Sooner or later someone connected to your organization, totally devoid of fundraising knowledge (likely a board member or the spouse of one), is going to come back from their summer break with the ‘brilliant idea’– half-baked in the sun and sand—that your organization should be changing its name. Or your logo. Or your tagline. Or your graphics and copy style.

Heaven help you. Because that “brilliant idea” if not grounded in understanding could put  your organization out of business, head it in the direction of a fire sale, or at the least have your organization spending needless time and money in an ill-informed-expedition to the Land of Branding.

If you’re particularly unlucky, someone high up in the organization will suddenly become enamored by a “branding consultant”.  After all, this expert the consultant has done it for soap, deodorant and may even some Silicon Valley startups. “And, he’ll give us a big ‘nonprofit’ discount on his fee.”

Just a notch below “particularly unlucky” is the “simply unlucky” fundraiser who’s been directed to follow the brand instructions of the marketing communications manager and stop sending out your “off-brand” stuff. “And frankly, we don’t care if your stuff raises more money; it’s off-brand.”

I was reminded of this all- too-frequently occurring scenario by a spate of Tweets from some of my favorite fundraising colleagues.  Few subjects trigger a Category 5 shit storm as quickly as the issue of branding.

In an effort to shed some light on the pros and cons of the branding debate Tom, Nick and I’ve covered the subject of branding extensively over the past ten years (here, here, here, here, and here to cite just a few Agitator posts.

From the scores of interviews, real-life experience and the writings of practitioners like Jeff Brooks, Sean Trimer, Lisa Sargent, Tom Ahern, John Lepp and others I’ve failed (with apologies) to mention,  there emerges this consensus:

• When it comes to nonprofits, branding is not about big ads, prescriptive fonts and cool logos – it is about how the charity behaves; what it feels like to be helped by them, to help them and to be thanked by them.
• Brand is not about how a charity ‘looks’ it is about how people experience that charity.
• The best branded charities tell fantastic stories brilliantly and use fundraising advertising activities (like online, direct mail, phone calls, direct response TV and events) to position themselves.  Good fundraising is good branding.

HOWEVER…until now I’m not aware of a piece of empirical research that has explicitly explored the relationship between fundraising and branding in terms of investment in brand building and return on that investment in fundraising income.

That gap was filled on Wednesday when Adrian Sargeant and Harriet Day of The Philanthropy Centre released  their study titled Great Fundraising and Brands: Help or Hindrance commissionedby ACA Philanthropy and Fundraising.  You can download it free right here. [Six years ago ACA also commissioned another ‘must read’ study by Adrian and Jen Sheng titled Great Fundraising.]

 Using 10-year histories of branding expenditures and fundraising income of 30 UK charities that, in the authors’ judgment,  have “achieved outstanding levels of fundraising growth”.  Bolstering the financial review are  quantitative and qualitative studies.  Here are the Study’s main conclusions:

• Spending on a charity’s brand is most effective when it is used to support fundraising.
• Fundraising expenditure alone could account for 87% of a change in income, whereas spending on brand only accounted for an additional 1%. “The report notes,
  “We found that increasing brand expenditure has only a modest impact on fundraising success while increasing expenditure on fundraising is massively impactful.
• “In successful organizations we studied, we found that brand was frequently positioned as the servant of fundraising.”
• “In the successful organizations we studied we found that brand was frequently positioned as the servant of fundraising. Regardless if where the team were placed in their organization’s structure, clarity over the nature of the relationship between branding and fundraising seemed to play an immensely significant role.  Great fundraising brands were there to drive great fundraising growth.[Emphasis added.]

“This is a key finding since there is often a cultural tension between the two functions, fundraising seeking to use the most powerful messages they can to raise funds and brand pushing b ack on messaging that is inconsistent with their guidelines.  If everyone understands the role of the brand is to build fundraising success, those conversations (and any possible disputes) are much easier to have (or resolve).”

• “We also found that brands could play a powerful role in making an organization ‘fundraisable’.The processes and procedures necessary to create and manage a brand can build whole organization buy-in to key messages.  We found this to be particularly powerful where the messaging focused on the ‘why’ of ‘why’ the organization exists.  Emotion is key to fundraising and it is often in an organization’s ‘why’ that the strongest emotions can be found.  Our outstanding fundraising organizations had been able to use the branding process to harness the passion the whole organization had for the ‘why’ and thus lay the groundwork for everyone to understand why fundraising was so important and to get fully behind it.”
• “…that strong fundraising brands were more likely to focus on purpose, proposition, personality and passion. …    Our work suggests that charity brands are good candidates for the transition to love objects, and there is a weight of evidence that suggests that ‘lovemarks’ would be likely to attract massively more income as they are better placed to meet the higher order needs (wellbeing) of supporters.”

Finally, print the following paragraph and have it handy the next time a branding vs. fundraising discussion comes up in a board meeting:

“In too many nonprofits the brand is an object of vanity.  It attracts hugely more attention from a Board because it’s perceived to be strategic and consequential for the organization’s reputation. Fundraising by contrast lacks the glamour afforded the brand and can be perceived by a board as a purely tactical pursuit, a necessary evil that can be conducted by others.  Our work shows the folly of this approach.  Or at least the folly if the goal is to raise massively more income to make the organization’s vision a reality.”  –Adrian Sargeant.

Roger

P.S.  Too often “not on brand” is used as an excuse for avoiding the new and different.  As in “Telemarketing is really not on brand for us.”   “Door to Door is really not on brand.”  In fact, the old “off brand” repellant usually means “we’re not willing to test.”

Nick will pick up with more on the branding issue next week by discussing which aspects of brand are important and which are not.  I suspect that among his other insights Nick will tell into which category the antipathy that your head of brand for your organization holds for serif fonts falls.