Developing Personas to Enable Tailored Public Health Communications: The Case of Organ Donation in Québec

In the context of long organ wait lists and few registered organ donors, Transplant Québec aimed to understand public views on deceased organ donation, as a basis for public-facing communications. It formulated four personas representing subgroups with varying views and behaviours related to organ donation. They were iteratively built via triangulation of findings from literature reviews, populational data, public polls, an expert panel and focus groups. Personas offer a more human approach to characterizing groups than statistics, which is particularly helpful for sensitive issues such as organ donation. This work may assist other organizations in tailoring public health communications.