If you missed Roger’s Friday post on brand, a recent study on brand found that fundraising spending has 87 times the impact on income as brand spend and the best organizations had brand as the servant to fundraising instead of vice versa.

It’s not all bad news for brand folks, though.  There are two areas where brand and brand policing are vitally important for nonprofits:

1. To vouchsafe and communicate the central values of the organization. As the study found “We also found that brands could play a powerful role in making an organization ‘fundraisable’.  …  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.”
2. There is no second area.  Number one is, and should be, the only purpose of brand and brand exercises.

That one purpose is vitally important.  For example, in Mothers Against Drunk Driving’s brand standards, you cannot, must not, refer to drunk driving crashes as “accidents.”  This is because 1) they aren’t and 2) it’s antithetical to MADD’s mission to think they would be.  MADD serves drunk driving victims, victims of a violent crime.  You would no more say that such a crash was an “accident” as the person who hit you with a baseball bat and took your wallet committed “a giant whoopsy-doodle.”  Getting that right is core to who MADD is and to the identity of MADD’s supporters.  If MADD knew it could raise more money by betraying itself and using the a-word, it still wouldn’t do it.

This last point is the key: if it’s so core to your identity you would sacrifice expanding your fundraising and thus your mission impact, it is core to your brand.

Everything else – every other single thing – is for style points, which are accepted at none of your finest retailers.  Everything else, therefore, should be assessed by “does it work?”.  Sadly, things often held out as sacred cows should in fact be turned into hamburger.  For example:

Logo: The logo is the most prominent feature of the brand to the point that some refer to the logo as the brand.  It is immutable down to how much white space should be put around it so it can be appropriated venerated.  Surely you shouldn’t mess with the logo, no?

You can.  You should if it will raise more money.  A story from my upcoming book (notice how I slipped that in there?  Details to come…):

“In 2004, there was still some debate about whether online donations were ever going to be a significant part of nonprofit revenues.  That same year, a knitting blogger who goes by the name Yarn Harlot  created a fundraising campaign for Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) called Tricoteuses sans Frontières (Knitters Without Borders).  She put up a page on her blog talking about the important work that MSF does and urged her followers to join Knitters Without Borders in support.

Guess how much she raised.

Wrong.  Too low.

By the sixth anniversary of the campaign, Knitters Without Borders had raised over a million dollars to support MSF.  ….

[T]he Knitters Without Borders logo, such as it is, is a parody of the MSF logo.  Think for a moment about whether your communications or legal team would allow a knitting blog to parody your logo.  I’m thinking it’s actually more likely that on page 637 of your brand standards guide it specifically says “this logo may not be parodied on knitting blogs.””

Allow someone to parody your logo, get a million dollars.  Is your logo so sacred, so core to your mission that you should turn down this money?  No.  No, you should not.

My favorite story about how to do your logo right is World Wildlife Fund.  Founder Sir Peter Scott recounted the discussion over their famous panda logo (emphasis mine):

“We wanted an animal that is beautiful, is endangered, and one loved by many people in the world for its appealing qualities. We also wanted an animal that had an impact in black and white to save money on printing costs.”

That was 1961.  Let’s say that WWF has since printed their logo a billion times worldwide, probably an underestimate.  Let’s also say that each printing in color would have cost them an extra three cents, also probably an underestimate.  So that decision saved them $30 million so far that has been freed up for wildlife preservation.  Would you give that $30 million up for a logo your brand specialist thinks is prettier?  Hopefully, you would not.

Contrast this with an organization that will remain nameless that change from a three-color logo to a seven-color logo designed by and for digital folks who didn’t care that it was impossible to print. Testing with millennial non-donors went gangbusters, so they were surprised when their core multiyear donors didn’t recognize them any more…

Organization name: It’s understandable that NAACP now goes largely by its acronym now – not even racists use the phrase “colored people” any more (they do apparently still use the phrase “go back where you came from” though…).  Similarly, AARP opted for its acronym when it no longer focused on just retired persons.  In both cases, the name no longer fit with who that organization was and they were willing to take the fundraising hit to be who they should be.

Other than that, though, it’s malpractice to change a name from something donors recognize to something they don’t simply because the board chair’s spouse thinks the current name is passé.  Sadly, people in these cases often  argue that the change will help fundraising, despite no evidence this has ever happened and every piece of evidence showing the pain of a change.

Imagery: You don’t want to show sad images, do you?  You’ll just bring people down.  One Agitator reader combatting hunger discussed the time s/he reviewed photos for fundraising and found they “looked like a cereal commercial. Testing proved that sad kids and even ugly photos were winners.”

Are you willing to take money away from starving children so you can feel better about the images you present to the world?  If so, may I suggest John Stuart Mill’s classic Utilitarianism?

Moreover, the same imagery doesn’t work in all places.  Some research shows that committed donors respond best to happy faces and less committed to sad ones.  Any one-size-fits-all brand standard will fail there.

Channel: The ACLU doesn’t use Facebook pixels.  This makes perfect sense.  It would violate their own mission and values.  Bravo to them for living their beliefs and giving up the revenue that would come with abandoning them.

Everyone else should use what is effective.  Even though door-to-door fundraising in America predates America, some organizations say it isn’t on brand for them.  Same with telemarketing.  In these cases, “not on brand” is a synonym for “I don’t like it, even though it could make money.”  It’s fine to have these personal feelings; it’s when you generalize them organization-wide to ban different ways of communicating with and recruiting donors that you are hurting your mission recipients because how you feel.  In that case, get over yourself and test.

Font: I tried to come up with a legitimate example for a brand standard on fonts as I’ve done in the other cases.  There just isn’t one.  No organization can say “use any font but Calibri, because Calibri shot our founder’s mother.”

So we are left with what font works best.  The problem is most designs and brand standards run counter to this meritocracy:

• Gray fonts instead of black
• Tiny fonts that look cool to our 27-year-old designer
• White fonts on a colored background
• Sans serif fonts on a printed piece

All these are sins against readability.  Readability equals persuasion and persuasion equals donation.  No readability, no donation.  Therefore these brand standards steal money from those who need your services, Q.E.D.

Pet phrases: Hopefully, you already know to avoid long, involved phrases when you can be simpler and that acronyms/initializations are out.  But did you know the wrong metaphor can kill?  I talked about this in a metaphor post: the phrase “War on Cancer” causes people to reduce their efforts to prevent cancer.  Picking the wrong phrase and carving it into your brand stone tablets could cost people their lives.

All these yield to a simple two-question test:

• Does it work?
• Even if it works, is using it a higher moral cost?

Filtered through this lens, you should be able to use many pages of your brand book as nature intended: when you run out of toilet paper while camping.  The evidence shows that organizations work better when brand exists to serve fundraising, not the other way around.

Nick

P.S. Disagree?  Let’s discuss and debate.  Riling things up is very “on brand” for us.

P.P.S. We’ve been getting a lot of brand horror stories at Agitator HQ.  Please feel free to send them my way.  If it’s simply to vent, great – I’ve been where you are so I’m here for you.  But if you want, we’re getting in enough stories there’s probably a post coming out of it, so let us know if we can share and, if so, what level of anonymity you’d like.