Podcast episode transcript ↓
Josh:
In today’s nonprofit world, building a meaningful connection with supporters requires more than just good intentions.
It takes a brand that tells a compelling story.
A nonprofit’s brand isn’t just a logo, but a representation of its mission, vision, and the change it’s working to achieve.
But how can organizations ensure their brand cuts through the noise and remains true to their cause?
How do storytelling and visual elements support this process, and how can nonprofits measure the impact of their branding efforts?
I’m Josh with Anedot, and welcome to Nonprofit Pulse where we explore trends, insights, and resources that help nonprofits accomplish their mission.
On this episode, we are joined by Howard Levy on the topic of effective brand strategies for nonprofits.
Howard is the President of Red Rooster Group and has partnered with organizations across a range of causes, revitalizing their brands to remain relevant.
He is a brand strategist, award-winning creative director, and fundraising expert with a 30-year track record of helping organizations revitalize their brands, engage their audiences, and raise more money.
Hey Howard, thanks for joining us on Nonprofit Pulse.
Howard:
Glad to be here.
How nonprofits can define their brand and stand out
Josh:
Yeah. Excited to talk today about effective brand strategies for nonprofits.
And maybe first, let's just define terms because brand is a huge word. And it means so many things to so many different people. So first just defining that, how do you define brand?
Howard:
Yeah, it's a good question because, it can be misconstrued.
We've been doing this for about 30 years. I've talked to organizations of all sizes, and unless they start with that premise of understanding where they're coming from, you can quickly have different expectations.
So, I'll say this, there’s about a million and a half nonprofits in the United States, and they're all competing for attention, not necessarily with each other, with other businesses, other nonprofits in their sphere.
You know, organizations have similar missions, or at least are competing for the attention of donors specifically. So it's important for organizations to stand out.
So I think when organizations talk about their brand, in some way they're talking about who we are as an organization. And how we stand out in the world.
But I like to think of a brand really as like your reputation because you think about who you are as an organization, you have a mission.
Some missions are oriented on solving a problem, and some are providing a direct service.
But what you say you do and then how effective you are in actually doing it equals the perception that people have about your organization.
And that's really your brand.
But the important thing to note is like you control certain things. You control your mission.
And so a core part of brand strategy is having a real clear, crisp, and compelling mission that people can understand easily, makes sense, and that is inspirational that people can galvanize around.
And that's really in some cases that's a problem that we're solving is like the mission is not even clear.
Organizations kind of have evolved over time, they have many more programs, they are expanding. They don't really know what to do.
And they have a committee and they write this brand statement and just sounds like we do this, this and this. And if you ask someone later what you do, it's not really clear.
So having a real compelling mission that you can actually solve, whether or not you can act against so that you can show some impact that leads to the reputation that you can have.
Like, hey, we're effective at doing something, saving the forest or the whales or educating these kids or whatever it is that you're intending to do.
So it's having a clear mission. It's painting a vision of what the world looks like with your mission accomplished so people could grasp that and really understand that.
And then it's communicating that effectively.
And I think that's often where nonprofits kind of fail in terms of the brand part like, well, we got the logo, we got colors, but how are you communicating what you do so that people can understand it and can rally around it?
Either participate in the programs or support you financially, or partner with you, or volunteer with you or whatever it is.
So it's having that clear statement, it’s communicating that effectively, and then of course, is living up to that with actually accomplishing your mission or making steps toward that and showing the impact.
So, how are you documenting what you're doing? Could be hard stats and numbers and many organizations have that and funders are looking for that.
But it also could be more of toward soft things like anecdotes and testimonials and things like that.
But whatever you could do to show that you're actually making progress on your issue, that's kind of like wrapped up in the brand.
And so we'll kind of get into, I guess, some of the specifics about the message and the visuals and all that stuff.
But the real strategy is those components.
3 key components of a strong nonprofit brand
Josh:
Yeah, I want to talk more about that and lean into that, because when I think of a strong brand, one organization that jumps out in my mind is Red Cross, and I don't know a ton about the Red Cross, but I know their brand.
I see their brand everywhere. I see their media everywhere. I see what they're accomplishing. I see what they're asking for.
They're very clear about where a dollar to the Red Cross goes, at least in a meta sense.
And that's what I think about a strong brand. And yet when I look at a lot of smaller nonprofits or nonprofits that are just beginning, there's just not that clarity.
There's not that conciseness about here's what we do, here's how we're making a difference. So you kind of alluded to some of those key elements.
So I want to ask you what are some of those key elements that really make up a strong brand for a nonprofit? And how might they differ from a for profit organization?
Howard:
Yeah. Well, you know, it's interesting because you point out something with the Red Cross and then you said small organizations and there is a real kind of a bifurcation in the nonprofit sector.
Most of those million and a half nonprofits in the United States are smaller or are under $1 million in annual revenue. So they do have a real need to stand out, and they don't have the resources of the Red Cross.
