6 Ways Boards Are Critical to a Nonprofit’s Brand

Nonprofit board members know they must oversee their organization’s finances, governance, and major initiatives. But they often overlook their role in keeping their organization’s brand healthy, vibrant, and free from liability. To fulfill that responsibility, board members must:

1. Prioritize the Brand

Having a strong brand is fundamental for long-term success. The brand must be easy to understand, appealing, and motivating. If people don’t know what you do and how well you do it, they are not going to support you. Boards make it possible for an organization to build and maintain a brand by allocating the resources needed. Whether marketing is done in-house or with the help of a consultant, the board must budget sufficient money to ensure success.

If the brand is important to the board, it will be important to staff, donors, and clients. By ensuring that systems and resources are in place to reinforce the brand, the board ensures its continuity and strength.

2. Be Part of Brand Development

Boards help define the organization’s brand — its mission, vision, values, and brand promise. The board can participate by taking an active part in the branding process. Boards should be involved in developing and approving key deliverables, such as a new name, visual identity, or mission statement, and ensure that appropriate trademark protection is secured.

3. Protect the Brand from Internal Threats

The board must ensure that there is a brand guideline manual and that all communications materials reflect the standards laid out in the manual. By making consistency a priority, your team will not inadvertently erode your brand. 

For organizations that have chapters or affiliates, pay attention to the relationship between the parent entity and others that use the brand. Parent organizations need to clearly articulate how their brand is to be used (and not used), provide guidelines and training to those using the brand, and monitor for misuse.

Affiliate organizations need to be mindful of using the national brand appropriately and setting guidelines for adapting the brand locally within the national standards.

4. Protect the Brand from External Threats

External threats come from people — including your supporters — who may use your logo or other brand identifiers in an inappropriate manner, or other organizations that usurp or infringe on your name or logo. 

The board must also examine any potential mergers, partnership arrangements, or cause-marketing deals to ensure that the arrangements are mutually beneficial and that the organization’s brand won’t be misappropriated or harmed in any way. Make sure that all partnership arrangements are with entities with similar values and interests. Don’t enter into agreements — no matter how financially tempting — that contradict the mission and values of your organization. Spell out all the details of how your name, logo, and other brand elements will be used.

5. Leverage the Brand

Smart organizations know that their brand reflects their entire organization and that branding, marketing, and fundraising support each other. Each of these departments has touchpoints with the public — clients, donors, media, volunteers — and each touchpoint should reinforce the brand. 

Boards can ensure that all departments — particularly development and marketing — support each other. Boards need to understand the many skills, roles, and positions within the organization affect and support their marketing efforts. They need to put systems and teams in place to ensure brand cohesion. 

6. Speak Up for the Brand

Board members must be brand ambassadors. Their job is to enthusiastically spread the word, raise funds, and serve as the chief cheerleaders for the organization. To do so, they must be able to confidently and passionately talk about the value and impact of the organization. A strong brand makes it easier for them to do so by providing clear, concise language and a message that board members are proud to convey.

Previously published online in Candid.

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Branding & Advertising

The logo features two “e”s turned in to mimic people meeting, and the ad shows the concept of 2 people finding each other in a crowd, and reinforces the logo. The theme was used for ads in trade journals reaching conference promoters.

Links

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Red Rooster Group is a New York based graphic design firm that creates effective brands, websites, and marketing campaigns for businesses and nonprofits to increase visibility, awareness, and sales. Contact us at info@redroostergroup.com.

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So you’re starting a nonprofit organization or have one and want to know how to build or strengthen your brand. Well, what is a brand? Is it advertising, your spokesperson. a logo? You have heard of the Red Cross, Oprah, McDonald’s. These are all brands. And while you may have positive or negative perceptions about each of these, you’ll notice their missions are easy to define – providing disaster relief when needed, inspiring people to live better lives, and providing a cheap, convenient meal. They are all based on making a clear promise to their audience. Essentially, your brand is the reputation you have for delivering on your promise.

For more information on brand promise, read the following article: http://www.nonprofitquarterly.org/content/view/13/28

What does this mean for your nonprofit? A strong brand will help you to stand out from the masses of solicitations, distinguish your cause from other organizations doing similar work, and inspire others to support you. The best brands elicit positive emotional responses because people understand and identify with your mission and know that the organization is consistently true to it. When carefully developed and nurtured, the brand becomes the fabric of an organization’s culture.

