Building a Better Brand from Bridget Brandt

Branding plays an important role in your nonprofit. Your brand is your personality.  The presentation above was designed to be a how to guide for nonprofits that are seeking a stronger brand.

Want to Build a Better Brand?

Consider strategic issues the brand faces, growth potential, barriers and challenges.  What can your team do to get ahead of these issues, capitalize on them, and grow as a result of them?

Take a look at what you do, who you are, and who you want to be.

What are your brand features, benefits, personality, and essence?

After you define who you are and make a plan for what you want your brand to be, you must share it.  Create a plan on a page.  Share it with volunteers, staff, and board members.  It is important to be able to clearly articulate who you are and more important for others to be able to articulate who you are.

Define what you are going to do, who is responsible for doing it, and who the project owner is.  Write it down and hold meetings to keep everyone accountable.  A strong brand is only as strong as those executing it.

Are your brand efforts working?  It’s ok if they aren’t, but it is not ok if you don’t know.  Measure your likelihood to recommend every six months to make sure you are making headway.  Other metrics to look at include web hits, social mentions, and referrals if applicable.

Take-away: Google returns 346,000,000 hits on brand building.  It is a big topic with a lot of advice, suggestions, and how-to’s; think about your organization and work through your brand one step at a time.  If you are ready for a big change, I recommend working through the presentation to help you decide what you are solving for.  Then seek assistance if this is not an area of strength in your organization.  After all, your brand is what makes you different from everyone else, you should invest time and effort in “Building a Better Brand.”