What is a Nonprofit Brand and Why Should I Care?

There are a lot of misconceptions about brands. Many people—marketers included—use the term to refer to the organization’s logo, its “value,” or even the organization itself.

But a brand is both larger and more nuanced than any of those.

One way of thinking about brand is the sum total of everything that creates meaning, value, and preference in audiences’ minds. As Marty Neumeier—author of The Brand Gap—says: “[Your brand] isn’t what you say it is, it’s what they say it is.”

This can be a useful way of thinking about brands, particularly for organizations whose primary objective is profit. “The customer is always right,” after all. But for those focused on impact, audience perception is, at most, half of the equation.

Your brand identity may include how others perceive you, but it originates from someplace deeper: from the choices you make, the work you do… For nonprofits, more than for other types of organizations, your brand is really the soul of your organization. And given the diversity of your audiences and operating capacities (participants vs donors, impact vs fundraising, etc.) it’s an important way of maintaining alignment in all that you do.

Same dish, different flavor

The fact that nonprofits are focused primarily on impact creates a meaningful shift in their relationship to audiences. Many of the standard brand objectives apply, although they take slightly different shapes than their for-profit counterparts. For example:

• Nonprofits need to expand brand awareness and recognition

• Nonprofits need to attract new supporters

• Nonprofits need to engage with existing supporters

• Nonprofits need to convert goodwill into action

Nevertheless, what audiences think about them isn’t nonprofits’ primary concern: that is the implementation of their mission and values.

For nonprofits—as well as all organizations—a brand includes who you are intrinsically, what you look like (i.e. your visual identity), and how others perceive you. Brand development is about creating and maintaining alignment between these various dimensions.

It’s a combination of things you can control, and those you can only hope to influence. And the fact that nonprofits typically have numerous very different operating capacities (fundraising, mission implementation, marketing) and numerous very different audiences (staff, volunteers, board members, supporters, and participants) makes brand management at once more important and more challenging.

The Brand IDEA

In the same way that we conceive of brand differently in the social impact space, it also functions differently. It’s not about exploiting a competitive advantage, stimulating demand, or building customer loyalty; it’s about activating a community in order to implement the organization’s mission.

The Brand IDEA is a framework developed by Julia Shepard Stenzel and Nathalie Laidler-Kylander at the Harvard Kennedy School that outlines the specific ways brands function in the nonprofit space. IDEA is an acronym that, in addition to referring to the common branding goal of distilling a brand into a single strategic idea, stands for:

• Integrity

• Democracy

• Ethics

• Affinity 

In the Brand IDEA framework, clarity is a way of centering an organization’s mission and values, messaging is about empowering others to identify with and express their own understanding of the brand, and differentiation is a tool for fostering collaboration and partnership as opposed to competition.
For an excellent primer on the Brand IDEA framework, check out The Role of Brand in the Nonprofit Sector.

Stronger brands, greater impact

For some in the nonprofit space, the idea of branding can come with a lot of commercial connotations and for-profit-related baggage. But don’t let that frighten you off because the truth is that strong brands are absolutely crucial for maximizing your impact as a nonprofit.

There’s an African proverb that states: “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.”

Nonprofit branding promotes alignment both internally and with your audiences so that you and your impact can go further.

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