Evaluate, adjust, repeat: A five-year persona odyssey
Editor's note: This article is an automated speech-to-text transcription, edited lightly for clarity.
What is the best way to create personas?
This is a question Lisa Herceg of the National Association of REALTORS posed during her session at the Quirk’s Event – Global Virtual. She explained the questions her team deliberated on when asked to create personas, explained the four personas created and how they changed as more information and data was gathered throughout the years.
Session transcript
Marlen Ramirez
Hi everyone. Welcome to the session “National Association of Realtors Virtual Global Session: Evaluate, adjust, repeat: A five-year persona odyssey.” I’m Quirk’s News and Content Editor, Marlen Ramirez. Before we get started, let’s quickly go over the ways you can participate in today’s discussion. You can use the chat tab to interact with other attendees during the session, and you can use the Q&A tab to submit questions for the presenters during the session. Our session is presented to you by the National Association of Realtors. Enjoy the presentation.
Lisa Herceg
Hello! Good afternoon, good morning, good evening, wherever you are in the world. My name is Lisa Herceg. I'm the director of business insights for the National Association of Realtors in the United States. I'm based in Chicago, where it is cold and you might hear my heater kicking on.
In case you are not familiar with the National Association of Realtors, we are the largest trade organization in the United States. We are the second largest membership organization in the United States after AARP, the American Association of Retired Persons. So, we have offices in Chicago and Washington, D.C, and my function is essentially to do internal research for the National Association of Realtors. So, my team and I are the people that they come to when they have business decisions that need to be made in light of data that doesn't already exist.
Well, a few years ago, we were actually asked to build personas, which was new and interesting to us. So, I wanted to take you through this journey that we went through with building these personas, adjusting these personas and then, early in the presentation, I would like to know how you would have approached this.
So, back in late 2019, our education staff approached me and said, we would like to build marketing personas. Not marketing personas based on members in general, we have over a million of those. No, we want marketing personas based on the few hundred thousand of those members that have taken education courses with us in the last five years. So, this is a very specific audience, and we want to base it on demographics, attitudes toward education, educational needs, as well as their past interaction with NAR, their engagement with NAR. And, oh, by the way, we have very little budget, all of this has to be for less than $10,000, but it needs to be reliable. And, as it turned out, this research ended up being conducted in the middle of a pandemic. We all remember that.
So, I sat down and thought about how to approach this, and I talked to many people that I know who have approached personas in the past, and I read many things, and what I found is there is no methodological consensus on how to do persona building. How do you do this? Do you start with quant? Do you start with qual? Do you start with secondary data? The back of a napkin? Chance? Prayers? How do you begin to build personas? Nobody agrees.
So, I would like to ask you, how would you do this? So, use the raise hand feature if you've got it. How many of you would start with stakeholder interviews? OK. How many of you would do stakeholder interviews somewhere in the process, but that's not where you would start? OK. How many of you would do quant first, and then qual? How about qual first, and then quant? OK. How many of you would just do this via quant? How many of you would just do this via qual? Interesting. OK. How many of you would do something else entirely? You have this wonderful, proprietary software that is probably far too expensive for me to use. Knew there would be somebody. OK, great. All right. It's probably great. Probably can't afford it.
So, in all of this, I did know how I did not want to approach it. I had one single experience with persona building in the past. Years and years ago, someone who was no longer with the company came to me and said, I have worked with an outside consultant to build personas, marketing personas of all members. I said, OK, alright. I said, how did you approach this? She said, well, this consultant did focus groups with NAR staff and asked them: In what three categories would you put members in general? Just members overall. And I said, OK, and then that was it. That's how they built the personas. They based the personas solely on feedback from NAR staff, and I said, OK. And what they wanted me to do was take these personas and recruit people based on the general demographic features of these member personas and put in front of them a wireframe of a potential website design geared to each of them that would be thrown based on their behavior on the website, and marketing collateral, all sorts of things and see what they thought of it.
