Personas with purpose: understanding your organisation’s audiences through a regenerative lens

It is widely recognised that to stay relevant and provide value, organisations must develop a deep understanding of their audiences. And central to this process is the creation of personas—semi-fictional, research-driven representations of the people you aim to serve.

Personas capture key attributes such as demographics, personality traits, interests, behaviors, goals, challenges, and decision-making styles, offering a human-centered perspective that helps teams align and respond to the needs, motivations, and actions of their audience.

Traditionally, businesses focus on buyer and user personas to optimise engagement, drive purchasing decisions and build brand loyalty, with profit as the primary goal.

But what do personas look like in a regenerative context, where profit isn’t the main priority anymore? What shifts are necessary, and how can socially and environmentally conscious organisations develop personas with purpose at the center?

In this blog post, we’ll explore how personas might evolve through a regenerative lens. Because it’s high time we shifted our focus towards the true needs of the broader ecosystem, and started prioritising meaningful, collaborative change over the obsessive pursuit of profit.

A quick persona refresher

To create personas, we need a blend of data-driven insights and in-depth dialogues with people representative of our ecosystem. The profiles encompass both demographics and psychographics, complete with a name, photo and stories that bring them to life.

A common point of confusion I often see is the difference between personas and segments.

Segments provide high-level classifications of groups based on shared characteristics like sector, organisation type or geographical location.

Personas delve deeper into the individuals we seek to engage with. They offer a multi-dimensional view of various communities, looking at their interests, pain points, goals, motivations, decision-making styles, preferred communication channels, objections and expectations.

While segments provide a scaffolding for targeted outreach, personas add the human touch. They transform faceless segments into relatable individuals with distinct personalities, aspirations and struggles. Both are needed.

Personas in a regenerative context

Widening the research lens

A regenerative purpose requires that organisations go beyond the conventional buyer and user personas, and widen their lens to understand their wider ecosystem. This expanded view includes not only direct users and customers but also indirectly impacted community members, partners, supply chain participants, advocates etc.

This might mean developing additional personas such as partner personas, civil society personas or advocate personas, to better capture the range of existing relationships. By adopting this more inclusive approach, businesses can start co-creating impact across the broader ecosystem.

Embracing a Nature persona

What if organisations embraced the concept of a “nature persona”? Courses like the Non-Human Persona programme from the Life Centered Design School and the Onboarding Nature Toolkit developed by B Lab Benelux, the Earth Law Center, and Nyenrode Business University—aimed at helping businesses integrate nature as a key stakeholder—offer inspiring examples and valuable guidance for embracing this innovative approach.

Such an approach encourages teams to view nature as the crucial partner that it is. It fosters a deeper connection to the natural world, cultivating a better understanding of its needs as well as respect for its key role in our well-being, now and in the future.

By tuning into these often-neglected aspects and giving a proper voice to nature, organisations do not only design for human needs but also for planetary health. This mindset reinforces the idea that humanity is an integral part of nature, not separate from it.

From data extraction to collective well-being

While traditional persona research typically focuses on extracting insights to drive more sales, a regenerative approach is about empathic conversations aimed at collective well-being.

In this context, we listen to the real needs of communities and the natural world—looking to foster collaboration and co-creation instead of exploiting personal data for profit. The idea is to create meaningful, long-term value for the ecosystem, working alongside those who have the greatest understanding of it.

As Cecilia Scolaro and Tiago Vilas Boas, founders of Design Reparations, beautifully articulated this during one of the Design Reparations events at Dutch Design Week 2024:

Design—meaning “any form of manifestation of an intention”—must evolve. We need to shift away from “extracting insights, offering top-down ‘solutions and shaping realities according to our own perspective; creating new products, new technologies that require more resources; trying to convince people to consume more; relying on euro-centric models, references and definitions of knowledge” to:

• “Designing with nature
• Protecting Earth’s balance
• Designing sustainably
• Designing with the next generation to secure the future
• Designing for everyone”

Before we dive into the practical steps for creating personas, let’s look at the key benefits they can offer to organisations.

The benefits of developing personas

1. Fostering a vibrant community around the positive change you’re looking to create

When you take the time to understand the values, aspirations and challenges present throughout your ecosystem, along with what is required to create positive change, you lay the foundation for a thriving and dynamic community. You create trust, form deeper bonds, develop long-lasting relationships and can ultimately take collective action that really matters.

2. Improving your initiatives and products

Persona research offers invaluable insights into how your products, services or programmes are truly perceived and the impact they’re making within your ecosystem. The process reveals what resonates, where improvements are needed, and what changes could drive greater, more meaningful outcomes.

By engaging consistently with your various communities and by listening to the natural world, you can design and refine your initiatives based on genuine needs rather than assumptions only. This will ensure that your work stays relevant, impactful and focused on addressing the core issues at hand.

3. Strengthening and tailoring your communications

By gaining a deep understanding of your communities’ challenges, goals, motivations, and feelings about the current landscape—as well as their perspective on the actions and change needed—you’ll ensure your message really resonates. This insight will allow you to speak their language and meet expectations, making your brand more relatable and impactful. 

