Okay, welcome everybody to the TechSoup special webinar, How to Create Personas for your digital marketing, digital communication, messed up already. I'm Aretha Simons. I'm the webinar producer here at TechSoup. It's always good to have you come on to our webinars and here's how you can engage today, especially if this is your first time, you know that you are muted. We would love for you to put your questions in the Q and A section, because you know, sometimes the chat moves up really, really fast, but you can still put your questions in the chat and we'll try to get to as many as possible. We are definitely recording this. Check your email probably tomorrow, maybe later today, I don't know. I'm gonna give you the webinar YouTube video link. Maybe the slides, are we sharing the slides with? We'll be sharing the slides. So you'll get that. If you hear anything that you think, wow, that was amazing, I gotta share that to the world. Share it on your social media and then tag us at all of our hashtags or add us TechSoup. If you need the CC button right at the bottom of your screen where it says closed caption has CC, click on that and it'll allow you to be able to listen to us and read at the same time. I'm gonna get ready to turn this over to Whit, but I want to just say for those of you who are here for the first time, on behalf of over our 100 partners that provide us hardware and software for nonprofit organizations, TAPS, TAP, Lord, I can't talk. I was gonna say TAPSuit, TAP Network is one of those partners. And so we wanna welcome Whit here and thank you Whit, I'm gonna turn this over to you. Thank you. Thank you, Aretha. Good morning, good afternoon, everyone. I hope you all are having a wonderful day. Can everyone see my screen all right? Aretha, we good? Can you see it? Yes. Perfect, all right, awesome. I'm very excited to dive into this topic today. I think it's a very timely and important one and I see a lot of nonprofits that I work with on a day-to-day basis, kind of tackle these on a regular basis. So, but before we dive too far in, I'm gonna do a brief introduction of who I am and my experience here. My name is Whit Godden. I'm the director of strategic marketing here at TAP Network. I help kind of manage all of our marketing and communications clients that come through, specifically a lot of our larger non-profit government state government agencies. And then a little bit about TAP. So TAP Network, we are TAP, we are TechSoup's marketing technology partner. And as it says here, we strive to empower organizations for good. Essentially, your vision is our mission. And over the past two, now two and a half years, I personally have been leading our strategic partnership with TechSoup, delivering digital marketing and website services through the TechSoup marketplace, as well as developing amazing educational content like this, along with blogs, you might see us in some courses. I do hope I see some of you at the town hall next month. I will be presenting there with Aretha and a few other folks kind of talking a little bit about the breadth of things that are going on at TechSoup and I'm so grateful to be a partner and be able to be a part of all of that. So now that I've gotten this boring part over, let's dive into the discussion for today. We're gonna be focusing on how to create personas and then talk a little bit about how you're gonna use those personas. But first, I wanna kind of dive in and talk about what is the importance of a persona? Why are they important for your organization to be investing the time and dedicate a team member to do it? We'll review the steps on how to actually make a persona or why we make a persona and then we'll discuss what a persona is and then we'll get to how do we make a persona. And then lastly, I'll go through a few key tactics on how you should use your personas in your messaging and end with a brief Q and A to answer any questions that might be lingering. So what's so important about a persona? Before we get there, always wanna start with making sure we all are utilizing and understanding that we have a baseline understanding of all of the terminologies. So here's a few key important definitions to just consider as I walk through some of these slides with you guys today. A target audience, some of you may know these and this is a moment, Aretha, I will say that I wish that I could see their faces because I'd love to be able to see like when I ask a question, do you get this?  You may already know some of these terms having worked in communications if you work in the communications team. Some of these terms may be new to you. Don't worry. We'll also hopefully it'll all make sense by the end of this hour. But the first term to kind of get our head wrapped around is a target audience. And this is really a particular group of people that marketers are looking to reach and engage with. A lot of times you might wanna think about these in like terms of your donor audience versus your volunteer audience. Perhaps you're also targeting participation in a program, your end service consumers or customers or individuals. And then you have a persona.  We're gonna kind of peel the layers of that onion back throughout the hour but just think through like we're really looking at developing a fictitious person that is based on actual real data and information we have about a target audience. So we can properly develop in this scenario communication materials and messaging. When I use the term user, I want you to think this is the person who is interacting with your marketing materials. So whether or not that's your website, your social media marketers, we tend to use the term user. And so you'll see that term come up a few times throughout the presentation. And then lastly, the term lead. You might know this if any of you have ever worked in sales or are in sales. A lead is traditionally a sales term. But in this scenario or for this conversation today, I want you to interchangeably think of this as a prospect, you know, a prospective volunteer, a prospective participant, maybe a prospective donor. So those are just some of the key terms that I wanna make sure we all sort of have a baseline understanding before we kind of move forward here. So let's talk a little bit about the impact using personas has across businesses and organizations. I think these numbers are fairly compelling. So if you and your organization has not necessarily gone through the process of really thinking through your target audiences and developing an actual persona, maybe some of these metrics will inspire you to take the time and kind of do some of the exercises and the work that's laid out in this presentation. So firstly, that should be 56, not 59, 56% of organizations have developed higher quality leads or prospects using personas. 58% said that targeting cold prospects with persona-based content is more affected than targeting warm prospects without using persona-based content. We have 36% of organizations have actually achieved shorter sales cycles using personas. So consider this, if you have somebody who requests information, you follow up with a donor request. If it's just a blanket generalized donor request, we don't really, you're not really thinking through who that person is and how that person is actually utilizing the information that they initially were requesting or consuming. You might have a longer conversation. It might take a few more touchpoints before that individual says, you know what? I'm gonna give that organization $15, $20, $50, whatever the case may be. And then of course, 24% of companies gained more prospects using personas. If you are writing your long-form content with the perspective and the lens of a persona behind it, that is gonna resonate more appropriately with the existing audiences and more likely to be shared amongst their communities to then reach additional people that your organization might not have a pulse on quite right away. So the numbers are there, right? So let's review some key elements that a persona will help you and your marketing team with. So first off, they're there to help you guys create the messaging that appeals to your target audience's needs, right? We're gonna start to understand who this person is, what are their needs specifically? And in some cases, you may even want to or need to consider where your personas are engaging. For instance, are they primarily on a mobile device or are they utilizing a desktop? A lot of times that can influence the way that you deliver message, the way you design things as well. They can also help your marketing team discover topics to write about for your blogs or your website content. You're not gonna necessarily have the same information on your donation page as you would on your volunteer recruitment page, right? So you wanna think through and in some cases you probably are doing this to some extent but maybe there's an opportunity for you to take it a little bit further and really hit some of those key needs and goals and pain points right on the head