Well, those focus groups did not go well. I've never had focus groups like this before. People were angry. One group said, this looks like it was designed for kindergarteners. This is completely unprofessional, I am insulted. Go back to the drawing board, this is terrible.
Another group said, how old do you think we are? This looks like it's geared to somebody in their 80’s, who doesn't even understand how to use a computer. We are technologically savvy people, what is wrong with you? I actually had someone stand up and bang on the table and scream at me. No joke.
So, that was not how I was going to be approaching this. So, I'll tell you how I did approach this. We did do stakeholder interviews, but we used them just for hypothesis creation. So, I pulled in our education staff, our research staff, our brilliant data scientists, and we all spitballed what we figured would be the most likely driving factors to creating clusters of members and then we took those hypotheses and we built a survey. And some of those factors that we postulated were age, experience, function in real estate, attitudes toward education, political engagement, not political fealty, we didn't ask that, but how often are you voting in what kinds of elections? In what area do you work? Suburban, urban, small town, rural, education level, past engagement with NAR, feelings about NAR. We put this survey together and sent it out to 75,000 randomly selected learners, people who had taken our courses in the previous five years and what we got back was 4,200 completed surveys. So, we had this really nice, rich data set to work from.
I could have done the cluster analysis, that would have been unwise. I'm not great at that, so I let our brilliant data scientists do it. And there was one data scientist in particular who went with me to present these findings to our members, and she explained what she did as the following. I put the data in sort of a brown paper bag and I kind of shake it up and throw it out on the table, and we see what groups come out. OK, obviously that is not what she did. What she did was K-means hierarchical clustering on the survey results over and over again, until she got to four unique clusters that seemed the most unique that we could get. Great. No, she did this scientifically. Then what we did was we took the demographics and the survey attributes, matched them to those exact clusters, matched the respondents to those clusters, and then figured out where are they significantly different, so that we could create segments.
So, quant first. Then we did the qual. We did IDIs. Now remember, less than $10,000 budget, so the best I could do was 16 IDIs total. I am aware that that is not enough. If I do this again, I'm gonna push for more budget. Not a lot more budget. To keep it consistent, I did all of the IDIs, so we had one interviewer. And, obviously, this is qual. The IDIs were designed to explore their place in their career, industry engagement, political engagement, attitudes toward education, career goals. What are your greatest challenges, your greatest frustrations, your greatest joys? What skills do you think you need? Who do you consult when you're trying to figure out what to do in terms of education? How do you learn about courses? What credentials do you hold? NAR offers a lot of credentials. We wanted to know which ones they already had. What we came up with were four pretty distinct personas.
So, I'm not going to go into all of the details here, but this first one, I wanted to give you an idea of what the whole thing looked like, and then I sort of condensed it for the other three. So, the first persona, is the persona that is most engaged with NAR. She's the one that's probably volunteering for us. And she is a managing broker or team leader. She's, 60 to 69. And this sounds like she might be getting ready for retirement, not with our members. Most of our members come to real estate as a second career, so I think the age of the typical member at the time was 55. So, 60 to 69? Still practicing. She's just starting to think about retirement and succession planning after 25 years in the business. So, she has a lot of experience. She probably doesn't have a college degree, she's got some college or an associate degree, but lots and lots of experience. And she is deeply involved in her community. That's much more important than involvement at the state or national level. And when I say involvement, I mean, are they actually involved in their local realtor association, state, national? She's very likely involved in, for instance, her Chamber of Commerce. She's somewhere between an education enthusiast and an evangelist. She understands the importance of education. She knows it's vital for herself to keep herself in the game, and to keep her agents educated and ethical. She prefers online courses, but she understands that online is what's next. Remember, this was in 2020 when we did all of this. Ultimately, she just wants to make sure her client needs are met. She wants to put people in homes that they love and she wants to make sure that her agents are conducting themselves ethically and professionally. Not just to keep herself out of trouble, but to make sure that they're doing things the proper way, and they're making people happy.
