Case Study: Personas & Value Propositions

Synopsis

An association was seeing declining email engagement, retention, and new member growth over a period of a few years. Based on member feedback and longitudinal data analysis, I hypothesized that the association’s value proposition was no longer landing: neither the audience nor the message. I created an AI-powered workflow to perform further analysis, write new personas, and draft options for a new value proposition. We then validated the new personas and value propositions with a member task force. Early results showed a lift of 369% in email engagement after the new personas and value propositions went live. Due to AMS and measurement factors out of our control, the impact on member growth and retention will need to be analyzed in the following year. 

The Challenge

If you have ever watched engagement numbers slide year over year, you know the temptation is to blame the channel. Send more email. Rework the subject lines. Add a campaign. The association in this case had tried versions of all of that, and the email engagement, retention, and new member growth kept drifting down.

So I started somewhere less comfortable. The member feedback and the data pointed to a harder problem than tactics. The value proposition itself was no longer landing, and there were really two questions tangled together: were we even talking to the right people, and were we saying the thing that mattered to them? When both of those are uncertain, more email only sends a message that does not fit to an audience that may not be the one you think you have.

The Solution

I built an AI-powered workflow to do the analysis I did not have the staff hours to do by hand. It worked through member data and feedback, drafted a fresh set of personas grounded in what members were actually trying to accomplish, and generated several options for a new value proposition built around those personas. The AI moved fast through the heavy lifting; the judgment stayed with people.

That last part mattered. AI drafts are a starting point, not an answer, so we put the new personas and value propositions in front of a member task force to check them against reality. The members told us where the personas rang true and where they were off, and we revised before anything went out the door. So the value proposition that reached members was not a machine’s guess about them. It was their own language, validated by their peers, and focused on the benefit to them rather than the features of membership.

The Results

Early results showed a 369% lift in email engagement once the new personas and value proposition went live. That is a strong signal that the message finally fit the audience, and that the audience was the right one to begin with.

I want to be careful about what that number does and does not prove. Engagement is a leading indicator, not the whole story. Because of AMS and measurement factors outside our control, the effect on member growth and retention could not be cleanly isolated this year, so that analysis carries into next year. So the honest read is this: a clear, fast lift in engagement, and a longer question about retention and growth that the data is not yet ready to answer.

Executive Takeaway

When engagement falls, the instinct is to fix the message. Sometimes the harder and more useful question is whether you know who you are talking to and what they are actually trying to get done. AI can do the analysis at a speed and scale that thin association staffing rarely allows, but the members are the ones who tell you whether you got them right. So the lift came from pairing the two: the workflow to draft fast, and the people to make it true.