Is your brand working for you? How to know when it’s time to refresh it.

While you may be deep in year-end mode, this is also a good time to pause and reflect on the year ahead. Make some space now to ask and discuss these questions:

• Is our brand doing all it can for our organization?
• Does our brand reflect who we are now and who we are becoming, or does it feel stuck in the past?
• Does our community associate who we are with our intended ideas and feelings?
• If we are facing a decline in program participation or donations, are our branding efforts likely a factor?
• Does our strategic plan require or suggest that we routinely assess and refine how we communicate?

First, let’s get on the same page with some of these terms and ideas. When we ask people to define branding, we often hear responses tied to reputation and image. At Big Duck, we define the brand as your organization’s whole identity, not just one piece. It’s what your audiences encounter, think, and feel as a result of their experiences with you. We aim to determine the big ideas we want associated with that identity by crafting a brand strategy, which defines how you want your brand to be perceived. And then we get to branding itself, which we describe as the process and practice of establishing your brand strategy and developing the tools you use to express it every day.

Now, let’s go back to your organization and where you are today. In moments when big questions about the brand emerge, it can be helpful to consider your brand alongside other dimensions of organizational performance, such as operations, governance, and culture. The nonprofit lifecycle (summarized here by Social Impact Architects) maps out indicators of a nonprofit’s performance across different stages of its evolution: idea, start-up, growth, and maturity. It also captures when a nonprofit may be in decline or in crisis. For a brand, they offer these benchmarks:

• Idea: Not utilized
• Start-up: First official marketing materials — Primary method of marketing is word-of-mouth
• Growth: Build-out of marketing and communication needs, including public and media relations
• Maturity: Sophisticated marketing and communications plan using multiple channels; everyone equipped to tell [the organization’s] story
• Decline: Decreased public interest; issue area not discussed in the media
• Crisis: Unable to attract media or public attention; messaging does not resonate with the public

As you review the tool, it can help assess brand performance in relation to other categories. For example, your brand may be in growth mode, but your operations and revenue may be in maturity or vice versa. In many cases, we find the brand lags and is often the last part of the puzzle that organizations focus on developing or advancing. 

Certainly, almost every nonprofit has a mission statement, a name, and a logo. Still, we often find that people have not intentionally set or applied how they want others to perceive them throughout their communications. Some nonprofits may look and sound great on their website, Instagram account, or at events, but then their staff is not sure how to explain who the organization is and what it does. Branding work should start inside the organization and move outward.

As you use these tools and questions to determine the next step for your organization’s brand, here are some reasons you might consider a brand refresh:

• You want to shake off an old image. People associate you with something you used to do, not what you are doing now. Understand your current perception, define your new one, and work with your team to develop a brand strategy.
• You are known for the wrong things or not at all (aka “best kept secret”). This may be a matter of reputation, so it’s best to understand your brand perception first. On the other hand, this may be tied to how you use marketing and communications to build mindshare and awareness of what your organization is doing.
• You want to connect with new audiences or are failing to engage current ones. This could be an issue with your brand or your ongoing communication and branding efforts. Starting with understanding the audience and conducting research can help here.
• Your language and/or visuals are outdated and not inclusive. This could be an issue with your external messaging or your visuals — it could also be a concern with your organizational strategy. Review your messaging and consider creating a language guide. You can also ask if your visuals are accessible. Ideally, you’d look at everything together and may also invite feedback from your community. 
• You’re failing to differentiate yourself from peers. It’s great to work in close partnership with others, and many organizations thrive on referrals and coalitions. Here, we encourage you to move beyond defining yourself as better than others by understanding your role in the ecosystem of organizations that do similar work and clarifying your area of expertise.
• You’ve moved or expanded beyond your original geography. Many organizations mention a specific demographic or location in their name, which is a helpful way of connecting with the community or easily identifying your participants. However, organizations evolve, and if a significant aspect of your organization has changed, you may need to change your name and rebrand.
• You’ve merged with another organization. If your organization is merging with another, there are often questions about whether one brand will absorb the other or if you should create a wholly new brand. Determining the right path is usually tied to resources, recognition, and research. 

For many nonprofits, your brand can be a source of power, and branding is key to using communications to advance your mission. If we can explore ways to partner with your organization to shift and shape your brand, let us know.