And maybe haven't been around for 100 years or more like some of these larger legacy organizations.
So you kind of stop the person on the street and ask to name an organization name. They might say Red Cross or Salvation Army or March of Dimes or some of these organizations, but they have literally more than $1 billion or $3 billion in annual revenue.
They've been around for a long time, and they're highly visible and many of these organizations are doing direct mail. So they're like in people's mailboxes like for generations.
And so, and they have the PR and reputation and things that have been generated over the course of time on accomplishing certain things or the disaster relief or curing polio or whatever it is.
So they're at an advantage versus the smaller organizations that don't have that legacy, don't have the reputation, being out there. Don't have the national or international exposure or don't have the budget to do these things.
So to answer your question now, like, what could the smaller organizations do in terms of like, what are those brand components?
Here's some.
1. Organizational name
The first thing is your organizational name and many organizations that come to us with their problem to have a more effective brand.
The first problem is their name is not effectively telling their story anymore, or in fact, it may be hindering them in some way. I'll take a generic nonprofit.
And just make up for illustrative purposes like, the Children's Welfare Society of Atlanta.
So they may be that they're not serving children anymore. And now they've expanded, for example, to adults.
Welfare is an outdated term and maybe not descriptive of what they're doing anymore. Of Atlanta, they may not be just in one geography anymore, right?
Or society also kind of an outdated term that doesn't really fit what they're doing or they're doing some other kinds of things.
So those are kind of typical issues that nonprofits may have with their needs.
So I'm not saying all nonprofits should change their name by any means. There's tons of great nonprofits, and you may have a great brand and reputation and legacy and recognition, but to have a strong brand, you need to be able to tell your story quickly and easily and have people understand it.
And that's kind of really the first line is like having a name that is going to help you and if it is holding you back in such a way that changing it would be better, then you should consider that, because that's like you could do all the messaging and the logo and all that kind of stuff.
But if people just hear the name and they're like, oh, that, what the heck is that? You’re just children, you know, you have to go and tell them that we're not just children and we're not just in Atlanta anymore, and we're not just doing welfare, you know?
You're already like behind the eight ball just in communicating your message.
Josh:
And having to spend that precious attention of your audience explaining, well, we used to be a society back in 1923 because they were society's then and now we don't really do society's, but now we have communities.
And what we mean by that is and it's just a you're always kind of pushing against that wave, that friction when you've got a name that doesn't immediately provide context and value.
Howard:
Yeah. Yeah. This metaphor I like to use like your leg is broken so you're limping and like, you'll never run and you'll never kind of get faster or beat the others or kind of get to the finish line, you know, so you kind of have this crutch on your leg, there's something wrong and you're just, all right we can get there eventually, but, recognize that eventually may not be good enough. And make that change.
But, having said that, I'm not recommending that for everyone, but that's kind of the first kind of line of communication.
2. Tagline
The tagline though is a very important thing.
So if you can change your name, that's great. If you can't, or in conjunction with that is how do you tell your story in a pithy way?
A tagline is often a great way to do that, particularly if your name is not descriptive.
So like that Children’s Welfare Society of Atlanta is descriptive and it tells you what it is saying like jump start or some other more evocative name doesn't like tell you anything like what industry are you even in? Like what are you doing?
Having a way to communicate that often through a tagline is going to be very valuable because you’re bridging the gap between what people could understand and what they don't know, just based on the name.
So like quickly bridge that gap as fast as possible.
So a tagline or some other kind of messaging component that could be in all the communications on your website, social media, or so forth, so that people can get it really quickly you don't want to, like, lose people before you even have the chance to start to engage them.
The mission, the vision, we talked about those are really powerful brand asset tools, your values are important too because it helps it to communicate.
It helps you to run the organization. To us at Red Rooster Group, we see these as tools for nonprofits, not just to communicate externally, but to actually drive the organization.
So like your mission should be used by the board in every meeting and making decisions. Right? Should we be spending the money on this?
Many of the discussions are budgetary decisions. So if you could use the mission statement to actually guide the conversation in a fruitful way, then you have a good mission statement.
If it's just too muddled and like, well, I don't know, maybe it fits in, maybe it doesn't fit in, that's not going to serve the organization well. And same thing with like the vision is like what's the world we're trying to create?
Does this get us there or is it just because the donor would give us money and wants to do this project, but it's not quite aligned with where we're going, and that's where the values come in as well.
And it helps people into all levels of the organization kind of make decisions like, hey, should I be doing this or not?
Whether it's someone at the top or that mid-level or even at the lowest level serving as line staff somewhere or creating a newsletter or whatever it is, they should be able to say, you know what, we're about this transparency or authenticity or whatever.
I have to tell the truth here. I have to say things in this way, or we're about accessibility and like, I have to rewrite this or I have to make a decision based on allowing us to be able to have more people come in, whatever based on that value.