and shorten that time of getting an individual to convert or do an action that you're looking for them to do. And then also they'll hopefully, they're there to help you tailor your messaging on social media and email as well. So it's gonna be able to help you understand how can I get small bits of information that are gonna really resonate with this particular target persona within this audience. So now that we kind of understand how they're gonna help help you and what they're gonna help sort of help elicit amongst your teams, let's take a look at what a persona is so that you can understand these takeaways just a little bit better. So let's talk about what is a persona. Aretha and I were talking on here and she's like, I've never even heard that term before and it's a common thing that we hear a lot over at Tap Network. So let's talk through like what makes a persona a persona. The goal of a persona is really to distill your audiences from many to one. So through this process, you're gonna synthesize information about a group of people and develop a single, excuse me, a single fictitious character that includes a name, understanding their behaviors and other relevant and important qualities. So let's, who uses personas? So in a day to day life, you'd be surprised the breadth of professionals and individuals within all sorts of businesses and organizations and government agencies, all the different individuals who use personas to get the work done to meet their business or organization goals. So if you're on the product team, let's say you make a product, some organizations might be making products that are available at significant discounts. So your product team is really using them to remember who the product is built for. Just because you like a feature, it doesn't mean it's gonna resonate with your persona targets, your target personas. So you really wanna make sure you're thinking through and empathizing with the individuals that you're looking to produce a solution for. User experience designers, I wish I could get a thumbs up again on how many people have heard the term. They use personas to design what you would guess is an optimal experience. An example of this is, how content flows on an individual page, like where elements exist on a single page on your website or how different pages flow together so that the designer can thoroughly understand where and how this individual is gonna interact with the content on the page. Your sales teams might also use personas as well. They'll use these to inform and refine their sales strategies. So there are multiple value propositions that you could tailor and that you could create, but it's important to ensure that you're utilizing the ones that really resonate with who you're talking to. So differentiating and understanding this persona versus that persona and really knowing who and how to talk to them is very vital.  So I'll put that hat on and wear it proudly. Personas help us as marketers craft the messaging that speaks on a very personal level and considers all of the nuances of that individual human's behavior. So how many personas should you create, right? So this is a common challenge that we face for pretty much any marketing client we have nonprofit or a for-profit company. When you're looking at a target audience, you could easily say like, if you're looking at a group of 50 people, 100 people in some cases, 15,000 people, those might make up your donors. You can easily say there are seven different, eight different, 15 different personas, but developing that level of specificity in your communications and materials would be really inefficient. And it would essentially like what we like to say at TAP is like the juice isn't worth the squeeze if you've ever heard that term before. So the goal here is how can we create the most comprehensive and clear actionable persona? So at most you guys should consider two personas per target audience. This happens quite often when we talk about our donor personas with our clients. We often create a persona that's really focusing on that like one-time donor versus a persona for a recurring donor. By doing this, we're not sending messaging to the one-time donor that makes them maybe feel like I'm not giving by a monthly basis. And we're also able to tailor our messaging to recurring donors, potentially with continued incentive to maintain their recurring giving. And think of it vice versa, right? If you're a recurring donor, you wouldn't want to receive an email or a piece of communication that says, consider becoming a recurring donor. It's like, do you know who I am? You should know that I've already been giving a recurring donation. So that value proposition wouldn't be appropriate for that particular persona. So thinking through sort of your primary persona and potentially secondary persona is an exercise that's gonna be helpful and in some cases necessary to do. So let's take a look at what kind of makes up a persona, what are the pieces? And you do, it's fairly self-explanatory, but you'd be surprised at how challenging it can be once you start to really sit down and try to think through it.  So we have to literally create a whole human being based off of information that we have, some qualitative, some quantitative information or data. But at a minimum, you'll want to include a name, an image, a quote. So that kind of answers the I am a blank. You'll want to identify behaviors. A lot of times in the bio section, we kind of get to uncover like, what is the day in the life of Frederick? Frederick's gonna be my name for the day. I'm just gonna say that. Who is Frederick? What does Frederick do on a daily basis that are gonna be helpful or relevant for my organization to know? What are Frederick's goals and motivations in life and also in relations to what your organization does? You know, I want to be able to commit some time to an organization or a cause that means something to me. Needs, I want to feel, how do I want, like what does Frederick actually mean in his life? What are his attitudes? I really like this. And in some cases, I don't like that. I don't like this. And then in other cases, you might have some other elements that are gonna be important that are really specific to your organization. And I'll get to that in a later slide. I think it's really important though as we kind of look at some of the three key areas, I think that are gonna be driving motivators when it comes to defining and differentiating our messaging.  So the goals, when we talk about a persona's goals, we're really talking about what are they ultimately trying to accomplish? So for instance, let's use Frederick again. Frederick wants to be able to support his local community the best way that he can. That's his goal. He's, in some cases, I have an example persona that I'll show you in a few slides. They move around a lot. We've recognized that that's a commonality amongst this one particular community. They kind of have a lot of travelers settle in this one area. So now that they finally got roots into a city, they're like, okay, I wanna know how can I be a participant? How can I help support my local community? When you're looking at the needs of your persona, the needs are, what does this person require in order to accomplish these goals? So in Frederick's case, maybe Frederick needs to know the different ways he can support his local community or engage with a particular organization. Perhaps he needs to know what are the biggest challenges that his community is facing, right? This may be an educational experience. In some cases, you might be like 99% of our donations are online donors, but we don't have an online donation or we don't have the ability to donate online or we know that this age demographic that we're trying to grow around our donation base or a volunteer base really interact with organizations on a digital footprint, but we have paper applications for volunteers or we take, we have like a PayPal account. It's not a very, maybe a user friendly or generational friendly donation platform. So really understanding maybe some of the technical barriers or situational barriers or educational barriers are a way to be able to develop and consider thinking through what type of content are you gonna be developing whether or not that's an email, organizationally, organizational decisions. I mean, really that's why I was saying so many roles in businesses and organizations use personas to help design how they want an individual to interact with their organization. And then lastly, and I would say probably one of the most important ones would be identifying what some of those pain points are. What's preventing your persona from accomplishing their goals, right? So for instance, if we were to look at Frederick maybe Frederick has a really, really busy schedule and he just has a hard time finding opportunities to show up to volunteering events, right?  