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. UnknownApril 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

Steering Your Brain Toward Better Program Ideas

This is a post about asking good questions whenever you think you have a good idea for a program or program improvement. You probably knew that great ideas still need to be examined, questioned if you please. That's what this post is about, sort of. Mostly, I want to offer a few comments on Brainsteering: A Better Approach to Breakthrough Ideas by Kevin and Shawn Coyne. Brainsteering offers a disciplined approach to asking, and answering, questions about product ideas and business ideas. The process also works just fine for program ideas. The book starts by describing some generic questions to ask about a challenge then goes into creating logic trees. A logic tree works by stating a question and breaking it down into subquestions. Simply asking and answering questions might lead to some valuable new ideas. Brainsteering And that's as far as I have gone in the book. I can say that there is a chapter on making your own brainstorming efforts more effective. Other chapter...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to Crowdsource and Experiment Our Way to a Fairer Economy

Economic and social inequality should be treated as design challenges that, like designs in architecture or packaging can be solved by applying some creative thinking. That's hardly a new idea, but the recession and ongoing concerns about economic inequality make crowdsourcing seem like something worth talking about.  Crowdsourcing as an Economic Justice Tool: Most people have an idea of what  crowdsourcing is and how it works - you let a group work on your problem or challenge and see what they produce. Can they produce a better answer (whatever that means) than an expert or a small group of experts? You can't answer that question until you have some real-world examples to draw upon. That's where social experiments and simulations can prove useful. Maybe there should be specific crowdsourcing projects and a place to organize all of them. We could start crowdsourcing campaigns around a range of topics: New ways of using barter to meet peoples' needs Using buying co...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Web Strategy That Works

I was reading a Chronicle of Philanthropy article about online strategies that work in a bad economy. The article presented four different strategies and a nonprofit that used it successfully. This post is about the strategy of using specialized Web sites. Put up a site just for a certain crisis, event, issue, project or program. The Chronicle details how Partners in Health did this for Haiti earthquake relief. Any issue, whether a crisis or not, whether global or local is a potential candidate for replicating the Partners in Health approach. Events of global and local significance are fine subjects for a site. You are probably already familiar with World AIDS Day or World Water Day. Those global events and many others are the subject of special Web sites and advertising campaigns both online and in print. Local events from the mundane, like the beginning of a new school year, to the momentous. A crisis is another good reason to put up a specialized Web site. The epic flooding in...
Post a Comment
Read more