The brand strategies are really based on those core things: the mission, the vision, the values, and expressed through the name of the organization, through the tagline.
3. Visual identity
And, then we get to the visual identity, what does that look like? What’s our name, our logo type or our logo or icon, how is that depicting us?
And, how does that connect the different parts of the organization? So how does that relate to our subbrands?
The name of our newsletter or publications or our different events that we have that people know, our fundraising bike rides or walks.
How does it connect with different chapters that we may have or other kind of programs so that the people see those things.
We're getting the advantage of all the impact of them knowing that that's our program as opposed to like, well, we do that and we do that.
Now that they saw that newsletter or that event, but they didn't know that it was yours or they saw that another chapter and you're not getting the benefit of saying, wow, we have 50 chapters around the country.
They are all different logos and they don't look connected. And people say, oh, that's that organization that's national, that's doing those things? I just thought it was this local one.
So those are the kind of the brand components that's useful to have cohesion and unison and all those things all together. So they're under one roof.
Josh:
Yeah. And intentionality.
And I love how you brought up organizational transparency, as an example of one of the values, because people may be wondering, okay, but how do my values enter into decision making, especially around brand or around communications, which I think brand communications are tied at the hip.
But transparency, related to branding communications could be your annual report, right.
How much do you share? What stories do you tell? Do you share only the positive things, not the hard things? Only the wins, not the failures?
That's how you can bring in your values into your brand, which I think, it cost you nothing to do that.
And it's a breath of fresh air for supporters and donors to see real, authentic communication and mission around a cause.
And I think that's changing now as millennials are beginning to lead more organizations.
And Gen X and Boomers are kind of decreasingly involved at the leadership level. But there's a real desire out there to say, I want my dollar to go to something authentic, something that's not hidden and unnecessarily spooky at times.
And I think that's just such a great example, you brought up transparency and how that can come into your brand, and your communications.
Examples of nonprofits that successfully rebranded and what worked
Josh:
So shifting gears a bit, you mentioned earlier about a rename, and that's a great segue into our next question, which is about rebranding.
I wondered if you had an example you could share of a successful rebrand.
And really what made their rebrand successful and how did strategy play into that?
Howard:
Yeah, sure. Yeah. I'll point to organizations that we rebranded. And they had different challenges.
1. Rebranding a historic social service organization
One of them was a 183 year old organization in New York City that was started as an orphanage and so kind of an outdated model to begin with.
They had morphed into a multifaceted social service agency with more than 40 different programs.
So, I mean, from early childhood, young kids to all ages to adults with developmental disabilities, to teens who had traumatic issues.
They had a residential treatment facility where they would live there and get the therapy. So, all kinds of different programs.
So like many organizations doing that kind of work, they're largely government funded and trying to build up their independent donor base of individuals, as well as maybe some foundations and corporate supporters and things like that.
But many organizations like try to really expand that.
So that's in contrast to like this, the Red Cross or some of those large organizations that have a large public face and people know them and a good portion of money from some of these larger groups come in through donations that many organizations don't have that and these smaller groups are struggling with that.
So, part of the challenge was to, one was address the name. It was called Leake and Watts. These two people was founded by that 180 plus years ago.
And so the name didn't tell anything about what they do. And in fact, it was hindering them just like that example of the, you know, they're limping along now because they have to explain what they do.
So already they're behind the eight ball in any communications.
And so there was an opportunity then to kind of have something as inspirational and galvanizing for donors.
And then in terms of the unison of all the divisions and bring them together under kind of one unified goal so they all know what they do, and they could speak with one kind of clear voice about what they do.
So we went through a process of getting stakeholder buy in and more than buy in input, we ran focus groups and we talked to the different teams and we ran different creative exercises and pretend you’re this and that and just kind of activate their minds about their spirit and their culture.
To capture what we were talking about before in terms of those values, but they kind of manifest and what people do with values is your culture, right? The decision.
One organization is going to choose to be the transparent, and the other is going to kind of hide it and do something else, like that's the culture.
So, how do you create this, identify what the culture is and then bring that together.
So, all of that led to a new name called Rising Ground. The idea that we're kind of lifting or helping people to kind of lift up. We're meeting them where they are and empowering them.
So it was a nice story. We're kind of paving these pathways for success.
And it could be for any of the different programs. And allowed flexibility for them to grow in new areas and it allow them to acquire other smaller agencies. They grow.
So it's very flexible need for them. And, we had a nice rollout where we had events at the different locations they had.
And we kind of galvanize the teams there, as part of that and all the other communications out to the different constituents, to all the different parties that they were trying to reach and with videos and things like that.
And it was very successful and they've been able to embrace that and go ahead and to grow and be successful with their fundraising and with acquiring other agencies and things like that.
So that was one example.
2. Rebranding a disability inclusion organization
And another one was a disability organization. There were about disability inclusion.
