Teams, Stages, Personas, Surrogates
In the two previous blog posts, we recognized that for a discipleship ministry redesign: (1) we need to have a team of people to do the design and (2) at least some of these people need to represent the faith stages that Pastor Tim has suggested. This leads to the obvious questions, How can we form a team that represents faith stages and Who or what else should be represented?
The second of these questions suggests the first in the sense that it implies that many points of view must be represented on a design team. Spiritual maturity (or faith stages) is clearly one of these. In broader terms, the spiritual goal of the ministry undergoing design must be represented. But there are other things to be represented. One is the potentially wide demographic range of those for whom the ministry is intended. These include age, cultural background, educational level, affluence, and geography. Another would be the insights and capabilities of those who will implement and deliver the ministry (Is it feasible? Is someone with the requisite skills available?) And there will be still others.
One these “still others” is those who will facilitate the design process itself. However, because these are not part of the issue of demographic breadth, we won’t discuss them now, but rather in a later blog post.
The challenge with a broad list of points of view is to form a reasonably-sized design team that represents them all. My friend Ella faced a similar challenge when our church asked her to lead a team to study the way the church communicates with its constituency. That constituency involves the same demographic variety we have just discussed. I liked her team’s solution. They created categories of people by combining reasonable but otherwise random characteristics that covered most, but not all, important demographics.
They called them personas. Over the past century the term persona has grown from describing the character an actor represents in a play to being a fictional surrogate for persons who have similar characteristics, and that’s how Ella’s team used the term.
There is an obvious problem with personas. It is that any workable number of them will not represent all the demographics of a targeted ministry’s audience. However, this is not as big a problem as it appears. It’s a statistical thing. A complete design has many parts, but there is not a separate part for each person. Each part serves several people’s characteristics. Therefore, if a complete design satisfies the needs of a rich set of personas, it will satisfy more than the characteristics embedded in those personas. It may not cover them all, but many of the ones that are not covered are likely not to exist. And if they do, we can redesign later.
Tim and I realize we need a team. We will use Ella’s team’s personas, modified to include faith stages. We still face the challenge of picking people to represent each persona, and we’ll want to minimize the use of surrogates. But that’s the topic of my next blog post.
Ministry Design 