If we know that this target persona doesn't have the time we've identified that that's the case may be then there are other ways in which he can help support potentially. You know, is it making donations? Is it maybe in some cases contributing other means of expertise? Other resources serve as like maybe a liaison between his professional career and the community helping build partnerships just being that connector or convener with whatever the case may be that's where you're gonna start to do a lot of the research and kind of figure out, okay, how do we understand this person's goals, their needs, their pain points and then moving into sort of how do we then craft messages around those pieces to really amplify and kind of, I guess, engage and capture. It makes them feel like they're being heard or being seen or being understood. So let's talk about like the do's and don'ts. I always love a do's and don'ts list. It's very helpful sometimes for a marketing here. So on useful personas. So these are some elements that I want you guys to consider as we move into the next phase which is building them, right? These are rooted in reality. They are fictitious, but they are rooted in reality. You wanna be leveraging as much qualitative and quantitative data as you can. And I'll talk through a little bit about research, how to do where you can possibly look to do some user research or audience research that can help influence the development of your personas. It should really have a full 360 degree view of the user, right? We want that day in the life of who is this person? What do they do for a living? Where do they live? What is their age? Do they have a family? What are their needs? What are their goals? What are their pain points?   Like some of those pieces might not necessarily be much of a differentiator that is, so you wanna make sure that between one persona and another, there is some differentiation. There may be some crossover, but you really wanna get through and dial in on what those differentiating elements and components are. This should be inspired by multiple users. That's a very important thing. You know, Frederick is a facsimile of, let's just throw a couple more names out. Aretha, Witt, you know, Lauren and Jen, right? Like let's say we have like these four real people and then we created Frederick as a representation of those four individuals. You don't wanna make Frederick just another replica of Aretha. That's not helpful. It's not gonna be fully encompassing of all of the overlapping qualities and characteristics of the four of us, of me, Lauren, Aretha and Jen. And they really should be able to help your teams answer questions about the user, right? About the end of individual who's engaging or interacting with your organization. What are the not useful personas? What are the don'ts? As you said, it should not be based on a single user. It's not based on direct feedback. So direct feedback could be something like, and I'll get to the research piece, like you haven't looked at your Google Analytics, you haven't looked at your social media and analytics. In some cases and some organizations, they'll do surveys or they collect information at events. You always want it to have some sort of a direct feedback. You want them to have, you want to make sure that they are not lacking in clear differences between other personas, right? We don't want the donor persona and the volunteer persona to be pretty much the same person. If they are, then there was either, there wasn't enough research done or there wasn't enough synthesis of the data to really identify what those differences might be. But as you can probably imagine, a volunteer and a donor, there are gonna be quite a lot of overlap and relatable qualities. But you have to make those personas actually different than one another. So you can really make actionable discernments in your messaging decisions. And then, of course, you don't want to include irrelevant details. Again, is including that they have a cat helpful? Maybe not. If you run an animal foundation, it definitely does.  So now we kind of got a good picture about like what makes up a persona. Let's talk about the steps of like, how do we build one, right? What are the pieces? What are the stepping stones to actually going from all of these ideas of like, okay, this is a persona, this is what a persona is, this is what a persona isn't. Now let's start to bring it to life. So the four key steps of developing a persona is conducting your user research first, right? You want to discover those goals, those needs, behaviors and pain points of your target audience. On the next slide, I have a few ways in which we have worked with our nonprofits to conduct user research to get a better understanding of who these individuals are that are existing and engaging with your organization. The second step is synthesizing that research. You want to uncover common themes and patterns across your target audiences. Some of that might just be a very sort of a yes or no type of answer, right? Are they on mobile? Are they on desktop? Are they in my city? Are they outside of my city? Do they speak English or do they speak, are they bilingual? Understanding some of those underlying patterns and themes. So taking all the notes and the information and starting to clump them together and synthesizing that into information that you can start to bucket. Cause idea, right? You have 100 people, what makes up those 100 people? How can we start to make commonalities and identify those themes? And then we document those patterns from your synthesis into a persona. So this is that third step is really where you're going to create that document that we're going to look at in just a couple of seconds. So I'm sure you're like on your edge of your seat like waiting to see what does a persona look like. You're going to document those patterns and you're going to build that into a persona. Templates are very useful for this. And I do have an example template that I'll share that I'll show you guys. And as Aretha mentioned at the beginning of today's presentation, we will be sharing this presentation to you guys. So you'll have the slide decks. You'll be able to replicate the persona template that I have included in here. And then lastly, in some cases if you have the ability to validate your personas, but most importantly, keeping them alive. Validation is some in some cases like you might be able to do some field research or have responses or conduct a subsequent surveys. But most importantly, it's just continuously understanding who they are and how they're engaging and do like a six month or a one year check-in. Does this persona still reflect this target audience? People change their persona as a human. We are human. We change. So making sure that you consistently kind of go back and forth and do a check-in to make sure that your personas are up to date and accurate. So research takes time. It can be exhausting. It can be a little daunting in some cases. And I know it at nonprofit, some of us sometimes may feel like we lack the resources in some cases to conduct those research, right? So we may not have access to these expensive databases. Joining a Facebook group of your target audience is 100%. Thank you, Risa. That's a great, great call out. Google Analytics, I'm gonna quickly touch on that one. This gives some really great generalized demographic information about the visitors that are going to your website. Who is going to your donation page? Who is going to your volunteer page, your programs page, maybe your enrollment page? You can get a breakdown of gender, of location, of age. You can kind of get to understand a lot about the user traffic on your website. As Risa said, social media insights, but I love what you said here. We've done this before as well for clients. Perusing, it's amazing. And it's 2022 now. We should all kind of say we're used to it, but it still surprises me as a marketer how much information people give up about themselves on social media platforms. You can really synthesize a lot of detail around individuals by being able to look into their personal profile pictures or personal profiles and other conversations that might be happening as Risa pointed out in a Facebook group. So utilizing your social media insights as well. So on the back end of your social media accounts, you can also in some cases get demographic information and further details around who is actually engaging and participating in your conversation. So you can start to get that snapshot of like, these are the people who go to our donor page and these are the people who respond to our donation requests. How do we start to synthesize this into a person so that we can continue to elevate our messaging to reach more and hopefully grow that audience and invite more people through actual messaging? Lead forms are another great way of collecting information about it, about your target audiences. So it can be a little bit tricky. You don't wanna have a lead, a form on your website that's 150 questions long because no one's gonna end up filling that out. But I will say there's a webinar next month that I am doing with one of my fabulous colleagues, Janelle, on leveraging your CRM for messaging. And we will be touching on some really unique technical capabilities that some platforms have called responsive forms where if it will know I've already given you my name, my first name, my last name on my email. So maybe the second time I come, maybe you ask for my position in my company, other information that might be relevant. Surveys, these are a great way to collect qualitative and quantitative data about maybe for events. If you have an engaged volunteer group or if you have an engaged existing donor group, you can also just ask them, hey, we wanna know more about who you are so we can better our work here because you already have shown yourselves being supportive of us. So if you wouldn't mind taking five minutes and filling out this survey to give us some more information about who you are and how you currently or historically interact with our organization, that can help you guys gain insights as to who those individuals are and then synthesize that data and build it into an actual persona. And then lastly, and probably the most overhead heavy is conducting interviews.  