It’s a coalition of Fortune 500 businesses and other smaller businesses that was looking to promote disability inclusion. How do we hire more people with diverse talents and needs throughout our organization?
How do we get our supply chain to be more diverse with people and hire companies that have, disability owned businesses and things like that?
The problem was there, and they would share best practices among these corporations. They could all learn and grow. The organization promoted that. They had an index where they can rate you and then show you how to improve the different areas.
They certified disability owned businesses. So that they can then provide that entree for those corporations.
So doing all this good stuff, but their name didn't say what they did at all was United States Business Leadership Network. They abbreviated it USBLN.
So again, they're kind of handicapped by that, particularly in the corporate world where the decision makers needed to sell to their higher ups to say, this is, we want to be part of this disability inclusion coalition.
But like, the name didn't say that.
So we had a lot of discussion on using the name, I mean, what, what words to use and to use the word disability or not, it was also a kind of a movement to say it's all about ability. And so even within the sector, there's often tons of nuances.
And that I think is something interesting to note about the whole naming and nonprofit branding process is that there's so much nuance and detail once you start to get down, that nonprofits who have not gone through this before and most haven't, because that's not their job, kind of think, oh, well, we'll just we'll choose a name and we'll go ahead.
But once you start trying to pin something on just a few words, you realize how fraught it is to like the meaning inherent in those words has well, this word says a little bit of this, this one says that, what about this sector? What about this audience, all the different kind of nuances. So they're key.
They're key messages where disability inclusion were insight that they provide to these organizations was the innovation that it leads to as a result of having a more diverse workforce that could lead to different innovations that they could, give them the leadership ability advantage.
And they were also looking to grow internationally, as the corporations, these Fortune 500 companies were looking to expand.
So all these words had “in” in them, international, inclusion, innovation, insight. And so the name we came up with is Disability:IN and is a rallying cry, are you in?
And that became a galvanizing theme for them a way of saying, be part of this whole culture and this movement and to future businesses, you can join us.
Are you in is a positive, inclusive way to say everyone's doing something positive and good. Join us in this, in this disability inclusion movement.
Josh:
I love that.
Howard:
And then, it was all the manifestation of that with the logo and colors and the fonts and the materials and website and all that kind of stuff.
But, that was like the galvanizing force for that rebrand.
How storytelling helps build a strong nonprofit brand
Josh:
Thinking about storytelling Howard. And maybe you have some stories from those two projects, but what part should storytelling play in a nonprofit’s brand?
Because often I think when nonprofits are beginning the work of storytelling, they think of, okay, we have this project or we have this person, we have our founding we can look back to or we could maybe even look forward and say, this is what we hope to accomplish.
But oftentimes I am not sure brand is really playing a part in that storytelling. It's more of a focus on other things. So how do you see brand playing a part in effective storytelling for nonprofits?
Howard:
Yeah, it's a good question because often it doesn't play a strong enough role.
The story is told elsewhere in the fundraising communications or newsletters or whatever. But, in terms of the brand, often there's a founding story, sometimes it's kind of been lost.
But if the organization has that, that's a really powerful way to galvanize people around kind of the impetus that was, you know, the need that may still be there.
If the organization’s around. Ostensibly it is, unless it morphed so much. So it comes back to the idea of bringing everyone back kind of to the mission and saying this is why we were founded, right?
The other parts are like the values that we were founded on. There's an overall ethos, whatever you want to call it, a philosophy approach.
Now they use theory of change, like, what do we think? How do we go about changing our world? Is it through direct service? Is it through advocacy? Is it partnerships?
You know, like what is that? So often like the founding story kind of gives light to what that ethos is that drives everyone.
And, that could be a powerful part of the brand.
We like to think of like these idea of archetypes, these primordial roles that people play and could also be used for organizations, and businesses kind of use this too.
Are you a friend, someone who is going to make life easier for someone? Are you kind of like the warrior, you're fighting against some evil force out there, against corporations who are doing something bad?
Are you the healer who's healing trauma for people who have experienced that? Are you an advocate in some way?
So, often organizations do many of these things, but the founding story and ethos could sometimes be or the idea of using an archetype to encapsulate what the organization is, is a great way of creating the brand, because then you could use language and your visuals and your tone and your message all amplifying that one idea so that people could understand that.
And you can kind of see some brands are like really clear on, well, we're the fighters. We're going to fight against that corrupt government or corporations or polluters or like whatever it is. And some you can clearly see kind of like, well, we're the healer.
We're bringing people together, doing that, even though they may do advocacy. Something there's like kind of be a focal point for what the brand story is.
And so that could bring back that idea of like the brand story. There's like a narrative that's kind of told but if you could identify your archetype, even if you don't have the founding story, then you can start to kind of tell stories about that.
If you're the fighter against injustice, then all of the stories kind of have to map to that. If you’re the healer, the stories all map to how it's helped to heal.