4. Developing a content strategy that drives meaningful action 

The persona exercise will give you a wealth of content ideas for your community’s journey – from the moment  they first discover and consider engaging with your brand, all the way to the moment they make a decision and stick around. 

By understanding the typical decision-making process, along with the goals and pain points your audience experiences, you’ll gain a clearer vision of the value you can deliver and the specific content needed at each phase to inspire meaningful action. This will enable you to build a focused content strategy that fosters engagement, deepens community connection and creates change.

5. Showing up on relevant channels 

Persona research will also help you understand where your communities like to spend their time, what content styles and formats resonate with them, and what encourages them to take action. With this knowledge, you can invest your resources in the platforms that really make a difference.

6. Optimising resource allocation

Impact-first organisations often have limited resources and must make strategic decisions about where to allocate their time, budget and efforts. Personas offer a clear picture of the most pressing needs and priorities of different community groups. This information will help you prioritise your initiatives, ensuring that resources are used efficiently and effectively to maximise your positive impact.

7. Ensuring a shared understanding across teams

When all teams – from marcomms and product development to advocacy, business development and everything in-between – have a shared understanding of the ecosystem your organisation is looking to serve, relationships get enhanced – both with external audiences as well as internally, across teams. 

With this mutual understanding, confusion is minimised. Suddenly, there’s a unified view on who exactly you’re aiming to connect with and how best to resonate with them. This translates to messages that are uniform and crystal-clear, reaching all your communities in a consistent way.

So, how do you develop personas with purpose at the center?

1. Map out the ecosystem around your purpose

With your value and purpose crystal clear, begin by mapping out the ecosystem around your organisation’s purpose and identify all relevant groups, both directly and indirectly involved. This may include community members, civil society organizations, donors, users, customers, policy makers, partners, ambassadors, advocates, and of course, the natural world.

2. Look at existing data

Next, assess what you already know about each of these groups to identify demographics, firmographics, engagement patterns and sector dynamics.

• Review your existing data sources like CRM, web/social media analytics, marketing and sales systems, learning management systems, community platforms etc.
• Analyse past and current partnerships and initiatives your organisation has been involved in.
• Talk to various teams within your organisation to gather insights on trends and interactions they’ve noticed in their work.
• Consult internal reports as well as publicly available research from think tanks and recognised organisations in the sector.

3. Engage in in-depth conversations 

Now that you’ve formed some initial assumptions about who your ecosystem personas might be, it’s time to dive deeper. Identify at least 3 individuals from each persona group and engage in in-depth conversations to understand their goals, challenges, motivations, values and what they stand for. Listen to their views on the current situation, and how they envision collaboration and co-creation to advance the shared purpose. Consider asking some of these questions to guide the discussions:

1. What’s your sentiment about the status quo?
2. What are the changes you want to see in this space?
3. What do you think about the [purpose]?
4. What are your dreams about this space?
5. What are your frustrations about this space?
6. What are your key responsibilities in this space?
7. What gets you energised about topic x?
8. What are your biggest challenges and how do you usually address them?
9. What are your key goals in this space?
10. How would you like to collaborate to create change in this space?
11. How do you define real impact in this space?
12. Where do you start looking for initiatives/products in this space?
13. What does the decision-making process look like?
14. How do you evaluate between two similar initiatives/products?
15. What are the usual key drivers/deterrents when choosing?
16. What do you expect from an initiative/a product like ours?
17. What concerns you about an initiative/a product like ours?
18. How do you prefer to interact? Who else is involved?
19. Where do you get new info/inspiration on topic x?

4. Create your persona profiles

As you talk to people, you’ll start identifying recurring patterns and common themes within each group. But how do you know when to conclude this process? When the insights no longer feel fresh or surprising, and you find yourself anticipating what people will say next.

As you compile and analyse this qualitative data, you’ll be able to organise these insights into a framework like the one below.

5. What about the nature persona?

This is an area I’m currently exploring but here are several questions and a framework I’d begin with:

1. What is your organisation’s relationship with the natural world; where is it situated within the broader ecosystem?
2. How is your organisation currently relying on nature’s gifts?
3. What risks is your organisation posing to the natural world?
4. How is the ecosystem currently struggling, and what role can your organisation play in supporting its recovery?
5. What does nature need to thrive, and what is your organisation’s role in fostering a healthy ecosystem?
6. What do local communities and researchers have to say about the ecosystem’s needs and how can you collaborate to better understand and address ecosystem challenges together?
7. What key actions and commitments is your organisation making to help regenerate the ecosystem?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on what else you’d include and, if you’ve developed nature personas, let’s connect and exchange insights.

To sum up, I deeply believe that by embracing these perspectives—honoring our interconnectedness and recognising that we are nature, not separate from it—organisations can cultivate collective well-being, inspire collaboration, and create lasting, inclusive change.

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Image credit: Hug Earth by Tengwan Quek (Instagram; Website) via The Greats.

Published on 20 November 2024 by Laura Tufis.