So making sure that you're collecting a holistic data around that individual that can maybe then go back and influence the larger conversation of what that program is looking to achieve and then how can you develop the personas based off of that information so that you can reach the additional individuals who might fall within that target audience through really targeted and specific and meaningful messaging. All right, so here we go. This is the template. I saw someone saying, I love that they thank you for sharing the slides and templates. It's not fancy. That doesn't have to be fancy, but this is a very basic one and there's not a one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to personas. And also remember this kind of encompasses what I would say is the minimum of what you would want to be able to include in your target persona. But as I said too, there may be some additional information that is really important that maybe you didn't even realize was actually a major commonality across the target audience that you feel is really relevant to incorporate or include in your target personas. I have seen to some brands, like retailers might include like brands that this target persona has actually shown that they like. If you feel like it's really important or it's a helpful tool for you, maybe there's some similar nonprofit organizations that your target personas have considered or have in the past supported that helps align, that maybe you have a lot of synergy and an alignment with. So you might see in the bottom corner of a persona if you Google search personas, you might see like brands in the bottom of their little logos, visual like pictures worth a thousand words, right? We want to keep this as synthesized and as simple as possible. So if you can include any sort of like visual component that may be able to elicit further. May personas be synonymous with the term avatar? That's a great question. So an avatar is more or less just a cartoonish character that people use traditionally when they're like on online presence. It's not necessarily the persona, let's just say this, if you have like a creative like my old company, I worked for Exploding Kittens, my personas were actually cartoon characters from our game. And then I would give them a name and I would kind of build them out from that way. I'd say that like that cartoon non-human looking icon or that image is more of an avatar. The persona is who is that avatar, right? Who is, what makes up Polly, what makes up Polly and what makes Polly Polly, right? So, but that's a great question. And I think that term gets thrown around a lot, but it's sort of like is a square quadrilateral but not all quadrilateral or squares. That's kind of the situation we're talking about here. So take this, you'll have this. You can also, if you have a design degree, make it pretty. I'm gonna show you an example of one that we've done for an organization through TechSoup called the Center for Community Transitions. And as you can see, we have like all the elements we've covered today. I also wanna say, I don't know if you see his name, Garrett Giveback. I started at TAP about two and a half years ago and I sort of laid the foundation and I'm really happy to see that my team has continued to use my tradition of alliteration when coming up with persona names. I think it's always fun and it kind of just like has a little levity to the conversation in some cases. But as you can see here, we have his age, where he lives, what he does for a living. We have a bit about the day in the life and some of the background of who Garrett is. Oh, thanks, Beth. I very much appreciate that. Wonderful, what a wonderful piece of feedback. Thank you so much. So this kind of gives us the day in the life. It also gives some behaviors, like what Garrett listens to podcasts to get his news and spends his free time trying out new restaurants and breweries in the area. Some of that might not be relevant, but some of it, for this client, apparently it was. If we were to run, if we knew that this persona listens to podcasts to get his news, maybe we decide we're gonna set aside a $100 budget to run podcast audio advertising to build awareness and to get into the ear of Garrett Giveback. But as you can see too, at the bottom here, we've got those three key big needs, right? Those components, the goals, the needs, and the pain points. This is always helpful for us as we, as then our strategists, our content strategists come up with our monthly content calendar and we think through, hmm, what blog should we write about this week? Well, maybe we write a blog about, you know, what our organization has been able to achieve due to the financial donations of the local individuals. For the persona workshop, oh, I should have done Percy persona. That's a good one. I mentioned Polly earlier. Maybe I should have done Polly too or Percy and Polly. Maybe they're a married couple. That could be one of our personas. So this is our design kind of like pretty version of this lovely template, right? It doesn't have to be perfectly box. And if you go and you search, there's so many options out there. I mean, I'm telling you, there are so many different ways that companies and individuals kind of do this. You might even see like trackers.  Are they, you know, all sorts of, so they might have different like visual components. There could be scales. There could be keywords. So, you know, thinking through and do some research, see what works, see what you like. This is, we find that the simplest version right now for nonprofits is usually the best and most least confusing and least challenging to implement into the day-to-day operations of marketing. And of course, like really wanna make sure that we keep our personas alive. So once they're developed, you really should use them. I know this is silly, but I have some UX designer friends who if they have a really big client or if they're an in-house user experience designer for a tech company, they literally have their personas and their cubicles. So that as they're developing and coming up with solutions and identifying and addressing problems that come up through a user experience, they're like, okay, this isn't my problem. This isn't about me. This is about other people. We really are looking to empathize and see things through. So you guys might not have to print them out and post them if you're really avid a marketer or really avid UX designer, the maybe you would, but it's something to consider. I put it out there just for you guys to consider. It is very, very helpful to refer to them in presentations and documentation. This we do a lot when we're thinking through our content development. So when we sit down as a strategy team and we're thinking through, okay, for this month we have to write four blogs. All right, so what has Frederick been up to? What does he do? How can we maybe get him? Maybe that month isn't about donors. Maybe we're really focusing on volunteer acquisitions. So we would talk about our volunteer persona. How do we kind of look through the lens of that? As I said, use them in meetings and in casual discussions. I won't like, we don't make a Slack channel or a Slack name for our personas at TAP, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are some design companies out there that go that far. That's how important personas are in our industry. Continue to refine them, right? So continue to look through. As I said, we're all human. Your persona is a human. We change day to day, month to month, year to year. Your personas from 2020 pre-pandemic are probably very different now than they were then. So think of these as living, breathing documents to continue to update. And when possible, validate them. You can get feedback.  