Insights for Nonprofit Marketing and Branding Part 3: Logos
By: Ruth Chen
This is part 3 of a 3-part series on how nonprofits can use rhetorical appeals for marketing and branding.
Background
As humans, we often believe that we are rational beings capable of making rational decisions. Thus, logos is the mode of persuasion that appeals to this perception of us. As a statement with a pathos or ethos appeal captures our curiosity and interest, our immediate follow is a “wait, but”. Nevertheless, the rhetorical tool, logos, helps subside our doubts and persuades us towards taking action and committing to a social cause.
The origins of logos date back to the 4th century and is one of the three modes of persuasion defined and created by the Greek philosopher Aristotle. This form of reasoning has two major components, deductive and inductive reasoning, which both allow the respective audience to strategically think and follow arguments. Additionally, logos arguments are heavily comprised of proven facts and data (i.e. statistics, trends, dates). Through the use of logos, an organization is able to develop credibility and trust between them and their target audience.
Logos is commonly used across industries to provide legitimacy to their cause. Some prominent examples include Truth, the campaign against cigarette use, and McDonalds. Truth heavily employs logos in its campaign to effect change and prompt action within its target audience, the youth. Truth use emotionally charged photos to capture its target audience’s attention, then follow the campaign ads with hard hitting facts (i.e. tobacco kills 1200 people per day) to convey the severity and impact of cigarette use. Additionally, Truth’s website is crowded with statistics and trends, which allows its target audience to deduce that cigarettes are detrimental to their health and thus, are not worth their three-minute pleasures. While Truth moves its crowd to take action against a product, McDonald uses logos to encourage its audience to trust and eat its products. For instance, McDonalds’ signs have “Billions and billions served” to indicate how they’ve readily provided meals that are trusted and known by the public. Moreover, McDonald’s has been rebranding itself as a healthier fast food option by creating logical claims on that they invest in quality products and have numerous commitments to sustainable and ethical practices.
As these two examples reflect a powerful use of logos to forward their movement/brand, nonprofits can equally use this mode of persuasion to improve their organizational sustainability, receive larger scale investments from corporate and governmental organizations, and achieve greater calls to action.
Application to Nonprofits
One of the major problems that nonprofits often face is receiving sustainable funds. The majority of the time, nonprofits receive one-time donations from generous individual donors. However, it is difficult to sustain and run a strong organization off these funds. Thus, nonprofits have to find ways to build partnerships with large-scale organizations such as governments and an often-overlooked contributor, investors. To achieve this kind of partnership and steady income, investors are moved differently from general one-time contributors. Instead of emotional appeals, they are heavily drawn and convinced by rational appeals. Investors are more focused on results and the long term viability of nonprofits. More specifically, according to Nonprofit hub, “higher-end investors are more interested in [the nonprofit’s] results, which involve improving the lives of [their] customers and affecting real change over the long run” and they require clear communication that most effectively communicate that to them. Thus, nonprofits should leverage their data to build cohesive and logical arguments capable of convincing investors to invest in their social cause for the long-run.
Achieving greater outreach and sustainable commitment are other key difficulties that nonprofits often face. Nonprofits typically receive engagement and action from individuals who are interested in their cause; however, this kind of audience is often sporadic in commitment and limited in scope. Thus, for nonprofits to expand their reach and achieve consistent participation, they must employ rational appeals. Through rational appeals, individuals are more able to explicitly see the impact of their dollar, which allows for their initially captured interest become solidified and themselves to have a stronger committed support for the social cause. Additionally, according to The Cause Agency, logos “works best to connect people to a cause that would otherwise have no ties to the group”. This allows a nonprofit to extend its reach without needing to create several fragmented messages. Through the use of logical progressions backed by data, a nonprofit is able to build a cohesive and robust brand.
Case Studies
When building a cohesive and robust brand to reach across and influence communities, an organization must employ Logos to allow for the target community to develop their own rationalized support. In Spring 2017, The Berkeley Group advised on a project that helped Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín fully develop his platform and solidify his connection with his constituents. Angela, one of the consultants on the project, shared some key insights on how she and the rest of her team utilized logos to help brand Jesse Arreguín as “Berkeley’s Kind of Mayor”. Already known for his controversial platforms, Angela noted that it was imperative for Arreguín to utilize social media platforms (i.e. Twitter and Facebook) to publicly showcase his dedication to his “initiatives and election platforms” as well as his willingness to “ensure that every voice is heard”. This transparency allows for his constituents to openly send negative/positive feedback and receive direct responses from Arreguín himself. As so, his constituents are able to deduce Arreguín’s strong receptiveness to feedback and relatability to the public.
Moreover, TBG logically diversifies Arreguín’s social media approach to reach as wide of an audience possible by recommending plug-ins on social media accounts and tagging pages of partners. Not only was visibility key to Arreguín’s brand, but TBG also recommended Jesse Arreguín to be result oriented in social media marketing, such that his messages should be focused on “statistics and tangible improvements”. Through the use of data and transparency, Jesse is able to create an open and committed brand, showcasing his support for the community regardless of their political or personal affiliations. As the mayor’s key objective was to build an image that best reflected his initiatives and dedication to the community, TBG’s Logos-driven recommendations allowed him to have a cohesive brand that touch upon all communities rather than a fragmented one attempting to appeal to all.
Achieving sustainable and sufficient funds are critical to the health and capabilities of a nonprofit, thus logos is a powerful tool that helps nonprofits best market themselves to organizations to invest in their cause. A noteworthy case study of a highly successful nonprofit is Crisis Text Line. Crisis Text Line is a nonprofit that provides “free 24/7 support for those in crisis”. This organization heavily uses Logos to express the breadth and depth of their impact in order to receive large sponsorships and investments from major corporations and government organizations all across the nation. Explicitly on their website, they showcase numerous facts and visualizations about their impact, the public demand for their service and how they allocate their funds.
For instance, in indicating their impact and the market of their service, they display persuasive facts such as the exact number of texts they’ve sent out, which is roughly 66 million as of April 2018, and an interactive map of the United States indicating various ranks of different mental health issues. Additionally, they create a highly transparent and logical platform by using pie charts to reflect where they receive and allocate their funds. These honest and clear statements easily allow donors to deduce that majority of donations are spent directly on programs and have driven massive impact. Through the heavy use of logos, Crisis Text Line leverages their honest and powerful brand to persuade donors to fund their cause by the millions.
Applying Ethos, Pathos, and Logos
Although logos is a powerful tool to generate sustainability in the long-run, using logos alone will not elicit the largest response from the desired audience. The use of all three methods achieves the strongest and most credible emotions and actions. Nonprofits should attempt to implement all three methods of persuasion, but if not, two is better than one. One could consider employing pairings between pathos & logos an & logos. In pathos & logos, Pathos helps capture the target audience’s attention by eliciting strong emotions and the following logos’ argument helps solidify the trust between the audience and the organization. Similarly, in ethos & logos, Ethos helps craft a vision and mission statement that illustrates the purpose and need for the social cause and the following logos’ argument helps give credibility and the logical progression of how the organization generates impact. Overall, a nonprofit can dramatically increase their brand awareness and long-term viability by employing these three methods of persuasion.
