Personas How-To Guide

Background

Pro bono work for a non-profit organization whose mission is to empower motivated students from low-income backgrounds to graduate from college and pursue a fulfilling career by providing a ten-year, tuition-free program that provides students with the opportunities, resources, and relationships to succeed in rigorous schools and careers.

Goals

The organization wanted to examine their board of directors and to refresh its mission, plan, and future membership in order to ensure that it was structured in a way that would help it succeed. Success was defined as having members who were well rounded enough — both individually and collectively — to be able to reflect the skills and values needed for membership.

Methodology

In order to layout a plan for accomplishing their goals, I worked with the organization to create the ability for them to examine and evaluate the skills and values they wanted to reflect in their board membership. I outlined several steps they could take including an audit of their current board member skills and values, an organization values mapping exercise, and the steps needed to synthesize all this work into aspirational board member personas which they could use as templates when scouting and evaluating individual board members as well as the entire makeup of all members.