Over the long-term, organizations with strong brands become well known and tend to raise more money. In today’s environment, with more nonprofits than ever competing for funding, you can’t afford not to have a strong brand.

This article, along with helpful links, will help you get started in understanding how to create a successful brand for your organization.

Components of a Successful Brand

Three components create a brand: differentiation, credibility and authenticity. By assessing your organization’s strengths in each area, you’ll begin to understand how your brand value can be built, communicated and delivered.

•  Differentiation

While it is tempting to immediately turn your passion into action, with 1.5 million nonprofit organizations in the United States, first you need to distinguish your nonprofit from other organizations doing similar work. The average person is deluged with solicitations and is easily confused about what organization does what, so to stand out, you have to be very clear.

Start with your mission – is it easy enough for people to understand what you do? Is your mission inspiring to enough people to attract a broad base of support to be sustainable for the long-term? Do you have an achievable goal for success that will captivate people’s imagination?

For example, the laudable ambition of solving literacy provides little means to measure success. On the other hand, “a computer in every classroom” is a compelling promise that captivates people’s imagination and allows them to envision the mission being fulfilled.

To find out what other nonprofits are doing, run a search on Charity Navigator: http://www.charitynavigator.org or GuideStar: http://www.guidestar.org/

•  Credibility

Before someone makes that online donation or steps up to volunteer their time, they have to believe that your organization has the ability to deliver on its promise. Whether your organization is rooted in a rich tradition or fresh ideas, or was created in response to grass-roots needs or global demand, your members and donors will want to know that you can be trusted and have solid management practices so that their money is put to good use. Having a strong board of directors that sets the direction for your organization and is accountable for results is one step in giving your organization the credibility to substantiate its promise.

For information on the role that boards play, visit http://www.governancematters.org

•  Authenticity

The third ingredient of an effective brand is getting people to identify and care about your cause. Successful organizations know that they need to go beyond the support from people who are directly affected by the issue they are working on to attract a wider audience. By speaking authentically about the challenges you face as well as the expertise you bring to solving the problem, you make it easier for people to trust your organization and ultimately to volunteer their time and donate their money.

Every Picture Tells a Story. What’s Yours?

We learned that organizations with strong brands are able to distinguish themselves, establish credibility and speak authentically. How do they do this? By telling good  stories. Stories are the foundation of a strong brand – they give a deeper meaning to your mission and help people connect to what you do. Your organization’s story may revolve around the personality of your founder, a galvanizing moment in your organization’s history, or a natural affinity to your audience. Good stories, like good deeds, give your brand life, excite your donor base and instill confidence in others that your organization is what it claims to be.

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Naming, branding and storefront design for CarePath, a senior care management service launched by the Park Slope Geriatric Day Center.

See more of our work in launching CarePath

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Where does the sanctity of religion leave off and branding begin? That’s the question that Sikh transit workers are addressing in their protest against the MTA requirement that they wear the agency’s logo on their turbans.

The issue underscores the importance of design in today’s society and the extent to which we identify and legitimize people’s role through their uniforms. At what point does the perception and authority of the MTA as an agency, or the individual employees, become undermined by not wearing part of a uniform? Another MTA concern would be where to draw the line on people claiming an exception to the rule, for example in letting employees wear other  expressive or nonbranded headgear, such as a Yankees hat (a 2005 survey found more than 100 employees doing so).

While a proponent of the benefits that design can confer, I think it abhorrent that the MTA would seek to desecrate a religious item with an organizational logo. Apparently, I am not alone, as 27 City Council members signed on to a letter of support, urging Transit President Howard Roberts to drop the logo rule adopted after 9/11, when four Muslim women were barred from driving buses while wearing head scarves.

Nonetheless, as religious expressions expands and the hand of branding reaches into ever-increasing areas of our life, from our food, clothing, shelter, transportation and entertainment, there will no doubt be more conflicts in retaining “authentic,” unbranded versions of these things. I think the larger lesson is that while we can all appreciate the positive attributes branding brings, we must also be sensitive to its limitations.

What’s your take on this?

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Looking to redesign your website or upgrade your agency’s branding and putting out a Request for Proposals (RFP)? Make sure you get the best consultant you can by making your RFP the best it can be. Consider this list of what to include gleaned from our 17 years of responding to RFPs.

