Buyer persona for organization development

Toby Elwin, community persona, change management, Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist — “For MORE!’ said Mr. Limbkins. ‘Compose yourself, Bumble, and answer me distinctly. Do I understand that he asked for more, after he had eaten the supper allotted by the dietary?”

A buyer persona is a commonly used approach that helps designers understand customer motivation and behavior. With a buyer persona in mind, designers create products actual people relate to. A community persona effort borrows from the buyer persona approach, with a twist.

Organization Development (OD) professionals can adapt the buyer persona approach to foster stronger engagement and enable effective organizational change.

Personas can be equally effective in guiding change management strategies. In this post, we’ll explore buyer persona principles that can boost communication, encourage adoption, and ultimately lead to lasting transformation.

OD is an intentional effort to guide and manage change. An organization is a self-organizing community of people. It grows only when people within it are motivated to develop. While OD might seem far removed from marketing, the principles of a buyer persona are surprisingly effective, with a slight move from “buyer” to “community”.

Incidentally, this also works with volunteer organizations, non-profits. Just shift the mental model to community.

The Boot to Reboot OD

In today’s world, marketing professionals, armed with technical skills to design social media communities, are often ahead of HR professionals when it comes to well-designed, OD initiatives.

The tools and frameworks HR and OD rely on need a serious reboot.

Where does OD impact us? Here is a small OD list intended improving organizational effectiveness, culture, and performance:

Change Management Implementation
Develop and execute a structured approach to transitioning individuals, teams, and organizations from a current state to a desired future state.
Culture Transformation Initiative
Assess and redesign company culture to align with organizational goals, values, and behaviors.
Leadership Development Program
Create and implement a program that enhances leadership skills across all levels of the organization to drive performance and engagement.
Talent Management and Succession Planning
Develop strategies to attract, develop, and retain talent, ensuring long-term success by identifying high-potential employees and preparing them for key roles.
Employee Engagement Survey and Action Planning
Conduct an employee engagement survey to assess morale, motivation, and satisfaction. Follow up with action plans to address key concerns.
Performance Management System Redesign
Reevaluate and redesign the performance management process to align with business goals, increase transparency, and drive accountability.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Strategy
Develop a DEI initiative aimed at creating a more inclusive workplace, improving representation, and addressing biases.
Organizational Restructuring and Realignment
Implement a restructuring project to streamline organizational hierarchies, improve workflow efficiencies, and align resources with strategic goals.
Process Reengineering and Optimization
Reevaluate and redesign key business processes to eliminate inefficiencies and improve operational performance.
Competency Framework Development
Design a competency framework that identifies key skills, behaviors, and attitudes needed for employees to be successful in their roles.
Learning and Development (L&D) Program
Develop a comprehensive training and development program focused on enhancing employees’ skills and knowledge to support organizational goals.
Merger and Acquisition Integration
Oversee the cultural and operational integration of two organizations post-merger, ensuring smooth transitions, alignment, and synergy realization.
Team Building and Collaboration Enhancement
Create programs aimed at improving team cohesion, collaboration, and conflict resolution.
Job Design and Role Clarification
Redesign roles and responsibilities to better align with strategic objectives and ensure clarity of expectations across departments.
Organizational Effectiveness Audit
Conduct an audit of the organization’s structures, processes, and systems to identify gaps and opportunities for improvement.
Agile Transformation Initiative
Implement Agile methodologies across teams to increase flexibility, speed of delivery, and responsiveness to market changes.
Employee Onboarding Improvement Program
Redesign the onboarding process to ensure new employees are integrated into the company culture, understand their roles, and become productive more quickly.

Communication Rule #1: Know Your Audience.

Without motivation, development doesn’t happen. The key to development: intrinsic motivation.

In 1999, Alan Cooper, a usability expert, introduced the term persona. Cooper defined personas by goals that are personal and practical. Two key principles to remember:

Personas are derived from observing patterns during interviews and interactions.
Usability means designing systems that meet the needs of users.

Adele Revella has pioneered a persona approach more deeply into a buyer persona model that heavily influences me.

Effective messaging emerges at the intersection of what your buyers want to hear and what you want to say. Adele Revella, Buyer Personas: Gain Deep Insight into your Customer’s Buying Decisions and Win More Business

Good marketers craft targeted messages. They know one-size-fits-all communication doesn’t work. The same is true for OD. Successful change management isn’t about blanketing the entire organization with a generic message. It’s about tailoring communication to engage the distinct micro-communities within the organization, to meet unique behavior and culture: one-size-fits-none.

A persona-based approach helps OD professionals engage these groups more effectively, creating communication strategies that speak directly to their needs.

the most effective way to build buyer personas is to interview buyers who have previously weighed their options, considered or rejected solutions, and made a decision similar to the one you want to influence. Adele Revella, Buyer Personas: Gain Deep Insight into your Customer’s Buying Decisions and Win More Business

Organization Change and Development is not a linear progression, the key to change can use circular reasoning to engage design.

We need to engage design to appreciate where people are, not where we intend to “drive” them.

Return on Involvement: A New Kind of ROI

Where marketing looks for ROI as return on investment, community persona marketing for change management focuses on return on involvement. The true value comes from engaging people at the most personal level—their motivations, their needs, and their desires.

Think of communication to support change as a marketing campaign for motivation. The goal isn’t just buy-in, but to engage change agents, your true leaders. It’s not about what the company wants; it’s about what’s in it for them. A persona-driven approach allows OD professionals to meet their audiences at that critical intersection for them to relate What’s In It For Me? (WIIFM?) over What’s In It For Them? (WIIFT?).

