TAO/Persona Bernhard Hofer

Persona description of Bernhard Hofer, researcher in Zurich, interested in consulting online communities for seniors.

Personal characteristics

Bernhard is married, lives in Winterthur, Switzerland. Together with his wife they are planning to have children in a couple of years; they would like to settle and to buy a family home. Bernhard's biggest hobby is paragliding; in addition to the outdoor activities he regularly exchanges experiences and route indications with peers in an online forum.

Bernhard is a Researcher in social sciences with a masters degree in sociology. Until now he has mostly been involved in desktop research, and only rarely in action research. He has previously worked in a private company for a couple of years in the field of marketing research, with a strong focus on online marketing. He presently works in the social work department of the University of Applied Sciences Zurich in Switzerland. He has recently been involved with a research group working in the area of e-inclusion, mainly tackling the challenge of bridging the second order digital divide of older adults. After carrying out a few surveys in the area, the research team is at present moving more and more towards the transfer of their insights into practice (teaching, consulting, continuing education, but also research & development projects in co-operation with other departments).

Bernhard's professional goals

Bernhard would like to reach a stable job situation and possibly make a career. He would also like to write a doctorate thesis at some point. In order to reach a certain degree of freedom in his job, he needs to be able to get project funding or to find a niche where he can offer his own consulting or training. But from his perspective, it is still quite a way to get there. A couple of months ago, a colleague of his acquired a R&D project the goal of which is to develop online activities for seniors in collaboration with the provider of an online community platform for the region. Manfred was offered the possibility to work in the project; this puts him in the new situation of closely working together with practice partners to develop new solutions. He is quite motivated for the job, but sometimes has the feeling to lack the necessary methodological basis to do an efficient job.

Key stakeholders in Bernhard's job and their expectations

The practice partners expect from the research team that it helps to quickly create value in terms of additional users, while building upon the existing system. Bernhard’s colleagues count on his marketing experience to contribute to the project’s success. There are colleagues from the IT department involved in the project; they are supposed to further develop the online platform based on requirements derived from user research. They seem to have a precise idea of how these requirements should be provided; at present they are not very happy about the input they got from Manfred so far. Bernhard’s employer expects from the research team to continuously develop new ideas to get additional funding.

Difficulties / challenges

There are tensions between the online community provider and some of the users. There are regularly critical remarks in the forum and discussion groups. In some cases, rather closed sub-communities have emerged where newcomers often have a hard time to get integrated. The community provider isn’t happy about this, of course, because his interest mainly lies in generating additional traffic, and for that he needs new users.

A few pilot projects have been carried out to activate older users. The main challenge however lies in finding the necessary multiplicators, so that the activation efforts start to develop a dynamics of their own. At present, the efforts undertaken to integrate more older people are simply too expensive compared to their impact.

A lot of older people are quite reserved with regard to online communities; it’s not easy to convince them of their use. And if they are interested, they often need regular support over several weeks in order to get acquainted with all the functionalities and the etiquette of the community. Once they have been actively participating in the community for a while, they however seem to enjoy it and report being able to enrich their social life this way. For Bernhard and his researcher colleagues this is quite a rewarding experience; at the same time they are a bit clueless as to provide the necessary support to the newbies.

Bernhard faces the expectation from his developer colleagues to get acquainted with their ways of doing their work in order to be able to provide them with the requirements in the necessary form. Furthermore they have the impression that Bernhard’s way of approaching the users in order to get to know their needs and expectations is not very effective.

At an internal training sessions, Manfred is confronted with the expectation that the research teams develop business ideas in co-operation with their practice partners. In spite of his experience in the marketing area, Manfred does not feel very comfortable in the role of an entrepreneur. He feels that he lacks the necessary knowledge and experience to effectively develop business models and business plans and to “sell” them to potential cooperation partners or funding institutions.

How Bernhard could profit from support offers

Training: BM development, working in multi-disciplinary teams
Exchange of best practices with other people working in the field
Know-how about how best to approach older people to integrate them in online communities