Turn to your development team. Ask your development team, hey, does this sound right to you? I've done this research. Could you just take a look at this and let me know if I'm kind of on the right path? I wanna help your work by being able to develop the messaging that's appropriate for donation. You can, in some cases, go out and actually interview them and validate in that process as well. So make sure you keep them alive. They're humans, take care of them. They're like your little, like the egg that we all had to carry around in high school and we had to keep it alive for 24 hours. Think of that as this, you have to take care of it. You have to stay on top of it. Sometimes we'll actually walk through, like as a marketer, like my team will actually have worked on the development of the persona together so that when we refer and we come back in, we go like, hey, don't forget about Frederick for this one, like, let's talk through. Just a reference point. If it could even be, Allison, it could even be like having this in some way in your meeting agenda. Like before we start talking about what we're gonna write, let's just quickly recap who we're writing this for, right? Just making an intentional recognition, in-house only. Yeah, so in-house, yeah. So you traditionally only have them in-house only. Correct, you wouldn't use this. That's a great question. Sorry, I apologize. Yeah, this is for your internal team only. You wouldn't traditionally share your persona profiles with your audience as a whole. But this is great. So if you end up like getting to a point where you wanna hire an agency or hire a contractor, a designer to design your next website or a contractor to help write your social media or an intern or a volunteer, you know, in some cases you might share with your volunteers if your volunteers are focusing on in the communications department, it might be helpful for you to say, hey, I just want you to take a look and understand who it is we're talking to. Our goal here is to serve the needs of X, Y, and Z within these communities. Here are those individuals and the research that we've done. So this will help you do your volunteer work better or do your design work better or do your copywriting better or your blog writing better or your email writing better or whatever the case may be. But good question, Allison. Yes, in-house, traditionally, yep. So now we've kind of gone through the steps of how to build one. I'm gonna just kind of touch on a few interesting and important elements in places where these personas are actually utilized. And Allison, you kind of helped me segue perfectly into that next step, which is sort of like where and how do we use our personas when it comes to our communications, right?  So I think that is so important. I will answer that in just a minute, Alex, but that's a good question. So when you're dealing with social media, you wanna consider their goals, needs and pain points. You know, think of social media as short form content, right? You have, yes, on Facebook, you can write a long, long, long, long post. Your generally audiences aren't necessarily gonna sit and read six or seven paragraphs on their Facebook feed or they're not always gonna expand the information or the description on Instagram. So you're having to really tailor in your messaging and get to the nugget, get to the clear piece that's gonna resonate with them and push them to take the next step that you're looking for them to do. So you wanna make sure you're hitting on that. And you also wanna make sure you're diversifying your messaging to each of these, like through the headlines, maybe the infographic and post copy, right? So like, I don't know if there's an opportunity to talk about, you know, the number of types of volunteers that may be volunteer for your organization. That might be, like maybe my pain point is like, I don't like meeting new people, but I wanna volunteer. So if I know that the people that are already working or volunteering at these events are like me, then I'll feel a little more comfortable and I might sign up to become a volunteer.  Looking at behaviors and other aspects of your persona can be a great place to create a series of long form that they'll find interesting. You know, I think one thing to note on, and I've shared this in previous presentations in the past around marketing and communications, I try to use the term communications, but is, you know, the 80-20 rule. You wanna spend, you wanna publish about 80% of your content is really just about the topic of that your organization might exist in, but it's not really specific about your organization. And really only about 20% of the stuff that you publish should be about your organization specifically, including like, you know, donation asks, you know, updates.  And I was talking about their content strategy and I said, you know, we could, one thing is to talk about the product and say how fabulous this product is. The other thing could be like, you know, five top, top five symptoms that oncologists tend to miss during cancer treatment. I might find that very interesting and compelling and I would wanna read that. And then at the bottom, it could say, you know, by utilizing this app, you're able to continuously update your provider on your symptoms on a day-to-day basis. But we didn't capture them by saying, track your daily symptoms. It's like, oh no, first we're planting the seed that like these are miss symptoms, right? These are symptoms that are consistently overlooked by oncologists for email. I mean, I think we talked a little bit about this when it came to the donor side, but it's really a great opportunity to elicit a change in a persona. This is where you can really incentivize someone to go from A to B, B to C. So it's really important that you don't mess it up, but it's also really important to take advantage of that moment of sitting in their inbox. And if they're looking at it, you wanna make sure that that interaction is as valuable as humanly possible. So segmenting your email marketing materials to address each target audience and persona, it's really important and vital. And that comes down to two sides, right? It comes down to the messaging, but it also comes down to your sort of your database capabilities. Do you have the ability to actually segment and tag your audiences and your individual personas to kind of help follow through on that. And as I mentioned before, if you join us next month in March, we'll talk a lot about how to leverage your CRM to create more effective messaging. And then lastly on your web, we did talk about this as well, while your organization will probably have its own tone of voice, you wanna be sure you hit the key components of each persona and target audience, right? So again, I think I mentioned this before, you wouldn't put the same messaging or think about the person in the same way on the donor page as you maybe would a program participant page. So that's kind of all of my information for today. I hope that these tactics are a great place for you to start to think through. And as you develop your personas, be able to kind of step in and bring them to life and put them to work. Cause it's a lot of work to get there, but that work pays off when you're sitting at a meeting and you're like, I don't know what to write about. I don't know how to think about this. I don't even know how to organize my messaging for my social media. Like we sometimes will say, okay, we're gonna hit this persona four times this month. We wanna hit this persona three times this month. We wanna hit this persona six times this month. There's like 30% of the work done for you. Now it's just a matter of what are we gonna talk about? Oh, thank you, Holly. I don't know what your real name is, but OPA admin, thank you so much. I appreciate it. So I do wanna open up, Aretha, I have two slides for after the Q and A, if that's all right, but I'd love to open up for the Q and A portion of that. Do you wanna do my slides and then we do Q and A? Whatever you're comfortable with. I've been enjoying this. This is great. Oh, thanks, Aretha. I'll just pop in and then we can pop back. Again, I mentioned I kind of plugged it a couple of times. I'm very excited. So we at TAP, we are a very avid proponent of HubSpot and very excited that they have partnered with TechSoup to provide some pretty significant discounts. So Janelle is one of our HubSpot ex-liberts and so she will be joining me. What we'll be talking, it's not gonna be specifically, I mean, it will have the specific use case of HubSpot, but a lot of the strategies that we'll be discussing are kind of overarching when it comes to a CRM. For those of you who may not be familiar with CRMs, a customer or contact relationship management system. Where do I keep my basically my contacts? Some of you might use Google Sheets. Some of you might use Excel Sheets, but some of you might use Salesforce. But how do you leverage that information into your communications effectively? And then lastly, I wanna thank all of you for attending today. Also, I really appreciate all of your kind feedback. I appreciate it. I love being able to do this with