So it's a way of bringing that together in order to make the stories useful and serving your interests and your brand.
How to keep nonprofit branding consistent across all channels
Josh:
Yeah. Related to this question and you've kind of just alluded to it, but around consistency.
Consistency is difficult in every part of life. As a leader, it's so hard to be a consistent leader.
As a parent, it's so hard to be a consistent parent, whether that's disciplining or encouraging or all the things of parenthood.
And even so in nonprofit life, like having a consistent brand message is so difficult.
And, I think one of the reasons why is that organizations, people who are working in communications or marketing, they're kind of drowning in brand, they're kind of drowning in the same messages over and over.
And, it gets tiresome. It gets kind of wearisome of I'm saying this thing again. Really? And yet that's not how the audience receives it at all.
So thinking about consistency, what strategies can nonprofits use to maintain that consistency and brand messaging across kind of all of their channels, right?
Thinking, social media. Thinking, advertisements. Thinking, donor communications. What would you say to our audience around kind of the strategies to maintain consistency?
Howard:
Yeah. You're right about the idea that it's repeating the same look, repeating the same message is good, but does get tiresome.
But nonprofits, should know that no matter how many times you're repeating it, the audience is not hearing it that many times. I mean, they're not reading all of your newsletters, sorry to say, they're not even opening them.
Look at your open rates. It’s not a 100%, not even close to that rate. People are looking at one out of three. You're doing okay, so you can kind of repeat things.
But here's the point with the idea of consistency.
So short of having the manual and brand guidelines and specifying all those things, use this and this and here's the prescribed way which many people, especially smaller organizations, they're not really following those things anyway. They want creative latitude. They have more things to express.
So here's two ways of creating some consistency with your brand.
One, is just have the core idea. We talked about that idea of the archetype, right? There's maybe some other kind of core message.
If you can understand like what it is you want to be communicating overall, you don't have to prescribe all the specific language.
You could just look back at whatever communication that you're creating and say, is this doing it?
Is this communicating that? Are people going to get the idea that like that we're the healer or we're the warrior, or we're making an impact in a particular way, or we're using our particular unique approach, or whatever it is.
Then all those things, you have flexibility to tell different stories and to go about it in different ways as long as the core idea is getting through. I think often it’s lost more on like, well, what does the thing look like and all that.
But the message then gives different messages, even though they might look the same, that's not going to be meaningful to someone.
So the two things are like have that consistent point of view, that message that could always be the core idea for the message that people could use different words and stories and evidence to express.
That's from the message perspective. From the visual perspective, just have some core elements.
So as opposed to being very prescriptive, have like two brand colors that you can use and maybe one is primary and one is secondary. And just kind of use those. Have two fonts.
Same thing. One is primary and one is secondary, just kind of stick to those things. You can have a lot of flexibility.
They can be larger and smaller in hierarchy and all this kind of stuff, but just start to establish like some consistency, some way of treating images that lends someone to see something that's yours and say that's theirs because you're just leveraging and maximizing the impression that you have.
If they don't recognize it as yours, they're kind of like starting over. It's kind of like wasting your money with a new approach like, oh, who is that?
You want that instant recognition. You want the instant impact of, wow, that's another great thing that that organization is doing. Not like, let me kind of figure out who's doing this and connect it back.
And what was their mission again and how does this relate? So make it easy for your audience by just simplifying that core message, some core visuals and just use those consistently.
How to measure the effectiveness of branding efforts
Josh:
One question that I know our audience is thinking right now is, that sounds great, but how do we measure success with brand?
And it is an elusive target. I'm curious, Howard, how would you advise our audience on how to measure the effectiveness of branding efforts?
How have you helped your clients? What metrics or indicators really should they be looking at?
Howard:
Yeah, it's a good question.
How do you measure the success of your brand really depends on like what you're looking to accomplish with your brand.
So like we talked about some different scenarios. Is it clarifying your mission? Is that main problem?
People don't understand what you do? Well, then that kind of tells you what you could do to measure. Have a survey before.
What do you understand that we do? And then have the survey at some point after, six months or nine months, where they've gotten the chance to see certain amount of newsletters or emails or social media, whatever it is you’re putting out.
And then ask them, what do we do? And, more sophisticated questions.
How effective are we? Do we do X, Y, Z? Do we do it for the kids or the animals? Do we, all the different things you do and you can kind of measure and see before.
Oh, they knew we did three out of the six things or how much do they value those things, how much of the understand the impact of what we’re doing?
And they kind of felt, that they kind of knew these things, but they didn't really know anything about the after school stuff. They didn't know anything about the meals.
So, if you’re clarifying your brand and after the whole idea to be clarify that, to say, oh, here's what we're doing. So you can measure those through surveys or polls or things like that.
If your goal was to like expand to new services, then the success will be the introduction of those new services, right?