Now, this next persona was, at the time, pretty much our typical member. This is the mid-career pro. And just FYI, most of our members are female, so most of these personas are female. She is a sales agent or an independent broker, so she doesn't have anyone reporting to her. She's 55 to 60, so roughly typical realtor age. Married, kid's out of the house, she has a bachelor's degree, so she's more educated than the mentor, but she's not nearly as experienced, 14 to 16 years in real estate. She takes her career seriously, but she just doesn't need to set the world on fire anymore. She doesn't need to be a million-dollar producer, that's not what she's in this for. Income is a byproduct of good work. It's not the end goal. She wants to help people. She might have been to an NAR conference or two, but she's really not paying a ton of attention to us. She prefers in-person classes. She wants to be in the classroom because she wants her questions answered on-site. Online? That's too hard.
Now, the third cluster was interesting. This was our smallest cluster, and we looked at this and the only thing that they had in common was that they refused to answer all or most of the personal questions. So, political? None of your business. How many children are in my house? None of your business. Gender? None of your business. Age? None of your business. We came up with the age and the gender based on who we ended up recruiting in the IDIs. So, this is the skeptic. He doesn't trust us. He is male. He is a sales agent or small, independent broker. He's somewhere between 48 to 60, but who knows, he won't tell us. He might be married, he might have one kid at home, but he's very protective of those personal details. He has a bachelor's degree, 14 to 20 years in real estate, so he's got some pretty serious experience. This is the least engaged in NAR of all of the personas. He might have been to an NAR conference or two, but it's mostly just to keep an eye on what we're doing. He's paying just enough attention to NAR to be frustrated with it. What he really wants is to just succeed in his business. He wants to be able to support his family, do what he needs to do when he wants to do it, retire when he wants to retire. If he's a broker, he just wants to keep his agents out of trouble. He feels that politics are very personal and it's none of your business, unless your organization is doing something that he disagrees with, and then boy is he gonna tell you about it. We got an earful from some of the folks in this group. Attitude toward education? I don't have time for it. I don't see the value. I take courses specifically for continuing education, I need to keep my license, I just need to get it out of the way and I do it online because it's faster.
The last persona was the newbie. She is a sales agent, she is under 50, so 30 to 49, probably. Married, kids at home, bachelor's degree, four years or less in the business, which sounds like some experience, right? But remember that most of our members come in as a second career, and generally, you're not going to be making a living as a realtor in the first two years. So, even four years in you're still trying to figure out what's what. So, she's still trying to figure out the industry and what she needs to do to earn a living as a realtor. And she only recently discovered NAR courses during the COVID-19 lockdowns, because there was eight months or so where our folks weren't doing a lot of business, and we were offering courses for free or at a deep discount to help them out. Now, that changed later on, we'll get into that. We got folks back into the field, but at the time, she was staying at home and taking a lot of courses. She understands that education is necessary to being a better realtor, but she just can't afford it. What she really needs? She just wants to have a steady income from her business with a regular stream of referrals.
Now, obviously, since we built these personas dead center of a pandemic in the summer of 2020, we needed to validate these. So, we went and back and validated them again twice, once in 2021, and once in 2024. Now, by 2021, NAR had managed to get realtors declared essential workers in the pandemic in every state, so that they were able to go back to doing business. I think it was by September of 2020. If you're in the United States, you know what happened in 2021. The real estate market went bananas. So, realtors are back in the field. People are trying to move to get more outdoor space, or to move further away out into the country because they don't have to commute. The interest rates were at record lows, real estate was off the chain, and our realtors were doing business like you wouldn't believe.
So, we needed to validate this in 2021. Now, we didn't have the budget to validate with qual as well as quant, so we did it just with quant and then we re-ran just the survey again in 2024 and looked to see where things might have shifted. Now, my brilliant original data scientist from 2020 had, by this time, absconded to Ireland with her new husband, and left me with other data scientists who were good, but they didn't have her exact model. So, we used an adjusted 2021 model for 2024, rather than the original 2020 model. Might have been some errors introduced, but that said, there was very little shifting, except this was the biggest shift. The cluster sizes shifted enormously.
