As a nonprofit, you compete with countless organizations every day that are trying to win the support of the same audiences. While there’s bound to be some overlap in missions, we believe true differentiation comes from your brand.
Your brand is the way your organization tells its story. It’s the simple message you say over and over; it’s how you’re perceived. It sets the expectation for each interaction audiences have with you, and most importantly, it builds recognition and trust. Think of it as an instant shortcut to create meaning in the minds of your audience. Our nonprofit branding services look at your brand from a holistic perspective to create a consistent identity, tone, and voice.
Our nonprofit branding services analyze your brand, audience, and competitors to uncover hidden insights and form the building blocks to articulate your brand.
Our nonprofit branding services start with understanding your audience first, so we can truly position your brand in a way that’s relevant to their needs, wants, and motivations. Then, we look at your brand from a holistic perspective to create a consistent identity, tone, and narrative.
All the elements of your brand— from your mission statement and positioning to your visual identity and messaging— need to be communicated across every organizational touchpoint: telling a cohesive story of who you are, what you stand for, and why your audiences should care and connect.
Our approach follows a series of steps to create your cohesive brand.
Discovery
Understanding your current brand and challenges, as well as your overall mission and goals, will help to better analyze where you are and where you would like your brand to be in the future.
Research
Looking at not only your audience but also your potential audience and competitors will find what resonates most with the audience you’d like to reach.
Brand Language + Personality
Defining how you communicate with your audience is an essential piece to your brand. Your positioning and personality will work to set you apart from all the other orgs in your space (and beyond).
Visual Identity
This step creates the complete expression of your brand positioning. Your visual identity will capture your organization’s spirit, services, and impact.
Brand Guidelines
All elements will come together for your brand guidelines. This document is a reference tool and one source of “brand truth” that guides all communications for your organization.
Brand Discovery + Strategy
Our Discovery + Strategy services take a deep dive into all the parts and pieces of your current architecture to map and prioritize based on shared beliefs, interests, goals, and characteristics.
This all amounts to our insights + recommendations, which are used to develop a brand strategy.
Audience Research + Insights
It’s critical to pay attention to the people who are at the receiving end of your brand: your audiences. Our audience research encompasses surveys, focus groups, and brand equity + perception studies to gain insight into who both your current and target audiences are.
Brand Development
Our brand development service takes our learnings and puts them to work. We create brand language, positioning and personality, and architecture, then conduct brand language testing—to ensure it works. The final element we’ll work on is the creative, including your logo design, visual identity, and creative brief.
Brand Guidelines
Once we have all of the elements of your brand—language, visual identity, tone—we pull it all together into one final deliverable: your custom set of brand guidelines.
A brand is more than a logo, a tagline, or a rational explanation of your services and mission. It’s a set of beliefs, perceptions, feelings, and connotations that are influenced by your organization but amplified and activated by people.
Your brand image is how people perceive and, most importantly, trust your nonprofit. Brands with more trust see higher success in their interactions with their supporters. From increased fundraising to expanded awareness, a strong brand can help you reach your organizational goals and share your nonprofit’s mission with an expanded audience.