What are personas and how can Unself use them right now?

We're using Personas to break down the types of people we want to help through our service and product offerings. These personas are synthesized from lots of documented, individual conversations our team has had.

Personas are validated when we have talked to 5–20 people fitting the same characteristics and drivers. (Not all personas are validated yet. Some are just placeholders for types of people we think are out there.)

The functional goal of making them is to help us better tailor our marketing/sales tactics and feature designs to meet their needs.

They also provide enormous internal value to formulate our time-based strategic goals and provide shared language.

Groups of Personas

Primary Target

• Young Professionals:  At Unself, we firmly believe the volunteer comes first. Our focus on Young Professionals allows us to validate many of the volunteer features core to our vision – without the red tape associated with High Schoolers. Young Professionals are our peers — theoretically we already have buy-in from our friends and existing personal networks (or at least a lower barrier to entry). Young Professionals are employed with the target businesses we want access to— adoption by their teams can lead to social currency and corporate partnerships down the line.

Secondary Target

• Admins Admins allow us to rapidly acquire volunteers and scale. By and large, they are driven by telling stories of outcomes + impact for their causes and engaged volunteers. In the future, they will allow us to solve systemic nonprofit problems, access corporate partnerships, and eventually –measure philanthropy.

Tertiary Audiences (Incomplete)

• College Students This segment has the potential to go viral when we win them over. Most of the personas we will most likely target have external requirements motivations.
• Unprioritized Volunteers Fringe cases that will come more naturally when we solve other segments' main problems; difficult to find or scale otherwise.