For my family
Sarah Durham is a native New Yorker who grew up in the advertising industry. She began her career in the corporate branding world, working at Hearst Publications, Prescriptive cosmetics, Disney Consumer Products, and elsewhere. In 1994, she founded Big Duck (www.bigducknyc.com), a communications firm in New York City that works exclusively with nonprofits to help them raise money and increase visibility through smart communications. Big Duck’s client list includes local, regional, and national nonprofits of varying sizes. Under Sarah’s leadership, Big Duck won a Presidential Design Achievement Award for its development of “Growing Up Drug-Free: A Parent’s Guide to Prevention” (currently 28 million copies in circulation), and several awards from Fundraising Success magazine for integrated fundraising campaigns.
In 2006, Sarah was featured in Fundraising Success as a “Top Fundraiser Under 40.” She frequently writes and contributes to articles in nonprofit trade publications. She is a volunteer trainer for the Support Center for Nonprofit Management and a frequent presenter at Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) conferences.
Sarah is a rabid Brooklynite, a proud mother of twin girls, and proud owner of a VW bus. She tweets about nonprofit communications under the handle “@BigDuck Sarah” and blogs at bigducknyc.com/blog. Brandraising is her first book.
My husband, Craig, deserves thanks from me every day. Now they’re in writing and official.
Just about all members of the staff at Big Duck during 2007 and 2008 helped by researching aspects of this book, offering great insights into what they found, refining the brandraising approach, and making it possible for me to spend time writing off site. They include Sonny Mui, Katherine Sciolto, Scott Moe, Kristen Blair, and Maria Cozine. Rebecca Hume created the snazzy conceptual model (and taught me what that phrase means!) that’s used to illustrate the brandraising concept throughout this book. Farra Trompeter, Dan Gunderman, and Liz Brandwood were all invaluable readers and sounding boards.
Kathryn Glass is a great friend who offered smart suggestions, a keen eye, and morale support. The Boxenbaums let me use their place to write, and have really excellent tea.
My father, an author and ad man, had the words “Write, damn it, write!” framed and sitting on his desk. That served as a good reminder of the discipline it takes to keep at it, even when it all feels uphill. Like my dad, I’ve benefited from much encouragement from Mindy Papp Durham—a constant muse and support.
My mother, an activist, producer, and engaged civic leader, offers daily inspiration. She taught me the importance of writing clearly when I was young and helped reinforce that in her reading of this book. Howard Ziff has helped her and me with constant cheerleading and love.
The team at Jossey-Bass was supportive, smart, and professional through-and-through.
Lastly, my sincere thanks to all the organizations that generously allowed me to use them as examples in this book. Their work is inspirational.
During the fall of 2008, right in the middle of the financial market’s collapse, I facilitated a panel on branding at an event called “Meet the Grantmakers,” organized by the Support Center for Nonprofit Management. Throughout the morning, several officers of large corporate foundations talked about how their foundations’ endowments had plummeted, leading to fewer grants and less money awarded to nonprofits. These grantmakers stressed that the competition for available grants was going to be tougher than ever. Organizations applying would have to distinguish themselves by communicating clearly and demonstrating their value distinctively. By the time my afternoon panel on branding began, the big question on everyone’s mind seemed to be, How can we demonstrate our value and uniqueness with our limited staff, budget, and experience in the area of communications?
Let’s face it: nonprofits arrived very late at the marketing party. Back in 1994, when I started working with nonprofits, words like branding, marketing, and messaging were often misunderstood, ignored, or treated as dirty words. Perhaps this was because marketing is a term most often associated with selling, and the idea of having to sell a nonprofit’s benefits (to donors or clients, for example) felt strange.
Although development is a powerful department in most nonprofit organizations, it often functions independently from the program or advocacy departments. Each department usually produces its own materials, with no coordination or oversight, with the result that a direct-mail appeal, for example, doesn’t relate to what’s on the organization’s Web site or what’s in its overview brochure or even what’s on the sign posted in the lobby.