We're looking to, we have a program for schools. We're trying to get into more schools across the country.
Our goal was to get like into ten new schools and rebrand, trying to help us with that, because our message wasn't really clear, wasn't differentiated from the competition. Right.
So the whole idea of the brand was to like, be able to go to those schools and they get it. And, we can sell it to them. So that would be clear metric.
Fundraising, same thing. Like, part of the reason why we’re going to rebrand is like is to galvanize more donors.
So the metric there should be the amount of money raised. Right. You could also ask donors, what was it about our mission that compelled you to donate to us?
And you can kind of see if the message is getting through of how communicating your mission is that really compelling?
Is the vision inspirational? Is your impact meaningful to them?
Are you connecting on the values in the organization that's connecting with their values and your philosophy, ethos and approaches reflecting how they think change should happen in the world aggressively through this kind of action or slow moving over the course of time, those kind of things that are core brand things.
So you can ask your audience those. New funding partners, expanding your donor base.
I like to try to connect the brand effort to something other than just like it could be awareness, maybe, that's it - more people. A lot of groups say, oh, we want more people know about us.
Okay, great. Well, and then what? You know what I mean? All right, more people know about you.
But do you want them to donate, volunteer, come to your program, partner with you, like take an action? Those are the things then that you're going to measure. You could measure awareness.
You just kind of do a poll, do you know about us?
All right. 20%. Do you know about us? All right. 50%. Great, we've increased that. That's good.
But I don't know really where that gets. You want to translate that into some type of return on investment, some type of outcome.
Josh:
Yeah. And the fundraising area made me think about how a lot of nonprofits right now are hitting a new era in fundraising where they're wanting to target and really attract and retain different generational fundraisers right?
So millennials, for instance. A lot of nonprofits realizing, hey, millennials do not make up enough of our donor base.
We want to go after them. And one, I think an obvious way to do that is, hey, we should have a rebrand or some type of brand refresh.
And I love that of measuring your rebrand, or your brand efforts to an outcome because that's one that would be very clear.
You know, at 12 months after your rebrand or brand refresh, how many more millennials make up your donor base now, right? How many more Gen Z are in your CRM?
And that would be so easy to find out and to really see are we being successful?
And then you can say, well, maybe it's actually not our brand, but it's our services. It's what we're offering. Or maybe we need to speak a bit differently than we thought we needed to.
So yeah, I love that example that you brought up there.
Howard:
We found often like the brand exercise in some way is an impetus for doing something else within the organization.
So it's like, it's nice to like emerge from the process. It's like great, we have a new name, we have a new logo, we have this new message.
But often it's really like about the services, or a new way of doing things or restructuring in some way. Or raising money.
So there's an actual operational thing that's happening, that is leading to. It's like, okay, great.
So for millennials, like it's not just about like having the new name that's going to help us get the new, that audience. It's like we have to target them. So what are we going to do?
Are we going to buy a list? Are we going on Facebook? Are we going to have events? Like how are we going to reach those people?
So the brand processes lead to this for actually thinking about like, how do we go about doing that?
Let's create the personas for that audience and figure out who they are. Let's think about their values and how do they map with us? What do they see as impact?
What do they see as impact? Not waiting ten years doing something now.
We got to communicate something differently, right? What are the ways that we could reach them and all those kinds of things?
So it's a way of connecting to that ROI actually leads them to do something different in terms of actual fundraising or services or operations.
And often they're thinking about that. That's kind of what they do. All right, our brand, we know we need to address the brand, but that's not going to solve all our problems.
We're going to have to make a new investment in our CRM. We're gonna have to hire another person here. We're going to have to kind of segment these two departments out and do something different.
I have to hire some people who can do the outreach. You know, or whatever it is. When organizations think about the brand, they really think about, like what impact your organization has.
And that's just the kind of the fulcrum of how you do stuff in the world, how your organization actually does the good work it does.
Trends shaping the future of nonprofit branding
Josh:
Thinking about trends, Howard, what trends are you seeing right now?
What trends are you seeing in nonprofit branding and maybe even just how nonprofits are viewing brand and thinking through brand as part of their overall success?
Howard:
Well, I think, AI for nonprofits is a huge factor now everywhere throughout organizations like, what do we do?
This tool is here. It's changing the way we do things, changing the way we operate, changing the way we fundraise.
Let AI write the fundraising letter and let it write our posts or test out our headlines or our email subject lines, whatever.
So, I think it's going to, it's starting to be used for brand strategy.
You could do great competitive analysis. Here's the ten website URLs like, here's what we're looking for, frame it. You have to understand how to use AI. It’s a tool.
It's not the end goal who's going to give you all the answers, but it's a mechanism for doing things smarter and differently and using it effectively so that you get something else out of it that it would take like lots of time to actually do competitive analysis, understand your audience, understand internal stuff that you're doing, come up with language, come up with your emotional tone.
