Amplifying Impact: The Role of Branding for Not-for-Profits
In the wide landscape of not-for-profit organisations (NFPs), where every cause is important, memorable branding is invaluable. The ability to communicate a clear and compelling message, establish credibility, and foster connections with your audience is critical for fulfilling the aspirations of your cause.
Building Trust and Credibility
Branding can be used as a direct line to establishing awareness, trust and credibility within the NFP sector. By building a strong identity, brands are better able to influence their audience, raise funds and mobilise support.
A summary of your track record (results) is a fast way to demonstrate your impact, and provide reasons as to why your audience should trust you to help solve the larger problem at hand. Established organisations can do this by gathering examples of their achievements, and outline measurable ways that they have made an impact to their cause.
New organisations can also do this by focusing on the previous achievements of their people. What have your team members achieved before they joined the organisation? Lead by introducing each person and listing the unique skills and achievements that led them to joining your team.
Never undersell passion; when communicated clearly, it can also be a powerful tool in building trust and credibility.
Above: The McCabe Centre for Law and Cancer can clearly articulate the impact they are making across the world.
Take action
(1) Make a list of ten initiatives (or more!) that your organisation has driven or participated in over the last few years. Rank them in order of the impact that they achieved for your cause. Step into the shoes of someone who is allocating grants — what achievements would be most compelling for them to read that would further the work that they do? If it’s a regional or government grant, what will assure them that their funding is being well-directed? If it’s a philanthropist, what causes are important to them — and can you identify any personal values from the things they have funded in the past? Try tapping into these when you narrow down your list of achievements, and position each with this in mind.
(2) Make another list of smaller actions that, whilst may not have created broad impact, you are really proud of. These actions may not be overly measurable in any other way than they have had a profound impact on a person or group in an interesting, compelling or otherwise unforgettable way. These make great ‘nuggets’ of information or anecdotes that can bring colour to your communications and contribute to making your organisation memorable. When you share the stories of the impact created by your organisation's work, you can connect emotionally with your audience, and they’ll understand the positive change you bring to the world.
Craft a simple, repeatable storytelling framework
Storytelling lies at the heart of effective branding for not-for-profits. By crafting a compelling narrative, you have more power to engage and inspire your audience.
The first building block is articulating a clear and meaningful set of mission, vision and values — further establishing your organisation as a trusted authority that can attract the right donors, volunteers, and supporters who align with your cause.
Brand boilerplate document for Capital Punishment Justice Project
Boilerplate messaging applied to CPJP’s website
Take Action
Gather all of your key stakeholders in a room to workshop your brand purpose, mission, vision and values. Between 4-6 participants is ideal — invite more than eight people at your peril! You want to create an environment where people can share and contribute equally in a psychologically safe environment.
Create a communications ‘Boilerplate’ that articulate the exercise above. You can use this to lock down a messaging hierarchy that extends from from your topline (or simplest — a tagline is a great example) right down to 3-4 ‘pillars’ — descriptions of the way that you impact the world. Also useful to include are summaries that 25 word, 50 word and 100 word variations about your organisation.
Consistency in Messaging and Visuals
Consistency is key when it comes to branding for every organisation — be they for profit-generating or not. It pays to check-in and make sure that your messaging (see above) and visual elements are aligned across all communication channels.
Start by creating a visually consistent system for logos, colors, fonts, and imagery. Locking these things down help to create a recognisable and cohesive visual identity, not to mention keeping your brand and graphics neat, tidy and easy to use.
Reinforce this by building a set of templates for you and your team to use. You don’t need fancy software — whilst Adobe Creative Suite is the professional gold standard, Canva or even Microsoft PowerPoint also provide user-friendly alternatives. Always go with what will be the easiest for your team to work and collaborate with; there’s no point making things more difficult by introducing unknown or complicated software to your workflow.
A good template system has a variety of options ranging from text only, image only and multiple hybrids across pitch decks, proposal documents and social media graphics. The more options you can provide your team, the more they will feel empowered to make choices that best fit what they are trying to communicate. If you make their choices too narrow or boring, they may just go off-piste to meet their needs, which is rarely good for brand consistency!