In the for-profit world, corporations place a high value on marketing. Branding is a line item in any start-up’s budget, and communications-focused staff people (usually with “marketing” titles) are among the first to be hired. In contrast, new nonprofits rarely provide budgeting or staffing for communications. Instead, all resources are invested in launching programs, and communications evolve on an ad hoc basis. Scrappy and hard-working staff members at new nonprofits manage with whatever they’ve got as they seek out funding, attract clients, and establish other relationships.
But in the past few years the conversation has shifted as nonprofits of all sizes see more and more examples of how branding and marketing build valuable relationships with donors, clients, and other key constituents. Larger nonprofits (typically those with annual budgets of $5 million or more) invest in communications as a separate department, and fundraisers increasingly embrace the notion that they are marketers. Even the term branding is now commonly used.
Whether the economy is good or bad, whether the competition for funding is tough or not, and whether they’re small or large, organizations must communicate every day. Staff members send e-mail blasts, hold events, update Web sites, solicit donors, tweet, create newsletters, and more. Most do so with little or no centralization, coordination, time, training, budget, or support. Without realizing it, many organizations end up putting the cart before the horse, usually because they lack a clear framework for communications strategy, decision making, and execution. Nonprofits redo their Web site in the middle of strategic planning, for example. It’s like trying to install a window before you’ve built the wall.
Chapter Two, “Principles of Effective Communications,” takes a closer look at the value of communicating more deliberately and at some of the obstacles that make that particularly hard to do in today’s workplace.
Cattle ranchers branded their livestock with the symbols of their ranch to distinguish them from other ranchers’ stock. Many people today still associate the word brand with a symbol—usually a logo. Some people think it also includes colors, messaging, and other elements that distinguish an organization. Although those associations are valuable, they lack a connection to an organization’s mission and vision or to its impact, the things that all organizations are ultimately about.
For most nonprofits, raising money and increasing visibility are the primary reasons to communicate. Brandraising is the process of developing a clear, cohesive organizational identity and communications system that supports these goals and makes it easier to express the organization’s mission effectively and consistently.
In centuries past, communities came together and worked collaboratively to assemble barns, arguably the most important structure on a farm. Working as a well-choreographed team, all the members of the community played a role in planning, directing, constructing, or supporting the assembly of the barn. When the barn was finished, a single cohesive structure stood, providing shelter for the farm’s animals, tools, and supplies.
Brandraising, like barn raising, involves everyone in your nonprofit’s community—board members and staff leaders, volunteers, program staff, and perhaps donors and funders. Everyone plays a role in the development of effective communications.
Throughout this book the term brandraising is used to describe the process of building a strong framework for communicating. The elements involved in brandraising and their connections to each other are outlined at the beginning of Chapter Three, “Overview of Brandraising,” and then defined and explored in greater detail in the four chapters that follow.
If you work at a nonprofit and have little or no background in communications, this book should help you manage any branding or communications-related work more effectively. If you are a more experienced nonprofit professional grappling with the rise of social media and other unexpected changes in the communications landscape, it should help you stay current.
In a business that sells widgets, the ROI (return on investment) is measured by profit.
But in the nonprofit world, the impact of communications is measured in terms of the ability of those communications to support and advance the mission. More specifically, it is measured by
Most nonprofits communicate in order to
Some organizations experience significant overlap among their fundraising, program, and advocacy audiences (illustrated in Figure 1.1). For instance, a symphony’s donors are also subscribers to its programs and might also be community leaders who help to shape the group’s reputation in the area. Conversely, some groups have very disparate audiences, with little overlap. For example, an agency may be reliant on funding from foundations, have programs that work with people who are homeless, and lobby politicians for change that will benefit its clients (for instance, affordable housing).
FIGURE 1.1 The Shared Goals of Nonprofit Communications
In a for-profit organization, transactions are simpler. A customer buys a product or service and pays for it. Happy customers often lead to a profitable business. But in a nonprofit, this can be far from the case; even an extremely successful program will close its doors if funding dries up.
The true value of communications is measured through income generated, programs that achieve their stated goals, and other tangible results. Branding is certainly not a panacea. If a nonprofit organization is ineffective, corrupt, or has lost its way, good communications might delay but will not stop its collapse. But in my experience, most organizations are full of extremely hard-working people doing exceptionally good work. The principles of effective communications and brandraising strategy covered in the following chapters will maximize such organizations’ effectiveness.