The sum of individual motivations often exceeds the perceived value of the broader community. When you design for community personas, you tap into these individual drivers and create engagement at a deeper level.

Design the Heart of Human Behavior

Every communication, whether an email, training program, presentation, or strategy is a functional design. Communication needs to get through an obstacle course of noise. It’s less about what you design and more about how you design.

Functional design leads to desired actions. When design doesn’t achieve the intended result, whether it’s an email or a change initiative, it wasn’t functional. The key is in crafting designs that trigger the right reaction.

Donald Norman, in Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things, describes three levels of cognitive processing:

Visceral: Immediate reactions before interaction.
Behavioral:The management of everyday actions and decisions.
Reflective: The conscious consideration of past experiences, integrating meaning over time.

In OD, the goal is to design communications and interventions that hit all three levels. An email isn’t successful if it doesn’t elicit the desired visceral reaction. A strategy isn’t functional unless it leads to behavioral changes. Reflective processing solidifies these changes by connecting them to broader experiences and values.

Persona Perspective Foundation for Community

The foundation of community lies in understanding the personas within it.

Think of your organization as a design in itself. A network of people that develops only when its members do. A community persona strategy ensures that design focuses on the end-user’s motivation. It’s not enough to create great content or communication materials.

Effective messaging emerges at the intersection of what your buyers want to hear and what you want to say. Adele Revella, Buyer Personas: Gain Deep Insight into your Customer’s Buying Decisions and Win More Business

From Buy-In to Draw-In

Forget the term buy-in, buy-in is broke. Development isn’t something we sell. Change and OD is about commitment, understanding, and ownership to ultimately modify behavior. Change that sticks comes when people feel they are part of the process, when their voices are heard, and when they see themselves as agents of that change.

Effective communication in change management isn’t about bombarding people with information. It’s about connecting with their motivations and making them the champions of change. This is why community persona strategies are so powerful.

To draw people in to feel they are part of something bigger a persona strategy is one way to crowd source your strategy to include change management.

Engage or Die

People rely on filters to survive the daily communication that saturates each of us. We simply can not process the barrage of information and communication, to process the flood would send us into sensory overload, and many of us try to manage the effect of sensory overload, unsuccessfully as it is.

The world we operate in barely survives communication saturation when it gets through one of our primary gatekeepers to sanity: the What’s In It For Me? (WIIFM?) gate. To manage we build filters to process and place things into patterns we recognize. It helps us cope:

Have we seen this before?
Have we seen something similar?
Is this close enough that I can just leap to a conclusion without too much mental processing?

Others rely on their version of their WIIFM? filter to survive. The biggest deception to our brilliance is that your WIIFM? matches your target’s WIIFM?. Disavow yourself of this as soon as possible and you begin your journey to end-user adoption and product/project/change utility.

You must now think like a publisher. You should develop an editorial plan to reach your buyers with focused content in the media they prefer. Your first action might be to … organized by buyer persona. — David Meerman Scott*

The ultimate goal of OD is to foster an engaged, motivated community where individuals are empowered to drive change. Using a community persona approach, you design communication that resonates with more of the organization, to meet their WIIFM? and align to WIIFT?.

At the end of the day, change is a design challenge, and the better we understand the motivations of our community, the more successful we’ll be in creating lasting change.

Community Persona Design Template

The Community Persona Design Template helps to build archetypes of people you need to understand and engage. Go into the communities and engage with them them to discover:

Words and phrases they use;
Problems the change intends to solve;
Preferred media and message – and always augment this effort and develop a press kit or FAQs for their direct manager; and
Ways your community persona speaks and match that

Toby Elwin, persona, design, template — select to purchase a Word .docx Community Persona template

Design for Action

Functional communication creates a visceral reaction as an immediate, emotional response. It’s not enough to send an email or hold a town hall meeting. You must design for action. Consider the medium, the message, and the persona it’s intended for.

… customer-centred design: the idea that the design should be focused on the customer’s wants, needs, and context of use. If the process is truly customer-centred, then customers should be involved throughout the design development.
… while it’s good to understand the users of the system and their context, it’s equally essential to add the business and technology concerns into the mix too. — Lindsay Ratcliffe and Marc McNeill***

Steps to a Community Persona Strategy:

Create a Change Impact Assessment: Understand the motivations and challenges of your personas.
Engage the Community: Go into the communities and ask the right questions. What words and phrases do they use? What problems do they want solved?
Develop Persona-Based Messages: Tailor your communication to match their language, needs, and preferred media channels.
Pilot and Test: Create a feedback loop. Pilot your message, measure its effectiveness, and adjust accordingly.
Iterate: There is no one path for success, but the key is continuous improvement. Tweak, test, and refine until you achieve the desired result.

There is no formula, this is not alchemy. When you stop trying to hit on a formula to turn lead to gold, you move on from a fool’s pursuit towards people engagement.

Community Persona Change Management Design Sources

The New Rules of Marketing & PR: How to Use Social Media, Online Video, Mobile Applications, Blogs, News Releases, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly by David Meerman Scott
Engage: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web by Brian Solis
Agile Experience Design: A Digital Designer’s Guide to Agile, Lean, and Continuous (Voices That Matter) by Lindsay Ratcliffe and Marc McNeill

Buyer persona approach with an organization development twist