So, back in 2020, that green bar, by far the largest segment, was the mid-career pro. By 2021, half were newbies. Half. We had so many new members coming in in 2021 because of the real estate boom that it was half of our membership, and that stayed the same in 2024, People were still coming into the real estate industry. So, the mid-career pro shrank. The mentors, those were one in four in 2020. They shrank to 15% in 2021 because I think a lot of people were like, well, this would be a good time to retire. And then it bumped back up again to about one in five in 2024. The skeptic? Still 5%. 4%, 5%, they stayed the same.
So, here are the shifts that we saw. In 2020, the mentors, I think I mentioned they were the most engaged in NAR, they were the most positive about us, they felt even more connected to NAR in 2021. And part of that was, we were really working to make sure that our members stayed in business. We were offering courses for free, at a discount, all kinds of free tools. Like I said, we got them declared essential workers. The mentors were really happy with us in 2021. She still prefers NAR courses, NAR classroom courses, sorry, NAR online courses were second best, next best thing. Three years later, fast forward. She feels less connected to NAR now. Now, there were some things going on in the American real estate industry in 2024 that some of you may or may not be aware of, some changes that many of our members were not happy with us about. So, not shocking that even our most engaged members were feeling a little less connected to us. By 2024, she still says she prefers online courses, but now she's actually more likely to take them online. She's gotten on board with the convenience after the pandemic.
So, let's talk about the mid-career pro. 2021. She still feels neutral about her connection to NAR, still not paying much attention to NAR. She now likes online courses a little bit more than in person.
2024, she feels even less connected to NAR, but her course-taking has changed. She fully prefers taking online courses at home. Never mind getting my questions answered, I'd rather do this at home. Again, everybody got on board with the convenience.
The skeptic. The biggest change in all of the personas is in 2021, folks started answering the gender question, and they were female. In 2021, definitely female. more likely to hold a master's degree than any of the other personas and more likely than in the past, but less experienced than in 2020. And now, in 2020, they were more time sensitive, don't waste my time with courses. 2021, they were more cost sensitive. So, more interested in cheaper education. 2024, we're back to more experienced, but more likely to be part-time than two of the other personas and than in the past. And now, more swayed by cost than anything else in terms of courses, not swayed by reviews, recommendations, speakers, these things, remember, I'm a skeptic, these things do not mean anything to me. That wasn't the case in the past.
The newbie, in 2021, the biggest thing is there was this massive influx of new members. They were not young. They were older. So the newbie is now much older. Now she's in her 50’s instead of 30 to 49, and she's got five years in the business, still looking like a newbie, because it's hard to get your feet under you. She likes online courses because they're cheap and she probably has an NAR credential because it was free or discounted during the pandemic. So, that's a difference. 2024? In the past, she had been slightly positive about NAR, now she's neutral. So, again, the industry changes in 2024 are at fault here, I think. And now, she relies more on her broker for education than she has in the past, which is something that NAR needed to watch.
So, I wanted to find out from the education folks, we keep working on these personas, how are you using them? And the answer is, oh, we're using them a lot. We're tailoring course design, we're enhancing marketing and messaging, optimizing course delivery methods. They've been using these.
That said, we need to adjust them again. Now, I wanted to talk about some of those shifts first. Most of the shifts that we saw were general shifts during the pandemic, post-pandemic. The shift to preference for online courses, the OG online courses are really convenient. People got on board with that. Cost sensitivity, people became much more cost sensitive after the pandemic.
General feelings about NAR in light of industry changes that accounted for a lot of the shifts we saw between 2021 and 2024. Huge market changes in the American real estate market between 2021 and 2024. If you're Americans, I don't need to tell you what those were, but by 2024, interest rates had started to go up. Inventory really went down, things became much more difficult for our members.
So we really need to start these personas from scratch. I would love to do it next year, we'll see how budgets go, but if not next year, then 2027 for sure. If you have ideas on how we should approach that, without much of a budget, I'm all ears. So, OK. I would like to know if folks have questions. Thank you very much.