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Brand Awareness: The Face of Your Organization; The Future of Your Success
By Dell Fascione, Vice President
April 2010

A nonprofit’s brand is its core organizational principle and platform: the motivation behind its work is expressed through the brand. So, by effectively using the brand as the voice and vision of the organization, a nonprofit can successfully educate, cultivate, solicit and steward its publics and constituents.

To be sure your organization maximizes its marketing and communications, your brand identity must clearly and succinctly articulate the conviction of your work and the importance of the views you express. Since effective brand identity is the single most important component of your marketing efforts, it must be employed consistently and frequently in all communications and media.

More and more, nonprofits are revisiting and revising their branding packages to make sure they reveal a true and accurate portrait of the organization. Simply put, phases for developing such a brand identity package should include:

Discovery

• Conduct an audit of your marketing, fundraising and communications materials. How effectively and consistently is your organization’s brand conveyed?
• Research external perceptions of your organization’s image to find out how the public perceives and uses your communications and media. Learn how you are seen by various audience segments that are important to your institution.

Development

• Consider your current situation and your Discovery results to develop a marketing platform. This platform should include a positioning statement that drives 5-6 key messages and attributes which clearly and concisely deliver your organization’s vision, mission and goals.
• Develop – or refresh – your organization’s logo/mark, marketing tag/theme and graphic style to express your top characteristics as defined through your marketing platform.

Execution

• Develop a comprehensive user’s style guide with explicit rules and high standards for applying your brand to all marketing and communications. Guidelines should be strictly implemented and monitored by your marketing and PR departments.
• Incorporate your new brand identity and marketing platform into all communications and media – website, online correspondence, brochures, letters, speeches, signs, advertising, PR, etc.

By putting precise branding standards into practice and allowing the marketing platform (visual and verbal messaging) to drive all your communications efforts, you’ll automatically increase the public’s positive impressions of and responses to your organization.

Schultz & Williams is a national consulting firm based in Philadelphia; providing management, fundraising and marketing consulting for nonprofit organizations, along with full-service direct marketing, database and creative/production services.