I get this question a lot when I tell people that one of my jobs is to help nonprofits shape their branding. A common response is, "We already put our logo on everything. What else is there?" Prodigious use of your logo is simply not the answer to the branding question, friends. Sorry.
So just what is branding? In a word, everything. John Jantsch, one of my favorite bloggers for small business, recently touched on this in one of his posts. Jantsch proposes that branding should be viewed not as a logo, catchy tagline, or pretty colors. Instead, much like a person's image is shaped by his or her biography, a company's brand is shaped by it's brandography. That is, a company's brand is shaped by everything it does and says, both in private and in public:
A small business brand is very much like this collage - made up of who the owner is, who the customers are, what the employees say, what the press says, and who you had lunch with today - in your business, everything is brandographical!
The same holds true for the nonprofit organization. Who sits on your board, who the president is, who your active donors are, what your employees and volunteers have to say about you, what the press says and thinks about you, the ratings you receive from nonprofit watchdogs, who you associate with in your private life -- everything -- shapes your branding. And you can't always slap a logo on it.
Your organization's brand is its biography coupled with the impression that biography leaves on donors and potential donors. (And remember, everyone is either a donor or a potential donor.)
So, now that you understand just how invasive branding is, what will you do to add some really great material to your organization's brandography?
Leave a comment. Share your ideas. Generosity is a great quality to include in any branding effort.
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