Aretha on a monthly basis and you guys make it worth it. If you for whatever reason have more questions, you can always reach out to my team directly at techsoup at tapnetwork.com. The link here is also a link through the form on TechSoup where you'll be able to request a discovery call with one of our team members. We do provide a plethora of services. I think that's another great thing that TechSoup is sort of evolving into. They're not just a hardware and software solution. They have a lot of ongoing services like paid services like tapnetwork does, also free services like these webinars and courses. So I hope to see you at the webinar in March on the 22nd. The link is here and this will be included in the follow-up email from Aretha. And also come to the town hall on March 8th with Aretha and myself and some other folks. All right, Aretha, let's get into some questions. Thank you guys. All right, yeah, this is great. I put the link for the next event for the HubSpot event that's in the chat room. So OPA asks, I think you mentioned this earlier, is Persona the same as Avatar? But you can mention it again. I got that, yeah, so the Avatar is, I would say the Avatar can be a component. Like you might, as an organization, you might choose to personify, visually personify your persona with an Avatar or just a character, right? But traditionally it's more like my profile picture on Reddit or an avatar on like a gaming platform. Thank you. And Alex asks, how do you find relevant Facebook groups? Is there a Facebook portal that lists all by interest, et cetera? No, unfortunately there's not. You could Google Facebook group blah, blah, blah, blah, and see what comes up. The search functions via Google and also the search functions within Facebook are pretty robust. So if you're looking for something, it just might take some time to find the right ones. David asks, will the March session go beyond CRM's to Data Lakes? I think he might have meant Leaps, maybe. Data Leaps? Not sure what you mean. Yeah, David, type in the chat room if you're still here. Sure. And Angela, yes, the recording is available. We'll be emailing recording probably later today or tomorrow. Susan asks in the chat room, can you say more about gender or non-binary persona? That's a great question. As a member of the LGBT community myself, it's something that I'm constantly considering as I work through different clients and different marketing strategies. It is definitely when relevant, gender is an important piece. It's not always, but it is an important piece. And it's more important when and if a non-binary individual makes up a full persona. So I'll give an example is, I'm launching right now a, I hope this is appropriate, an STI sexually transmitted infection campaign within the state of Delaware here. It's called Erase the Stigma.  So we do actually have a target persona that lives within the LGBT community so that we're not always referring to sexual health in the terms of heteronormative dialogue. And in some cases that allows those individuals to feel included and inclusive. So I think it really is dependent on the marketing strategy and how that presents itself. More often than not, I will say, I hate to say this, but more often that it is a male or female type of just for the persona perspective, but I would say fewer than, it's fewer than far between where the gender is a major component to what you're gonna actually be executing at the end of the day. I think with David, he said about the CRM, he said, I mean data lake houses that integrate all data from analysis and business process. And he gave an example like data bricks. Yeah, so it's not gonna get that far. There are ways in which, using HubSpot as a use case where it's a centralized CRM, we're gonna be looking at it primarily through the lens of your communication. So like how are you using your CRM to actually communicate? Cause I think that's the biggest opportunity that I see a lot with the nonprofit space. But like a solution like HubSpot has additional hubs that you can attach to that CRM. They have a sales hub and a service hub. Actually service hub is another one that we've explored a lot with nonprofits who deal with like social work type of dynamics or they're kind of like using, like they have like different caseloads and they're managing a participant through a particular program. But we're not gonna go that far into like the data data data side of it. And this is the last question from Amanda. We're a librarian have two podcasters. How can we use persona to help them stay on voice for our organization brand? Very good question. Okay, that's a good question. So are they, a couple of questions I would maybe ask is, are they, are the podcasters podcasting as like a central role within your organization at your library? If so, I would have, I would identify who are your participants and now your personas. And this is something else that's a little bit interesting. Your personas on your podcast, if the goal is to get them to come into the library, that's one thing. If the goal is to get them to donate or to consume the content, I think it kind of goes back a little bit to what is the goal of the podcast and understanding who those individuals are that are listening, who are the individuals who are coming into the library and then being able to kind of cross-share that information so that as your podcasters are developing more information and more content, they're being aware of who's actually the foot traffic day to day in my library.  So I think it kind of goes into what is the purpose of your podcast and who is your podcast really serving to be able to kind of help align those two pieces together. Okay, I said that was the last question but I'm gonna take this last one in the Q&A from Emily because I think it's a good one. I have a mailing list of 1,000 plus with no segments. Where do I start? Are there any resources? Can we read that one more time? I have a mailing list of 1,000 plus with no segments. Where do I start? Are there any resources? So it's depending on the platform that you have and I've done this before with organizations and I've also done this before with like a for-profit company you can sometimes it's like for MailChimp for instance you can send them an updated form like a form update like update your information with our organization and then they go in and they might be able to fill out a few more things like where did you hear about us? How did you find us? Whatever the information that you might be looking for I wouldn't go too far down but like have you ever attended any of our events in the past? You know, if they're in your list you run the risk of attrition if you do that because but if you're really needing to get more information or detail on that you can do sort of like a follow-up kind of form to collect more information about those ones. Yeah. Thank you so much Whit. That was amazing. I really enjoyed that. I know there are a lot of feedback in the comment section, very helpful. Thank you lots of feedback in the comment section. Look, I wanna thank you all for being here. Look forward to seeing you in our next webinars. Please fill out the survey. I'll be sending you the YouTube link and the presentation. Yeah, the slide deck within a day and maybe later today and have a great day everybody. Thank you. Bye everyone. Thank you so much.


If you're new to the channel, I am Goldpony, I do new car truck SUV reviews on YouTube and today we are in the brand new 2024 Volvo V90 cross country courtesy of younger Volvo in Hagerstown, Maryland for more information on their inventory. Please feel free to check out the link in the description box below. So today we are in this one because there is a new color for the 2024 model gear, not the hugest deal there, but this is an incredible looking wagon in my personal opinion and there's very few wagons that still remain here, at least in the US. So ultimately in this video, we will be testing out and going over everything about this one from acceleration to braking, steering feel, ride quality, sound system, exhaust clip, all that fun stuff. So having said all of that, what do you guys say? Let's just go ahead and jump right into it. And as always, let's start with pricing. And so as you can imagine, there are a couple of different trim levels. There's only two for the 2024 V90. First one is going to be the plus, starting at $60,245. The other one being the ultimate and the one we have today, starting at $65,845. But regardless of trim level that you go with, the power plant is going to be the same. Powering the V90 is a two liter turbocharged four cylinder with a mild hybrid system, putting out 295 horsepower at 5,400 RPM, 310 pound feet of torque coming in at 2,100 RPM. That power being sent to all four wheels through an eight speed automatic, zero to 60 time, coming in at approximately 6.1 seconds. That's plenty respectable there. With MPG numbers coming in at 22 in the city, 29 on the highway, taking premium, unleaded fuel. And so before we do any kind