Skip to main content

Five Nonprofit Branding Tips


How do you establish a distinct identity in the minds of potential supporters? I’m glad you asked.  The Fundraising Fundamentals blog at http://www.andrewolsen.net/mark-cubans-advice-for-your-nonprofit/blog)  offered branding tips from entrepreneur Mark Cuban. Here are the tips(My comments are in parentheses):
1. Don’t make educating your donors the focus of your communications. Meet them where they are – not where you want them to be. (Don’t tell them what you want or what your mission is or what you need. Concentrate on explaining how donations or volunteering will benefit them in some way. The most obvious way to do that is to show people how their support will reduce domestic violence or clean up the river.)
 2. Forget the witty, brainy, philosophical branding campaigns that are designed to “make donors think.” They don’t want to think. They want to help. Show them in simple terms how they can help. (Take the direct approach. If you are the only nonprofit supporting microfinance programs in Jannu and Kasmir India, say you need money for that.)
 3. Focus your fundraising on the most urgent, tangible and solvable problems faced by those you serve. (Keep your “sales pitch” positive – “The money will help a widow start a business and provide for her three children.”)
 4. Ensure your brand communicates your value proposition – what your impact is on the community – not the programs and services you provide. (Again, keep it simple and concrete – “empowering  Nepalese women entrepreneurs” is a decent start.)
 5. Tell stories that are emotionally engaging and easy to digest. (All of our decisions tend to be based on emotion. Facts and logic do help out. Try to get people to feel  a certain action is right, sensible, or consistent with their values. X)

How is your organization doing in each of those five areas? Pick one thing that needs work and  start improving it this month.
Labels:

Comments

  1. AnonymousApril 9, 2013 at 10:48 AM

    I think your first point is an excellent point. Something very obvious and straightforward but also something so rare to see in modern advertising campaigns. I was around the office when synergyagency.co.uk were working with a large NFP and they had it spot on. It's so uncommon to see branding executed well in the modern climate, too many corporate cultures creeping in!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

9 Ways Cognitive Bias Undermines Social Change Efforts

This is going to be the first of many posts on how cognitive bias might undermine social change efforts. Yeah, I know. I will do my best to keep this concrete and interesting. A number of quirks in how our brains work might lead to mistaken judgments in many areas relevant to social change: problem analysis, strategy, program design, and advocacy. Maybe fundraising. Taking effective action on a certain problem is what activists want to do, so we'll come back to fundraising later. 1.Confirmation bias may cause us to look for reasons why a certain strategy or tactic is the right one. Supportive evidence gets woven into the narrative, lending support to the need for more education for women or more gun control or whatever the topic might be. Negative information gets tossed out. 2. Bandwagon effect -This may be a real problem when the resources devoted to addressing an issue get all of proportion to the seriousness of an issue. Instead, bandwagon jumping siphons away money and v...
Post a Comment
Read more

Using SWOT Analysis to Rev Up Your Fundraising

Strategic planning, including SWOT analysis, is for small nonprofits, giant philanthropic foundations, and every other nonprofit. Every nonprofit that seeks financial support of any kind needs a strategy.  The point is to make a plan and work the plan. Business gurus have shared a bunch of strategic planning tools, some generic and some made for a specific purpose. This post is about looking at your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats - SWOT.  Knowing about your organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats is step one in planning your fundraising efforts.  SWOT - A Quick Review This is not the best place to run through SWOT analysis, but an overview will make it obvious why we need to do it. First, however, you should write down your fundraising goal. Then, you can do some analysis. Here are the steps: Strengths - What about your financial resources? What about your reputation and your connections? How big is your audience on social medi...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Powerful Tool for Nonprofit Planning 2

This is the time for another post on the social environment of nonprofit organizations. Yes, I know this is a bit esoteric and complex. I’m just going to break things down into a few (more) concrete) posts. Last time I mentioned that your organization’s environment has seven dimensions, each with three elements – capacity, rate of change, complexity. I know I mentioned strategy before, but consider also fundraising, social marketing, and advocacy strategy. To make it easier, here is the table I presented last time: CAPACITY COMPLEXITY DYNAMISM CULTURE ECOLOGY ? ECONOMIC ? DEMOGRAPHIC LEGAL POLITICAL ? TECHNOLOGICAL ? Because 7 X 3 = 21 there are at least that many questions you could ask about your organization’s environment. Last time I posed some generic strategy questions based on the above table. This time I just want to offer some more questions based on the seven dimensions and three elements. From the polit...
Post a Comment
Read more