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

Brainstorming for Fundraising Success

Looking for opportunities to raise more money or just to use your fundraising resources more efficiently? This post is another of a series on brainstorming and fundraising. You need three things to think creatively about fundraising. Openness to new ways of thinking is a requirement. Attitude matters in creative thinking, so you need to be positive and nonjudgmental. You also need to be familiar with one or more brainstorming tools. In recent posts I’ve described some brainstorming tools created by Edward De Bono and described in various books of his. In those posts I referred to using random ideas or objects to spark new ideas. In this post I will rely on a fantasy question, a provocation in De Bono’s terms, as a starting point. Consider this fantasy question: What if every donor supported 1000 charities? That question can potentially spark new ideas, if examined in the right way. De Bono writes about several ways of creating movement from a provocation like that question. I’ll qui...
Post a Comment
Read more

Fundraising Ideas

Raising money is a perennial challenge for nonprofits. The Great Recession has made things tougher for some and nearly impossible for others. Your nonprofit may be working hard to deal with fundraising challenges. Traditional thinking about fundraising might lead to thinking like this - “We need to raise $600,000 more money third year. What do we need to do to make this happen?” A discussion of grant writers, fundraising consultants and mailing lists follows. There is nothing wrong with this approach. At least some of that discussion needs to happen. But, new thinking might also be needed. Lateral thinking may help you get better results. Lateral thinking is (from Wikipedia) “solving problems through an indirect and creative approach.” The point of lateral thinking is to move “sideways” to new ideas and different ways of thinking. The point of this little essay is to point out another way of approaching the subject of fundraising. Lateral thinking itself suggests a broader approach to ...
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