A Pitch Deck template for Feraliser
Take Action
Firstly, invest as much as you are able to in high-quality branding from a professional graphic designer. A polished visual identity will speak volumes for your credibility and ability to cut through in a noisy world. Avoid bad logo design, as often, this is the first and only thing people will have to go off! If your budget is really tight, opt for a simple typographical logo that does no harm. Employ a consistent colour palette and font choices and pull it together in a brand style guide for teammates to use and stay on-track.
A brand style guide (or ‘brand bible’) is a document that pulls together everything for anyone who works closely with your brand, and demonstrates how to apply key messaging, organisational values, logo usage, brand colors, typography, imagery style and templating systems. It’s generally a long-form document with granular direction on how to apply the brand which people can save as a ready-reckoner at any time they need to apply the brand.
Engaging with Stakeholders
Effective branding goes beyond visual and external communication; it also encompasses actively engaging with stakeholders as often as you can. By finding regular opportunities for dialogue and collaboration with donors, volunteers, and beneficiaries you keep the conversation about your cause alive, and closer to top-of-mind that you’d otherwise be.
Look for strategic partnerships and collaborations can significantly amplify the impact of your NFP. Identify like-minded organisations and explore opportunities for joint initiatives, which may create reduction in the duplication of effort and expand your audience. By aligning your organisations, pooling resources and involving each other in social media efforts, you can leverage each other's strengths and expand your reach, ultimately making a more significant difference to the cause and community you serve. Many causes have multiple NFPs that work to make an impact, and it can be tempting to be competitive, especially when vying for grants and other funding. The great Truman quote comes to mind: ‘It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.’
Revisit your purpose, mission and vision and you’ll find that every organisation offers the world something slightly different, but also, you’ll remind yourself that the problem you are solving cares not for who solves it, but how and when.
Take Action
(Create regular opportunities to communicate with your audience, be it through social media, email marketing or even events. Give them a reason to follow you or be receptive to your emails by regularly publishing high-quality thought leadership or articles that they will find to be of value. Communications channels are crowded spaces, and it pays to put some time, thought and effort into your content strategy.
Where possible, involve stakeholders in any strategic work you do as an organisation. Invite them to participate in workshops, focus groups, surveys or simply jump on the phone for a quick chat to gain qualitative data and an unique, invaluable perspective that you can reinvest back into your strategy, making it more incisive.
Measuring Brand Impact
Measuring the impact of your branding efforts is first of all crucial for continuous improvement. Additionally, it’s great data that can help you demonstrate a return on donor’s funding.
Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with your organisational goals. This will depend on the stage of the lifecycle your organisation is in. For startups, brand awareness will be most important as you spread the word. For younger organisations, engagement may then be a primary goal as you engage people with your cause. Sophisticated organisations will likely track donations, both new and retained. Make sure the metrics make sense for your organisation — there’s no point shooting for ambitious donation targets if no-one knows about you.
Brand metrics such as brand awareness, engagement levels, donor retention rates, and volunteer participation can all be used to build valuable data for donors and funding. Make a plan to regularly analyse these to gain insights into the effectiveness of your branding strategies and empower you to make data-driven decisions.
Take Action
Measurement doesn’t need to be fancy or complicated — many NFPs just won’t have the budget or justification to divert precious funds to sophisticated data collection. Monitoring web analytics is easy and free with tools like Google Analytics, Squarespace Analytics or any tools that your website platform may already have. Ditto for email marketing which shows open and click throughs rates, as well as detailed information about which buttons and links performed better.
If you’re on social media, make note of analytics that can tell you which content or posts perform better than others, and try to recognise any themes or patterns that you can leverage to drive your communications strategy.
In summary
For NFPs, branding is a powerful tool that can drive impact and get you a step closer to fulfilling on your mission. By developing a strong brand identity, crafting compelling narratives, and engaging with stakeholders you can build trust, attract support, and make a lasting difference.
Remember, the strength of your brand lies in the authenticity of your message and the connections you foster. Unleash the power of branding, and let it propel your NFP toward a future filled with meaningful change.
Branding and communications for not-for-profit enterprises
I love to work with NFPs! I offer discounted rates, and also take on pro-bono projects where there is capacity and an alignment in values.
Get in touch today for a chat.