of fun acceleration tests here in our V90, wanted to mention to you guys, there are a couple of different drive modes that can be accessed through the infotainment screen. But if you were to go to that infotainment screen, you got an off road drive mode. So that's kind of convenient there. And there's also a steering feel firm mode is what it is called specifically. Basically tightens up that steering feel, more of a sports sedan. If you don't press it, it's gonna feel more like an SUV basically, a looser steering feel. So we'll get more into that a little bit later, but now I haven't got all of that out of the way. What do you guys say? Let's go ahead and find a straightaway. Let's put the V90 here to the test and let's see how quickly we can get our new 2024 Volvo V90 here up to speed. All right guys in three, two, one, go. Instant acceleration. Even with the turbocharger because of the mild hybrid system. I love that. This is quick, man. This is plenty quick. You're not gonna have any issues in merging onto the highway. And again, a lot of times with turbocharged four cylinders, what you get is a heck of a lot of turbo lag. But I've said this in my other videos before because Volvo includes a mild hybrid system with their engines, there's no turbo lag. There's instant acceleration. And it does of course assist with a little better MPGs as well. Because of that, you do have that instant acceleration which is wonderful. But anyways, to go along with that acceleration as always, braking is equally important. So as expected, you will find four wheel ventilated disc brakes coming standard. As far as that 60's easier stopping distance goes that's gonna come in an extremely respectable 116 feet. Anything in the one teens is sports sedan good. I've said that before in my last 700 plus reviews. Anything in the 120's is kind of typical sedans and then there's 130's actually as well. So 116 feet is excellent. As far as braking feel goes, let's go ahead and hit the brakes here. Wow, that is brilliant, man. That isn't always the case in all of all of those. But with the V90, the braking feel is definitely on the firm side. It does instantly bring you to a stop. So wonderful braking feel on the V90 Volvo. You did an excellent job with that. Then touching on suspension and handling up front you're gonna get a double wishbone type front suspension in the back integral link rear suspension. As far as ride quality goes, it's been perfect in my short little test drive here today. I will say Hagerstown has some bang good roads, perfectly paved, but nonetheless, I won't say ride quality has been perfectly fine. As far as steering feel goes, like I mentioned at the kind of the beginning of the video with the drive modes, you can adjust it through the infotainment screen to go into settings actually. And there is a steering feel firm mode and that does increase the weight pretty substantially. So it gives you a much heavier feel to the steering, better points you in the direction that you wanna go. It really does feel more like a sports sedan. If you turn that off, you're back to the normal Lucy Goosey mode, which is fine for a lot of people. It basically feels like your traditional SUV more or less. So it's got something for everyone, I guess you could say. So I love the steering feel in that firm mode. I'll put it that way. As far as cabin noise goes, this is a good example. We're going 52 miles per hour right now. I'll let you guys be the judge through the road, Mike. Honestly, isn't that bad for me. So it's a pretty darn serene cabin, in my personal opinion. Touching on visibility, I can see perfectly fine out the back. Excellent visibility, if you're asking me. You can see fine out the rear view mirror there. Rain-sensing windshield wipers, though in terms of four visibility, actually do come standard on the V90. So whenever the V90 detects any kind of mist or rainfall, it's gonna automatically turn on those windshield wipers for you there. So it's one less thing you gotta worry about, kind of like automatic headlights. So I love that feature as well. And if you were to go with that ultimate trim level, like we have today, I am looking at a head-up display projected onto my windshield. It's giving me my speed, speed limit, and of course safety features as well. So it's gonna better help keep your eyes on the road and assisting with four visibility yet again. But that pretty much rounds out the performance segment of this review, guys. Let's now go ahead and take a look at the exterior of our brand new 2024 Volvo V90 Cross Country. All right, so here she is, you guys, the new 2024 Volvo V90 Cross Country finished in denim blue. In case you were curious of our exact exterior color name, and it just doesn't even look blue. It looks more like a blue gray, honestly, in real life. But anyways, there is a new color for the 2024 V90. Like I mentioned at the beginning of the video, that is vapor gray metallic. And that vapor gray is kind of a new color across the board from what I've been noticing in my reviews of all those lately. So anyways, that is pretty cool. And there are two colors that have been removed that's thunder gray metallic and black stone, in case you were curious. But as always, let's go ahead and start with where the V90 is actually made. Taking a look at the VIN, first character is the letter Y, indicating that the Volvo V90 is built and assembled in Sweden. The actual name of the city is on the window sticker. I can't pronounce it, so I'm not even going to try. But anyways, let's go ahead and start up front full LED headlights. Do you come standard, meaning both low beam and high beam with LED daytime running lights, of course, in the typical Thor's hammer fashion, get the automatic feature as well, along with automatic high beams, meaning if you have your high beams on in night and it sends the vehicle coming in the opposite direction, it's going to automatically dim them back to low beams. Then when that vehicle is gone, it's going to automatically then bounce it back up the high beams for you there. And if you were to look at ground clearance, since there is an off road mode, you do actually get 8.3 inches of ground clearance, which is very respectable. Typically I say, if you want to do a little bit of light overlanding, anything over eight inches is pretty decent. So 8.3 inches should definitely get the job done there. And I do like the LED fog lights just below those headlights as well. That definitely looks good in my personal opinion. But anyways, that pretty much runs out the front end of the V90. Let's now go ahead and make our way to the side. All right, so now since we are around to the side of this one, roof rails, aluminum roof rails, I should say, do come standard for both trim levels. Black windows surrounds do come standard as well. There will be body colored power adjustable side mirrors. They will have integrated turd signals, LED integrated turd signals. They will be heated and you got the power folding feature as well. So when you lock it up, they're gonna kind of fold in. When you unlock it, they're gonna fold back out. So that's pretty cool. You do have the rear privacy glass that does come standard as well as you typically get with wagons. So love that, just like an SUV. Then taking a look down at the wheel setup, you will find 19 inch diamond cut alloys as the standard configuration for both trim levels. But overall, love the side profile of a wagon. Definitely looks good. Now let's go ahead and make our way to the back. All right, so now since we are on to the back of the V90 body colored shark fin antenna all the way to the top, just blow that rear spoiler with an integrated brake light. Just blow that rear window wiper, a pretty massive rear window wiper as well. So that's pretty cool. Got the Volvo lettering spelled out in Chrome horizontally. That looks good. Of course you get the LED tail lights that do come standard for added illumination at night. Love that. You got a little bit of cross country badging found of the rear bumper. I'm gonna crawl out of the weeds here so I can show that to you guys. So it's cross country etch kind of into the matte black portion of the rear bumper there. And there is actually dual exhaust outlets tucked away and I like that they don't try to kind of fake it and pretend like there are integrated exhausts like a lot of other brands do, like Volkswagen and Alley for example, but definitely looks good back there. So having said that, I do believe you guys know what we have to do next. As always here is that exhaust clip. All right, so now since we are around to the back of the V90, when it comes to opening that rear tailgate it actually is a hands free power tailgate that does come standard for both trim levels. So we gotta love that. There's actually a rubberized button on the tailgate itself. There's a button on the key fob as well. But anyways, once opened up, cargo capacity comes in at 19.8 cubic feet with that second row folded down that bumps that up to an even 69 cubic feet. So quite a bit of space