project: “It’s important that we don’t waste precious resources.”
4 Steps to Take to Create Personas
Here’s how Mental Health America’s staff sifted through its audience data, and some advice from its leader’s on how to do something similar at your organization:
Assemble all the data.
Mental Health America pulled together all available data from its website analytics about site visitors: age ranges, gender, other sites the charity’s website visitors tended to consult, and so on — with all of that data poured into spreadsheets.
Split the staff into teams.
Small groups of coworkers can help each other spot patterns, making up for each other’s blind spots and biases. “You are filling in some of the gaps,” Gionfriddo says. “When you do it as a group and start trying to say, ‘What else is this person interested in; what else could we pick up from the analytics, what starts to emerge is a more fully fleshed person.”
Be prepared to be surprised .
Mental Health America thought it was serving a lot of older people who had lived with mental illness for decades. Instead, it discovered from questions site users answered when they took the charity’s screening tests that many of the people were young women. “You’ve got to pay attention to who you’ve got, not who you want,” Gionfriddo says. “You need to build something for them. If you want somebody else, you have to understand that you will need to build something else for that constituency.”
Heed your findings.
It’s easy to identify personas but then toss that information aside when an idea for a new program emerges, but that may not fit your audience. “It’s a natural inclination, particularly if the person developing that program area is different than the persona,” Gionfriddo acknowledges.
But, he cautions, “you can’t go with your gut here. If you’re not sure, call three or four people who fit that persona, create an informal focus group, and run that idea by them and see if it’s resonating with them.”
