BRANDING: Naming Nonprofits for Impact

I recently received an email that reinforced the importance of having a strong name for your nonprofit organization. Envirolution, a website leading the revolution for environmental jobs, was launching their latest project: The Win-Win Campaign — a youth-led small business energy and carbon efficiency campaign.The name Win-Win Campaign name made me grin — how can you go wrong with a name like that? It underscores the importance of the emotional impact that a name makes when people hear it. And face it, who would you rather support, The Association of Small Businesses for Carbon Efficiency (ASMCA)  or The Win-Win Campaign? (I made up ASMCA to demonstrate how most nonprofits name themselves, that is, purely descriptive and not result-oriented.)

Envirolution’s e-mail also contained the names of other groups that they work with including Always Build Green, Make Me Sustainable, Global Kinect, and Urban Go Green — all names that have an immediate appeal. Always Build Green is powerful because it is an exhortation that is easy to understand. The name Make Me Sustainable is an invitation that is hard to resist. The names Global Kinect, and Urban Go Green are short, direct and sound progressive, but it is not entirely clear what they do, making them a little less powerful.

WAKE UP CALL: Make your organization’s name compelling and it will make it that much easier to achieve your mission. Align your programs, campaigns and events around the same theme for even more impact.

Tips for Naming Nonprofits

  1. If possible, describe the benefit that your audience will receive.
  2. Use your audiences,’ not your organization’s, frame of reference when naming.
  3. Keep it short. If it’s refer to it by an acronym, it’s too long.
  4. Avoid industry jargon.
  5. Make it memorable by combining words in new ways  to create interesting juxtapositions.
  6. Make sure it distinguishes your organization from others doing similar work.
  7. Reinforce your organizational name through the naming of your programs and sub-brands and event as well as through your logo and tagline.

IDEAS: Valuing Intellectual Capital

Why don’t nonprofits value intellectual capital, particularly marketing expertise, when it can prove crucial to the success of their cause? I encountered that question when I learned about a nonprofit organization that was planning a campaign to raise $300,000 for food pantries and safety net social services, as well as to engage the community in volunteering on a regular basis.Continue reading

Ami Dar’s Online Tools for Effectiveness


At the CT Association of Nonprofits 6th Annual Conference, Ami Dar, the founder of Idealist, spoke about using online tools to communicate more effectively within an organization. His 70-person company uses Google Docs to share documents and Skype to hold video calls with each other around the world, using the internet and avoiding phone bills.

He urges nonprofits to embrace these tools, which bypass traditional hierarchies, and create a more streamlined organization. His organization’s adoption of these methods was driven by the younger generation – provided the tools, but without a mandate to use them, they naturally tended to them – a fine formula for nonprofits.

WAKE UP CALL: Will you allow the younger generation to drive change in your organization? What steps will you take to lead the change? The next time you email a document to a colleague, try posting it on Google Docs instead.

RELATED POST: How Lunatic is Your Fringe?

Facing the Recession

Citing a $6 billion state deficit, Stamford Mayor Dannel Malloy reported at the recent Connecticut Nonprofits Conference that the last eight years have brought “an assault on social services.”

“Government has an obligation to provide for its citizens.” He delivered a passionate call to fund the state’s safety net, starting with a 1.5% average increase in nonprofit aid. “The needs of the least among us should be taken care of first.”

Fellow presenter and NYU Professor Dr. Paul Light predicted massive consolidation in the nonprofit sector due to recession. Smaller organizations will likely join together to reduce administration costs.

According to Light, nonprofit organizations represent a $1 trillion sector, powered by 11.5 million employees and 61 million volunteers.

He views a reduction in the number of nonprofits as inevitable and a chance to strengthen the sector. Instead of avoiding the situation, we should embrace the opportunity to start a strategic dialogue regarding which organizations should go under and which ones should survive.

WAKE UP CALL: As a member of the nonprofit community, how can you engage peers to begin open, honest communication about the challenging times ahead?

Doing More with 'Enough'

In light of current economic conditions, the nonprofit sector can’t afford to continue in a “business as usual” manner. This was the message that NYU Professor Paul Light delivered at the 6th annual conference of the Connecticut Association of Nonprofits. His keynote reflected the event theme of “Sustaining Nonprofits, Strengthening Communities.”

“We’re the first to go into a recession and the last to come out,” said Light, who is also Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. To that end, he recommended the following paradigm shifts:

  • Greater state support. Grant money is appreciated, but state funds also need to help cover capacity building. Nonprofits can’t be expected to fulfill their respective missions with grants that don’t support training, marketing, and other critical areas.
  • Sector makeover. Many leaders in the nonprofit arena are getting older and retiring—and young people aren’t clamoring to take their places. The nonprofit world needs to shed its stodgy, ascetic image to attract innovative young minds.