1. Overview of Your Organization: Explain your mission, services, history and structure so that the consultant can understand what you do and determine if this is the right match. You want to attract someone who understands your issues and is compelled by your cause, so provide them with that information (this can be derived from your website, brochure or grant proposals).

2. History of Your Marketing: Your brand, website or campaign does not stand in isolation, Describe your current website, brand, or prior marketing efforts and what you have found successful and what you would like to address.

3. Reasons for the RFP: Explain what’s precipitating the need for a new website or brand – whether it’s operational, competitive, fundraising, move, merger or other impetus. The more the consultants know the better they can address your needs. And often, there are other issues that need to be addressed before or during the project to ensure its success.

4. Goals & Outcomes: A new website or logo is nice, but without a clear understanding of what you want to accomplish, the initiative will not move your organization forward. The RFP should answer the questions: What do you want the projects to accomplish and how will you know the project has been successful?

5. Specific Needs: Describe the particulars of what you are looking for. These can vary widely, as can the fees, For a branding initiative, explain the process or elements you are looking for. For a web project, describe the features or functions you want: from the type of calendar functions you need, what you want your online donation system to do, and the level of flexibility in updating the site. To paint a clearer picture, you can reference desirable features on other sites that have the functionality you want.

6. Technology Needs: For a website, interactive or online project, it is helpful to include all relevant technology issues such as: how your site is currently hosted and whether you want to keep that or not, programming languages you would want or not want, current databases used for you email campaigns, donor list, invoicing system or any other systems that might need to be integrated. For branding or other projects, describe what current applications or systems are used in-house and what type of integration your expect (for example, so your designer doesn’t deliver only InDesign files when you use Word).

7. Parties & Process: Describe who will be involved in the project and what your work and approval process is. Will a subcommittee be formed to handle the project, who is the day-to-day contact, what is the boards’ role in the project, and who has final approval? Address how you would like to work – whether in person, or online, any project management systems you have and potential key dates, such as board meetings.

8. Expectations: Different consultants bring different styles, so be clear on your expectations so that you can find the one that meets your needs. Explain what you are looking for in terms of work process, service delivery, communication, results or any other aspect of the project.

9. Timing: So you have neglected your website for 4 years, and now you want it redesigned immediately so you can pump up your fundraising efforts. Be realistic about how much time the process will take to actually do the work and to get input and approval from all parties in the process. And recognize that the schedule allowed will influence the cost.

10. Budget: It is very helpful to let consultants know your budget for the project. Most consultants and vendors tailor their services to your needs and budget, so asking what something costs will yield a range of rates which ultimately won’t be helpful for you. It is best to determine your budget based on what you could afford and the value that the project will bring, and to then find the party that can deliver the most value for your budget.

11. Evaluation Criteria: Explain what criteria your will be using to evaluate consultants for this project. It takes a lot of time to develop a good proposal, so be fair to the consultants and describe what you are looking for –  for example, whether sector experience or specific skills are required, if new solutions or ideas are valued, or if the budget or timing are the key priorities.

12. Evaluation Process and Timing: Tell when the RFP is due (prominently on the first page), who it should be submitted to, in what form (PDF, email, printed, presentation, etc.), how many copies, and the address to send it to. It is also respectful to describe your selection process and timing (for example: Proposals due June 1, Review of proposals and selecting 3 firms to meet with by June 15, Meetings with firms from June 15 – 25, Final selection on June 30).

A Final Note: Agencies sometimes ask for ideas or design solutions in the proposal (called working “on spec”). This is not advisable for several reasons:
• It is not common practice, other than in large advertising agencies which stand to make millions in commissions on advertising media (and even this practice is changing).
• Independent consultants and small firms cannot afford to work for free – their income is based on billing for their time and they can’t afford to give that away.
• It is unfair to deny someone the right to a living, and a nonprofit, whose tax-exempt mission dictates that they work for the public good, undermines their own integrity by asking for others to do free work, particularly knowing that not all the firms’ work will be used.
• From a practical perspective, it will not yield you the best results, since typically, the best consultants won’t work for free, so you are likely to exclude them from the running.
• The best work can only be done with a fuller understanding of your organization and its needs. By asking for solutions without this full understanding, you rob your agency of the best ideas to serve its interests best.

If you are unsure of which consultant to choose, a common solution is to pay the finalists for some initial work before committing to the entire project.

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The branding for this financial advisory firm uses a ship as a metaphor for guidance through rough waters. Three colors distinguish Tax Strategy, Financial Planning and Insurance services.

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