Show Notes: 

For more advice on crafting your own audience personas, check out Personas of Interest from the Winter 2025 edition of SchoolCEO Magazine.

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Episode Transcript

Welcome to the SchoolCEO Podcast. My name is Eileen Beard and I want to share our next suggestion for mapping your communication strategy—segmenting your audience. Segmenting stakeholders prevents inundating everyone with every message, many of which may prove irrelevant to them. The more comms they get and the less relevant that communication is, the less they will pay attention to it. Then they might miss the info that really is relevant to them and come complaining to you about it, tossing you into another reactive cycle. Instead, craft targeted messages that arrive at the right time in the right format. 

Of course, segmenting your audience will make you a more effective conveyor of information. But creating audience personas for each segment will also help tune your marketing and brand messaging. 

What are they? Simply put, personas are mock ups or imaginary characters that represent a real subset of your audience. In your district, you can create personas that are realistic models of all the people who interact with your schools—teachers, students, staff members and parents. You can then break down these groups further by collecting demographics, media preferences and other personal information to tailor your approach to each audience segment. 

For example, you might discover that working parents need concise text alerts about schedule changes, while community members want detailed monthly updates about district achievements, and teachers need real-time updates through different channels entirely.

Personas are incredibly useful because they help you understand different subsets of your community and help you shape a marketing strategy for engaging your stakeholders. But how do you create them? 

First, you have to conduct qualitative and quantitative research. You can create qualitative research through surveys, focus groups or even anecdotally in casual conversations with your stakeholders. You can obtain quantitative research by surveys as well as looking at numerical data from your district website, app and social media platforms. 

Second, you have to segment your audience. Then segment them again. Families and staff are two segments every district has in common. But you might break families into smaller groups such as one and two parent households or by the ages of their children. 

Third, bring your personas to life so you can see your district through their eyes. Here’s an example of an audience persona: Hurried Harriet is a single parent of a middle schooler. She is a 38-year-old lawyer who earns $80,000 a year and prefers to receive school communications via text over email. She ranks mental health support as one of the most important elements of his education. 

Hurried Harriet is completely made up, but she is the kind of character you can create using real information. Bringing someone like Harriet to life lets you craft relevant communication and deliver it to her in a format she’ll appreciate. When you can view your school district through Harriet’s eyes, you can not only broadcast information, you can broadcast your district’s strengths back to her—and the subgroup she represents—in a way that speaks to her priorities and in the style of communication she prefers. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Segmenting your audience and further segmenting it into audience personas is good for communicating information as well as reinforcing your brand to your stakeholders. Which is key to any successful long-term strategy. Happy planning!

Thanks for joining me.