By the way, tone, we didn't really talk about personality, but that's really an often overlooked area for nonprofits to differentiate themselves is to have, you can talk about authenticity.
It's like, how do you really communicate in a way that doesn't sound like generic, and use the jargon and buzzwords of the sector and sound like every other organization. And some organizations do it great.
You get the piece and you're like, oh wow, I feel energized, someone's talking to me. And others are like, oh, organizations are sending me out all their stuff that they do.
Like, I don't really care about all that stuff. So, having something that's like genuine and passionate or whatever the tone. I mean, the tone, the personality can be anything.
So using AI could help you to do those things. So I think that's kind of like the next frontier.
You can already set up brand kind of channels within ChatGPT and Jasper and some of the things where you're putting in the brand guidelines of your organization and tone and language and stuff, so that when you do write a fundraising letter or email or whatever, it's going to reflect those things.
So that's to me like the next frontier. It’s a current and an ongoing frontier is leveraging AI to manage the brands to build and manage.
3 ways nonprofits can build a strong brand with limited resources
Josh:
Yeah and that's a good segue into my next question, which is really about nonprofits kind of always having this limited resources and there are a lot of free AI tools out there, but as with everything, you get what you pay for.
And, currently I think paying for ChatGPT, you can create custom ChatGPTs, or custom GPTs. You can do a lot more with the paid version.
But just kind of thinking through limited resources, what advice would you give nonprofits who are just starting to build their brand, and especially as new nonprofits are, their every dollar is precious and that $30 a month Canva subscription or $40 a month ChatGPT does add up quickly.
So what advice would you give to those organizations who just kind of starting off to build their brand?
Howard:
I'd say three things. And we've touched on some of these already, and I'd say three things.
To build a strong brand for a small nonprofit would be number one is have a clear and compelling mission.
Just make sure that, you may know what it means, but do other people know what it means? Is it going to help you to make decisions and your board to make decisions?
Does it feel both doable and yet, like, inspirational enough? You want to kind of find a nexus where it's like galvanizing, is a problem that you're trying to solve, in some way, even if it's just in your community.
Like, what is that problem that you're trying to solve?
So number two is like the vision that goes to kind of like, what's the world or community that you want to create?
What are the outcomes that you're going to use to measure that? It's great to kind of just do a service.
But donors want to know that there's kind of some end in sight here, like that you're changing the trajectory of something so that you're not doing the same exact thing five years from now, ten years from now, 20 years from now, there's always going to be people in need.
Well, how do you kind of change that, right, so that you're actually making a difference in the problem itself.
So those two things, the mission, the vision and then which the vision and outcomes, and then how do you use donor support?
Like make it really clear. Like just give us some money, we do some like good work.
What are you going to use the money for? Are you going to hire new staff or are you going to build the infrastructure, or do you have to partner with someone to make inroads in a certain way?
Try a new approach, invest in AI as one of our clients is doing so they could be more efficient.
Show the donors what you're going to do. Often they don't know. They don't know your operations. They don't know where the money is going to go. Particularly larger donors.
If you're sitting down in front of a major donor, they want to know the picture of what their money's actually going to do and have an impact.
So, those three things, I'd say.
Josh:
And all of those are free, and I love that.
Howard:
Exactly.
Josh:
As a small or beginning nonprofit, the best things are free. Make a phone call, get in someone's ear, inspire someone, encourage someone, thank someone.
They take a few minutes of the day, but they're free. It's not a monthly subscription. It's not taking away from any other parts of your organization.
And those are really multipliers for impact, or just across your organization.
And again, it's building your brand. It's when people think of your organization, they remember that phone call.
They remember how they were sad that morning about something going on in their lives.
But you called them and told them, hey, you know what? We fed 800 kids last week in our community, and that means they didn't go to sleep hungry that night. And I just wanted to call and thank you that you were a part of that.
That is absolutely free, no cost, and is just huge for moving your brand forward and your nonprofit forward.
Howard:
That's exactly right. Exactly. You want someone saying that, that's a great group. They just helped 800 hundred kids.
Not like, that's a great group, their logo is so cool. Nothing against cool logos.
I'm not saying not to have a good logo, but the main point is that your organization has a good mission, is doing it, and you're telling people and you're accomplishing it.
And then you're telling people that you're accomplishing it. And so that's the main idea.
Closing thoughts
Josh:
So thinking of resources Howard, what resources would you recommend to our audience on brand and brand strategy?
Howard:
I'm going to actually break out of that question a little bit and say that there are a lot of good resources for brand awareness.
But I'm going to say to get out of your silo and try to expand your mind beyond your sector, like whatever that is, and read things and follow people, who you would not otherwise follow.
I mean, a couple people like that I like, one is David Brooks. He’s a New York Times columnist. I think he’s one of the top thinkers in the country.
