Problem

My team and I are working on a project seeking to build bridges between decision makers and young people. One such project with UNWomen , involves a series of discussions with female role models in politics over Twitter.  One predicament for us is that of understanding our audience better and being specific about who we are trying to reach through these interventions. And hence we used the Personas tool.

 

How we used the tool

We workshopped the tool with 6 people for 2.5 hours. Everyone worked individually in constructing a persona with very little moderation. Through the exercise we quickly established that we needed to engage  with people outside of our digital audience; a wider group of activists and students working on gender issues that we don’t normally interact with. In smaller municipalities people are far less conversant with twitter and so we identified a real need to engage users through other methods, Facebook for instance, or even Twitter Lunch Cafes – where people people can come together in an offline space and be assisted in bringing their issues to a virtual discussion.

 

Results of using the tool

The tool has been extremely useful in helping us to narrow down our core audiences for this initiative and to understand some of the obstacles that they might face in joining an online discussion.

We gained more clarity about our outreach activities needing blend offline activities and online events and how a part of it should start with Universities and spread through student governments.