In this edition, Jenni and Mary share their experiences of working in the Philippines with a team of landcare facilitators, farmers and leaders to write a ‘how-to’ landcare manual.

Our 12 days in the Philippines just before Christmas strengthened Econnect’s relationship with the Filipino landcare team. In the remote district of Ned in southern Mindanao, we got to ride the horse that we donated to help Aying, a young, vibrant landcare facilitator, travel across difficult terrain to visit farmers. And we witnessed the wonder of local school children using one of the microscopes we donated to their school.

Regards,

Before heading to the Philippines to help a group of landcare facilitators write a handbook, I had just finished reading a fantastic book about writing for the web—Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works, by Janice Redish.

In it, the author describes how to understand your audience using personas, or characters. I thought we could use a similar concept to understand the typical readers of the landcare handbook so we tried it out during our workshop with the authors. It worked well.

Here’s what we did:

1.      We got the authors to list the major audiences. In our case, we had new landcare facilitators, farmer leaders, local government extension officers, local government leaders (‘barangay captains’ and mayors). We narrowed the list down to those that represent typical readers.

2.      We asked each of the authors to describe a typical reader based on one of the typical audiences. We asked them to state the reader’s first name, age and gender; and to describe their family situation, their work situation, what they already know about the subject, their attitude towards the subject, and their values i.e. what matters to them. We also asked them to say what language the reader preferred the book to be written in (there are lots in the Philippines!) and what style of language.

3.      From around 20 reader descriptions, we found that we had 5 that were very similar. The group agreed that these 5 represented our typical readers.

4.      From this information, we created 5 personas—Juan, Gerardo, Maria, Sam and Pedro.

Now, as the authors write the sections of the book, they are conscious that they are writing for at least one of the personas.

They ask themselves: What would Pedro the farmer leader want to know about this? Would it help if I spelled out the process for Maria, the new field facilitator? How can I write this in a way that convinces Sam the mayor of the benefits?