Refresher: Personas get you out of your head and into the heads–and ultimately hearts–of your donors, supporters, volunteers, board members, etc. They allow you to understand the motivations and behaviors of different types of people. This means you can optimize your messaging and the mechanisms in which you use that messaging, e.g. website, Twitter, appeal letters, etc.

In Claxon University’s Words on a Mission course, nonprofits create a persona in Lesson 7. In prepping the Study Guide for that lesson, we came across two suuuuuuuuuuper funective (fun + effective) tools for  building personas. They give you extremely useful info on people in different zip codes and couldn’t be easier to use.

1) ESRI’s Zip Lookup

They’ve created a series of different target audience groups. Clack in any zip code in the country and you get a quick n’ dirty sense of who is living in that area. I tried 98118, the most diverse zip code in the country as of a few years ago. Here’s what I learned:

And when you click on one of the titles, you get info about that group:

You can also quickly see info about income by zip code, county, state and the country as a whole. Super spiffy.

2) Nielson’s MyBestSegments Tool

You can also search by zip code using this tool. Their breakdowns are a little more granular. You get information like this:

And then you can click on segments for a description, like this one for the Big City Blues segment.

Again, super spiffiness abounds on this site.

These are both great jumping off points for nonprofits who are savvy enough to create personas. Yes, you’ll still have to do work to create a persona that makes sense for your marketing objectives. But these free tools mean you can get all sorts of really good data in about as long as it takes you to say, “Do I have to create a persona?!” (Answer: Only if you want fabulous messaging that helps you successfully achieve your goals…up to you.)

P.S. Need some quick inspiration to get you going? Behold–personas in a 140 characters or less, all based on census data. Short, sweet n’ geeky.

***Want to engage more people more deeply in your mission? Grab your seat at Claxon University!***

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