Branding for Nonprofits Sneak Peek
This is a brief overview of a session that I will be doing leading for the Nonprofit Seminar Series at the 2017 Make a Mark Roanoke-Blacksburg Make-a-Thon.
What is branding and why does it matter for a nonprofit?
Brand is often used when referring to your organization’s logo or other design. Many people view brand as just the external, visual appearance, but it is much more than that.
“Brand is everything the public thinks it knows about your name brand offering — both factual and emotional,” Jerry McLaughlin, Forbes, December 2011.
Your brand is your whole identity and your story. It isn’t just about design or marketing, and it isn’t what you report to your grant monitor.
It is internal as well as external. Your brand begins with your organization’s culture including your staff, board members, volunteers and anyone else inside the organization. A successful brand evokes an emotional response and builds a connection with the audience.
Brand IDEA
Something that I reference often is Brand IDEA, a framework developed by Natalie Kylander and Julia Shepard Stenzel. It is the result of many months of work interviewing over 70 organizations that were focusing on their own brand management.
Brand IDEA starts with I for Integrity. This means that your internal identity aligns with your external image. This also means that everything you believe, plan and do fits with the vision, mission and values of your organization.
This is crucial because it creates cohesion for your staff, which then translates to consistency in visual appearance, language and activities. This ultimately leads to trust in the public.
D is for Democracy. This is trust in those representing your organization. This can sometimes be a challenge and take time, but once you find the right people, you have to trust them and give them the space to represent you. Luckily this means more delegation and freed up time for the Executive Director.
E is for Ethics. This means that your choices reflect the core of your organization — your vision, mission and values.
This also means that the language and imagery you use accurately reflect your organization.
A is for Affinity. This means an organization works well with partners and others outside of their immediate agency. You share credit and sometimes resources for your cause.
Internal brand — your foundation for success.
If you can’t agree on your brand internally, then you won’t be able to sustain long-term success.
In this session on March 25th, we will cover vision statement, mission statement and core values. Learn more on how to Start Building Your Nonprofit’s Culture.
As part of Make a Mark, we noticed that many participants were using words that just didn’t make sense to us as a brand. Some of these included client and consultant and, at Make a Mark, we want the relationship between Makers and nonprofits to be a partnership. This is when we outlined words that we like and words that we don’t like.
Words We Like: Partnership, Together, Collaborative, Community
Words We Don’t Like: Client, Consultant, Employee, Contractor
Now it is obviously hard to tell everyone what words they can and cannot use. This isn’t something we want to force. However, by coming up with this list as a team, board members and volunteers started using the language from the ‘words we like’ category, which eventually started to spread to the rest of the organization.
Now that we’ve broken down the internal brand, how do we keep this top of mind? Visibility.
Create a prominent visual representation, revisit these statements and values and acknowledge people based on your values.
External brand — your execution in the world.
Taglines are your way to share your organization’s story in a clear, concise way. This is often an expansion of your organization’s name.
To craft your tagline, you’ll want to answer a couple questions.
- What is your organization trying to accomplish, and how?
- What makes your organization unique?
Visuals are hugely important and could takes hours and many articles to discuss, but lets hit a few key points.
Colors. There are plenty of guides that tell you which colors evoke which emotions. For example, yellow spurs optimism, blue builds trust and purple impacts creativity. While you can use this as a guide, it is most important to find a color palette that best represents your organization versus cherry picking colors for your brand.
Some great websites include Adobe Color CC, Colordot, Designspiration and ColourLovers.
Choosing fonts can also be a difficult process, but also a lot of fun. Your typography evokes emotion just like your logo or your color scheme. The best way to start is by identifying the attitude you want to convey. This should match the rest of your brand.
At Make a Mark, we selected a few decorative fonts that we use for events, but we have one standard font that we use across everything from our agendas to our website and beyond.
Decorative fonts can be interesting for graphics and headers, but need to be readble. FontSquirrel has a lot of free, decorative, unique fonts for almost any occassion. Creative Market also many great fonts that are typically high quality, but do cost a little bit of money.
All body text should be a more classic, readable font although it can be tempting to use an overly decorative and thematic font. Google Fonts is a key location to find body fonts that will translate across the web.
In the Nonprofit Seminar Series, we will also review graphic elements, photos and logos.
Rebrand — when and why?
I’m sure some of you are thinking, “this doesn’t apply to me, our brand is 50 years old and everyone knows us.”
“Brands are like living things — they are born and they can die, but as long as they are carefully nurtured they will flourish and have a place in the consumer’s life. In order to have longevity, it is essential for brands to evolve,” James Boulton, Wired, January 2017.
Many people are afraid to rebrand because they think that their organization is recognizable as it is and they don’t want to rock the boat. However, for-profit companies often refresh their brand every few years to keep up with trends and revisit their company’s mission and values.
The real question is when to rebrand. Some key indicators:
- Your brand is scattered
- New offerings are available
- Your audience changes significantly
- Your brand is missing the mark
Join us on March 25th in the afternoon for this session on Branding for Nonprofits and keep an eye for most in-depth articles on these topics.
For more info, subscribe to the newsletter or send an email to me at hello@letsmakeamark.org.
