Here’s a good and corrective look at what brand really should be, from the Brands Create Customers blog: Position the customer, not the brand:
What is called “brand positioning” today is often more messaging strategy than brand strategy…. The typical result is a campaign to sell “the brand” as a desired product perception. The danger is that such campaigns can usurp the brand. They can transform it into a platform of messaging, greatly reducing its ability to innovate and enable.
A lot of attempts at nonprofit branding make this very mistake: Mistaking messaging for brand. Most brand guidelines documents have a few sketchy and abstract paragraphs about the “brand personality,” then pages and pages of color palette, required photo treatments, mandated fonts, and all the ways you must never, never use the logo.
Real brand is how your organization feels to your donors, not what you hope your brand standards will communicate.
You could have the most buttoned-down, attractive message and graphic standards in the world, but if it takes you months to acknowledge a donor’s gift, donors will experience you as sloppy and apathetic.
If your fundraising is a steady stream of bragging about how excellent your processes are and how cool and smart you are, donors will experience you as arrogant and self-centered.
If you never give your donors choice about what they can fund, how they can get involved, or how you’ll communicate with them, their experience with you will be that you see them not as partners, but as bank accounts.
Work on the part of branding that actually matters.
Jeff Brooks has been serving the nonprofit community for more than 35 years and blogging about it since 2005. He considers fundraising the most noble of pursuits and hopes you’ll join him in that opinion. You can reach him at jeff [at] jeff-brooks [dot] com.
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