then with the second row folded down. There are some tie down anchors back there. They're chrome plated as well. So a little bit fancier than you traditionally find. There are four grocery bag hooks. Typically you find one or two in SUVs but you got four here in the V90. So that's pretty cool. 12 volt power outlet, cargo cover as well. You do have a first aid kit in typical Volvo fashion. Lexus also does that, but yeah Volvo also does that, that's pretty cool. And if you were to lift up underneath of that cargo floor, you will find a spare tire under the cargo floor. And there was a nice convenient hook to actually keep that cargo floor up if you were to need to access that spare tire. So was a big fan of that as well. So then making our way to the rear legroom that comes in at 35.9 inches for reference. I'm an even six feet tall. This is how much space I had back there. There is rear ventilation for those rear passengers because actually four zone climate control comes standard on the V90. So both rear passengers can also set their own individual temperatures as well. So that is pretty cool. Dual phone charging ports, they're USB charging ports back there as well. And of course I don't want to forget to mention because we have the ultimate with us here today. You also have the rear window sunshades. So that's something you typically never find or almost never find in sedans and wagons, but always in a lot of times in SUVs. So I was definitely a big fan seeing the rear window sunshades back there. But then make your way up to the front seats, power adjustable front seats when memory settings do come standard. They will be heated as well. The ultimate is gonna add to that ventilated front seats and massaging front seats as well. So that is pretty cool that they're massaging, but overall as far seat comfort goes, the very most comfortable seats I've ever tested. And that's because they are kind of, they got a horizontal seams. Typically the vertical seams are super comfy, but I will say they're not bad. It's just they're not the most comfortable I've ever tested. But my favorite part about the seats of course is the flag of Sweden found on the passenger seat. But anyways, they're making our way to the steering wheel. It is tilt and telescoping. It is leather wrapped as well. I like the 10 and two grips. It provides a nice little spot to kind of rest your thumb. Typically don't see that with other manufacturers that make your way to the startup. Let me start by showing you guys the key here. You got your Volvo logo on the one side, but all of your buttons are actually located on the side of the key. So you got lock, unlock, the button to pop the rear tailgate there, but it is all keyless entry with a turn knob start. If you're not familiar with Volvo, this is gonna be different for you, but all you need to do is simply put your front of the brake, turn it to the right to start it and then turn it to the right to stop it as well. Never turn it to the left. Anyways, then taking a look at the gauges. There is a 12 inch digital gauge cluster that does come standard and I love it. Volvo does an amazing job at their gauges. Speedometers on your left, tachometers on your right. You got your speed limit indicator outside temperature. How many miles you'll have left until you hit empty and your navigation, which is provided by Google Maps front and center. So the very best mapping system in existence is found right on the digital gauges. So that is definitely gonna help you with navigation and all that as well. So I love that, but now let's go ahead and make our way to overall interior quality. You got a Panoramic Moonroof that does come standard. It's one of the largest Panoramic Moonroofs that I've seen goes way into the backseat. So I absolutely love that. Aluminum door sills do come standard as well. Definitely a fan of that. Tailored gear selector comes standard, but if you go with the ultimate like we have today, you get a crystal gear selector by Orphors. Orphors is a Swedish crystal company. So a company in Sweden that actually makes crystal, including the crystal gear selector for the Volvo V90 and some other Volvo's as well. So huge fan of this gear shifter. But anyways, Wood trim does come standard. I love that. You can find that on the doors just above the passenger side glove box and kind of surrounding the shifter as well. Another cool thing I like in this Volvo is you got a lot of carpeting found by the driver's right knee and it would be the passenger's left knee, but I love the carpeting. It's a very high-end feel to it and you typically don't find that in other manufacturers as well. You do have a frameless rear view mirror with homily controls to up to three different garage doors just below it. I do also love the kind of touch interior LED lighting that we have with us here today. So all you need to simply do is just simply touch your finger on it. There's no actual button or anything like that. That's gonna turn it on and off and then to open and close the power moonroof. You slide your finger back to open it. You slide it forward to close it. So a pretty cool setup that Volvo has there. As far as the extra stuff goes, there's a little bit of storage just in front of the shifter just to the right of the shifter. You have two cupholders, 12-volt power outlet and then within the center armrest. Decent amount of space, not a ton, but you do have a couple USB charging ports within there as well. So overall as far as overall interior quality goes, it's excellent and I also love the aluminum speaker covers, these Harman Kardon speaker covers. We'll test out the sound system in a little bit here, but they're very high-end as well. But now let's go ahead and make our way to the infotainment screen here. And so you're gonna find a nine-inch vertical color touchscreen display. Of course you get Android Auto Apple CarPlay you get Bluetooth and audio streaming. Factory navigation system also coming standard. You could check out your climate control settings up there. Also your heated seat buttons, your ventilated seat buttons, heated steering wheel button, all that stuff can be found up there. Along of course with your drive modes and your radio information. And so when it comes to the sound systems, there's two of them, obviously one for each trim level. The plus trim is gonna give you 10 speakers and 220 watts. The ultimate trim that we have today is going to give you a 14-speaker Harman Kardon sound system with 600 watts. They're three times the amount of wattage. So having said that, that is the one that we have today, like I mentioned. So let's go ahead and turn on the radio, see what we got playing today. And let's test out the clarity of this one. All right, bass was amazing. Love the bass and that. No doubt about that. Clarity was dang good. Not the very best clarity that I've ever heard. Like Volvo makes some Bowers and Wilkins sound systems like their S90, for example. I think it's amazing. This is nowhere close to that, but it's still dang good. I'll say that. The bass is good. Clarity is pretty darn good, but not as much as I expected. I'll just put it that way.   But you do also get a 360 degree monitor as well. So let me start by giving you the bird's eye view, which is always is going to lead us into safety. So first let me start by saying the obvious. IIHS top safety pick plus, which is the very highest designation given by IHS. So yes, Volvo is still the very best when it comes to safety without a doubt. Front side, side current, airbags do come standard.  And so overall when it comes to my final thoughts of the V90, I actually really like it because this is a very rare wagon from Sweden. It's not a vehicle that you're gonna see left and right everywhere you're driving. It's very rare that you're probably gonna find another one on the road like yourself. So anyways, that's pretty cool to me. Excellent safety as well. That's what Volvo is known for, of course. Pretty good driving dynamics. You got excellent braking on this thing without a doubt. Plenty of acceleration and that steering feel firm mode. So you got the heavier weight to the steering if you wanted it. So good driving dynamics, like I said, very good overall interior quality as well. As far as room for improvement goes, I didn't see a wireless phone charger. So would have loved to have seen that. And I think Volvo might be able to spruce it up with a little bit of ambient lighting as well. Like BMW and Mercedes do, for example. Anyways, let me know what you guys think of the V90 in the comments section below and that is about it for this one. You guys, thank you so much for watching. Feel free to follow me on social media at the bottom of the screen. If you want to see what's coming next on the channel before it gets to YouTube, be sure to hit the subscribe and the bell notification button if you're in any new car reviews because that is what we do here on this channel. After all, do appreciate you guys watching more than you know and I will see you guys all in the next video. Stay Gold.