Branding

Not long ago, a few companies realized something profound about the human spirit in its pursuit of meaning and purpose. Then they quietly began to reinvent their reason for being in order to bring “meaning” to the lives of the people who buy their products.

Imagine a baseball team full of players who don’t like baseball. To them, baseball is distasteful. A shady exercise that’s necessary to fill the stadium. The rules annoy them. They play with gritted teeth, resentful every minute. When they sit in the dugout, they complain about the fans who put them through this degrading spectacle. They dream of better fans — ones who will show up without demanding baseball.

As the number of nonprofit organizations grows — and competition among nonprofits with it — the need for strong branding among organizations has never been greater. In his white paper “Building the Nonprofit Brand From the Inside Out,” Carlo M. Cuesta, managing partner at Creation In Common LLC, a St. Paul, Minn.-base provider of strategic knowledge and services for nonprofit foundations and government agencies, says nonprofits need to do more these days than simply express a need. It’s more necessary than ever to both communicate a message and deliver on it. This builds organizational value, which can result in a brand identity that attracts

All nonprofit organizations are marketing organizations in that they use marketing activities to get prospects to become members, supporters or donors. An organization can’t market itself well without an understanding of its brand strategy, e.g., its market position, what differentiates it, etc. This is the focus of “7 Secrets to Branding in the Nonprofit Organization,” a white paper by Michael DiFrisco, founder of BrandXcellence, a firm that provides brand-strategy workshops and solutions to nonprofit organizations. Operating without a brand strategy in place is like trying to build your organization on shifting sand, DiFrisco writes. Organizations and businesses alike waste billions of dollars on ineffective

Branding is about communicating a sense of value and a set of values. For organizations doing good work, it should be a no-brainer. “For a nonprofit, that’s pretty easy because they have mission statements, they’re clearly focused on an objective that’s almost always in the interest of the public good, whereas the corporate side, you try to do the same thing but it may be a little bit harder to justify that sort of value proposition,” says Christopher Simmons, principal/creative director for MINE, a San Francisco-based design firm specializing in identity, print, environmental graphics and Web design. Simmons offers the following tips to nonprofit

A few years ago, a school I attended launched a multi-million dollar capital campaign. Because I regularly give to its annual appeal and a few other random appeals each year, the school probably considers me a mid-level donor — reliable for some support but not necessarily worth a lot of face-to-face cultivation.

When people come to special events supporting The Cleveland Play House, a Cleveland-based organization that produces professional-level plays and conducts theater-focused training and educational programs, they expect drama and something spectacular, says Judy Comeau-Hart, director of development for the play house. Given that fact and the incredible competition that Comeau-Hart says exists when it comes to special events, the organization spares no expense for decorations and food. “You have to make it spectacular so that people will look forward to coming every year,” she says. Special events are not the most effective way to raise funds, Comeau-Hart says. They’re actually the least efficient

Lutheran Social Services of Mid-America had a problem: Its name confused people. The Ohio-based organization works with people of all faiths, not just Lutherans, offering services from credit counseling to senior-living facilities. The “mid-America” was unclear, too. What to do?

“Many people didn’t know about our organization,” says Pam Blumensheid, director of marketing for Lutheran Social Services of Mid-America. “We were providing good work, but people didn’t know about it. We needed to build identity.”

For years, Washington, D.C.-based The Humane Society of the United States ignored the Internet’s full potential to reach donors and supporters.

Here’s the situation we found ourselves in: HSUS’ Web site in April 2003 had been transferred to its third department in five years. While the site was graphically appealing and content rich, it ran on proprietary software developed by a company that no longer was in business.

You would think that after a hundred years, a nonprofit could kick back a bit and maybe even rest on its laurels. After all, it’s been there, done that — right?

Not necessarily so, says Kurt Aschermann, senior vice president and chief marketing and development officer of Atlanta-based Boys and Girls Clubs of America, which was founded in Boston in 1906.