As the global community prepares to tighten its belt, everyone talks about the need to “do more with less.” Light argues that it’s time that nonprofits have the opportunity to “do more with enough.”

WAKE UP CALL: What steps can we take to increase state support and to attract the fresh talent we need?

The Moment of Now Conference 2008



On October 24, 2008, the Columbia School of Business held a conference titled “The Moment of Now: Market Innovations in Social Enterprise” to explore themes in the emerging sector of social enterprise. In this session on Cultivating Effective NGO-Business Partnerships, Gordon Peterson (second from left),  VP of Corporate Social Responsibility for The Timberland Company, squared off with two nonprofits: Allison Clements (left), Corporate Counsel for the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Kyle Cahill, Director of Corporate Engagement at the Environmental Defense (third from left), moderated by Alan Webber, Founder of Fast Company magazine.Continue reading

Creating Awareness for the Third Sector

After the three-day Nonprofit Congress in May, the National Council of Nonprofit Associations (NCNA), which produced the Nonprofit Congress, organized a lobbying day to create awareness about the nonprofit sector. The New York delegation was one of many that went to Capitol Hill to lobby our Representatives and Senators about the National Capacity Building Initiative (put forth by NCNA). The bill provides $25 million for training and infrastructure for charities to help them become more effective and sustainable (half the funds from the federal government, half from private sources). That’s me (Howard Adam Levy, Principal of Red Rooster Group) in the yellow jacket, with Fred Fields, from the United Way of New York City, behind me, and Doug Sauer, Executive Director of Council of Community Services of New York State, bottom left.

The lobbying effort was important on three fronts:

1. To generate awareness about the need for funds specifically for non-program activities to allow nonprofits to pay for leadership training and operational costs.

2. To demonstrate to government the impact and importance of the nonprofit sector, which accounts for $1 trillion of the economy and 10% of the workforce.

3. To promote advocating for the nonprofit sector as an essential activity for nonprofits and to show that we can be effective when organized (with the NCNA the organizing body for the social services sector).

WAKE UP CALL: What are you doing to advocate for the nonprofit sector?

Fundraising Day NY 2008

Keynote speaker to Association of Fundraising Professionals Fundraising Day NY 2008 conference, Lorraine Cortes-Vasquez, Secretary of State for NYS, shares her insights and inspirations to the nonprofit sector.

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I liked her quote encouraging nonprofit leaders to think like business people: “I is not for profit, but I is not for loss.”

WAKE UP CALL: To have the capacity to continually serve clients, nonprofits need to think strategically about investing for the future.

Smart Models Conference

AIGA’s Smart Models Conference Provides Lessons for Nonprofits
Drew Hodges from Spot Design opens the AIGA conference on Smart Business Models by describing how his agency transformed from a design studio creating a posters for Broadway shows, most notably, RENT, into an ad agency to capture the  hundreds of thousands of dollars in media commissions. This is a good lesson in making the necessary changes in your organization in order to take advantage of opportunity.

Athletica 3

Matt Owens discusses how he works collaboratively on projects with other young designers under the name Athletica. By sharing an office, they reduce their overhead, and by approaching clients as experts in various areas they are able to attract business that they could not independently. Nonprofits can learn from this approach to collaboration.
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Douglas Riccardi, from Memo Productions, a protege of Tibor Kalman, the legendary designer from M&Co., describes his journey to attract respectable clients and produce outstanding work. Keeping his business small while tackling large projects, he found that his personality was was his key selling point. In the face of daily mediocrity, he urged designers to “push to do something fantastic.” A good lesson in that your recognition comes from doing great things that get noticed, not in doing good or mediocre things consistently. Nonprofits that seek wider visibility from the public and funders need to things dramatically in order to get noticed.
Joe Duffy & Eric Block
Joe Duffy and Eric Block describe their latest venture, Duffy Partners – essentially, the relaunching of Duffy Design before it was swallowed up by the advertising conglomerate. Nonprofits can learn from this process of building up, selling or merging the entity, and starting again.
WAKE UP CALL: New ways of conducting business, serving people and fundraising, are being developed in response to technologies that shrink the world and allow people the interact in different ways. Smart organizations conduct periodic reviews of their missions and their business models to assess whether they are still relevant. When is the last time your organization checked the relevancy of its method of achieving its mission?