He's written lots of things. He was at a seminar and someone asked him, like, how do you stay out of the weeds? Like not go crazy because he writes a weekly column and stays in touch with all the news.
And I remember his response and stuck with me because I try to incorporate this is, because I don't read anything that won't be relevant in six months.
So he tries to focus on, there’s all the day to day, all the stuff that's going on in the world or in your sector if you're nonprofit.
But if you want to be ahead, if you want to think larger, you got to think about like, what are the trends? Who could you read and listen to that is talking about things in a big way.
And for me, some of those people are Noah Yuval Harari is a historian and kind of futurist, bestselling author of Sapiens and other books.
And you can see all his stuff online. That's how I like to watch him. But he talks about the big trends, the ideas, how we know things.
What are the kind of like the stories we tell ourselves in terms of politics and government and money and society. So it gives you some other basis.
I don't know, Ian Bremmer is great for news. He's head of Eurasia Group.
He has a newsletter, he does all the podcasts and you can see him on, but he connects the dots on what's going on in the world. So not just the news today, but like how the Mideast conflict, like what's the background and all that kind of stuff.
Heather Cox Richardson is a historian and she has a Substack newsletter, written to 100,000 plus people. But anyway, just like, try to see, they all give context.
They're not just writing about the moment, but they're trying to give like context.
And I think that's really important for anyone to think about where things are going so that you're not going to be doing the same thing.
It's good to improve, like what you're doing now, but you want to know, like what's going to happen with brand strategy, fundraising, marketing, you know, two years, five years down the road and be there to meet it. That would be my advice.
Josh:
Yeah. It makes me think of Seth Godin as well. I've been reading Seth's work for, I don't know, more than a decade and just love his work.
And not that I agree with everything he says or buys into every every angle he brings something from.
But, he's always kind of thinking from different perspectives and does a good job of really handling kind of basic psychology that none of us are exempt from, right? And I know with psychology and psychology plays a huge part of brand, of course, but a lot of times people kind of put psychology to the side, thinking, well, that's just, that's something academic or that's something unproven.
But the reality is if you looked at the behaviors of your donors, there's commonality amongst them.
And there's something to gain and understand and then out of that understanding, perform, right?
Create message that speaks to them who are in that current psychological mindset or psychological behavior, which then goes into psychographics and all that as well.
But yeah, Seth Godin, just comes to mind as somebody who really encourages me to think outside the box, to kind of look at something from a different angle and then see what you can do with that.
Howard:
Exactly. Yeah. He's terrific for that. Here's something we didn't really talk about. The difference between a nonprofit brand and the business brand.
There's similarity in that you're meeting the psychological needs of your audience.
Now, the consumer brand, by buying the product and the service you for fulfilling some ego need that they have to feel and be a certain way.
You're reinforcing their ego. You know Apple says think different. You buy them. You think that you're different. You're a creator. You are innovator, right?
You're shattering norms that says something about you versus someone who buys IBM. You're the stalwart. You’re sturdy. You're not going to go wrong. You know that kind of thing.
You're saying something, it’s not about the products, it’s about you. So for nonprofits, the real brand shift is seeing your organization as a vehicle for donor’s altruistic impulses, right?
You're a vehicle for people to do good in the world. So you're saving the kids, the trees, or the whales, or whatever it is. I'm simplifying, there’s billions of different kinds of missions.
Use your brand as a way to show your donors that they could do good in the world through your organization by connecting their values with your values, that's really where the magic happens. And I think that often nonprofits kind of miss that opportunity. You just see it from their perspective, outward, we're doing this stuff, so we're doing good, so you should support us. As opposed to, you want to do good. We're the way that you could do good in the world by reaching the kids.
We know you can't do it. But this is the way to do it. So that shift is like where the brand magic happens.
Josh:
I love that, I love that. So, Howard, last question of every episode. It's my favorite question.
If you were standing on stage in front of a thousand nonprofit leaders and could share one thing with them, one sentence, one pithy sentence, what would you say?
Howard:
I would say, be bold. I'd say, go out there. You're there to make a difference.
Don't be shy about it. Don't cut back. Don't be afraid to take the risks.
Go out there, do the big stuff, have the inspiring mission, ask for the big money, and make a real difference.
Josh:
Love that, love that. Howard, this has been such a helpful conversation.
Thanks for joining us. And man, just so much to think about. I'm just still processing a lot of what we talked about.
As always, our audience can go to Nonprofitpulse.com to find the episode there with show notes, and links to Howard and his organization, as well as, we'll throw a Seth Godin link in there as well.
But again, Nonprofitpulse.com for more. Howard, thanks so much for joining us in this episode.
Howard:
You got it.
Josh:
Hey, thanks for listening.
If you enjoyed this conversation, please share or leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts.
Also, head on over to Nonprofitpulse.com to sign up for our monthly newsletter, as well as check out all the links and resources in the show notes. We’ll see you next time.
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