The Nonprofit Branding Bandwagon

Branding has been getting much buzz in the nonprofit world over the last few years and while I can appreciate the desire to stand out from the crowd, I wonder if nonprofits’ wholesale adoption of corporate branding practices is a wise move in terms of mission fulfillment. We (I say “we” because I identify as an activist) are spending a great deal of money – in the case of one organization I know, hundreds of thousands of dollars – for corporate style tag lines, logos, commercial partnerships and strategies that might impress a news reporter or even a foundation executive, but that don’t necessarily move us toward our missions. This is particularly true for those organizations dedicated to cultural change and social equity. Changing the world is a big and costly job. There’s plenty of work to go around, so why fight one another?

It’s ironic that nonprofits are the only organizations expected to collaborate with their “competitors.” Look behind that irony, though, and you will see that there is some logic to this. There are very few, if any, nonprofit organizations that have truly unique missions. Mostly, our differences are matters of strategy and tactics – various ways of reaching similar goals and producing “social goods.”

Social goods such as housing the homeless, fighting for voting rights or cleaning up rivers are not generally things from which profits can be made. That’s why nonprofit organizations exist in the first place. In business, competition clearly drives innovation and improvement, but we need to ask ourselves if the same is really true in the nonprofit sector. When multiple organizations share a similar mission – one that is difficult and costs money rather than generates profits – wouldn’t it be smarter to cooperate rather than spend resources to outshine or undermine one another? Why are we on the branding bandwagon?

I suppose the answer to that question is based on fear. Fear of missing out on a big donation. Fear of seeing a rival quoted instead of

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ourselves. Fear of not having clout in the advocacy arena. We think, hope, that branding will position us to win.

But what if we didn’t give in to the fear? What if we partnered with the best of our peers and applied for grants together? What if we divided up chunks of work and didn’t duplicate what others were already doing? What if we insisted on having models of marketing, branding and communicating that were not mere grafts from the corporate world, but were designed and built just for us, for the nonprofit universe? We can and should develop ways of work that preserve each organization’s differences yet resist the pressure to compete when competition is unproductive.

Bonnie McEwanPresidentMAKE WAVES: Impact Marketing for Nonprofits

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