Is your brand real or ideal?

According to Plato, the world as we perceive it is only a shadow of a higher ideal reality. Our world is just "shadows on the wall" -- vague, inferior echoes of the Real Thing.

It seems some fundraisers agree. Tell me if you've heard this statement: Effective fundraising might raise us a lot of revenue, but it damages our brand.

Apparently, it means something like this: Some of the things we do to motivate people to give seem to be less than the platonic ideal of who we are. Or, even more bluntly: Our brand standards are so cool -- why can't our fundraising be like that?

You can agree or disagree with Plato's belief about the nature of reality, but if you have a platonic view of your nonprofit brand, you're choosing image over mission, or abstraction over reality. Here's why:

• Effective fundraising tends to be simple, urgent, emotional, often old-fashioned. It's seldom pretty (sometimes it's flat-out ugly), and it's almost never cool.
• Brand standards tend to be smart, stylish, happy -- things of beauty and purity.
• The more you do of one, the less you do of the other.

If you're separating your brand ideal from your ability to raise money, you're living in a solipsistic bubble. What you do is what you are. If that includes raising a meaningful amount of funds from the public, that means fundraising.

Fundraising is the way it is for a number of reasons.

• Fundraising targets older (that is, unfashionable) people. That's who gives, and if you want to reach them, like anyone else, you have to speak their language.
• Fundraising targets the heart more than the mind. The motivation to give is an emotional one.
• Fundraising is (and should be) accountable for measurable, real-world monetary outcomes. That gives it a no-nonsense attitude and a healthy ability to avoid BS.

A strong, well-defined brand is a huge asset. It's worth putting real effort into. But if the brand gets in the way of real-world fundraising -- it's going to hurt you. Define your brand carefully.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, marketing, Plato

Comments

[Ed]

Josh, at least the fundraising industry (or rather, the direct marketing fundraising industry) actually measures success. This is more than can be said of most brand advocates who only judge their work on if it 'looks cool'.

As for your second paragraph; 'brands sell' - well yes, but no-one is arguing that brands aren't important, but rather, how are brands important?

The problem for many charities is that the brand is created and developed by people who have no responsibility for raising income - they therefore consistently make the mistake discussed at length above, ie putting ideal before real. It doesn't really matter if the brand doesn't work when raising money as they are not responsible for this area of business.

This doesn't happen in the same way in the commercial sector as brands are specifically developed for one purpose - to make money. There is no other reason. Brands exist to give a product an identity and set of values so that when people are choosing a product, they can make a choice based on their perception of the brand - with a little help from advertising and direct marketing.

But what happens when your not selling cars or holidays or fizzy drinks?

Charities are different. They are not selling products in the same way - and this is where the confusion occurs. People don't wake up in the morning thinking 'I want to donate to an environmental charity - but which one.... well, I like Greenpeace's ethics, but their too political....'

98% of UK personal charitable giving is in response to an ask. Or put another way, Direct Marketing delivers 99% of personal fundraised income in the UK. So it's this dynamic which should trump anything else a brand does - if it doesn't work for DM, it's a bad brand.

[Josh Gowans]

I have to disagree with this post entirely. I'm sorry, but the fundraising industry is its own worst enemy. It measures it's success by capture rates of 10% being good for direct mail... another way of saying that is 90% of people DON'T give. Maybe a bit of branding would go a long way? After all, it's the brands that drive the culture right now.

This post implies that there is only real and ideal as brand attributes, without an opportunity to mesh them together. Why? Brands sell. Do we think that we are not selling our donors on a promise? Consumer or customer, there is an emotional transaction taking place that is driven by a connection which is conveyed in a mission and a brand. If brands don't matter for the best fund raisers, imagine how much better they'd do if they leveraged what every other company knows: brands work.

[A.T.]

Precisely right. There are two problems that we need to counteract:

1. A tendency to elevate internally-desired "mission" over consumer demand to such a degree that the former is all and the latter is nothing. In non-profits, unlike in consumer business, the "customer" (beneficiary) and the "consumer" (donor) are often two different individuals. When an organization makes all of its business decisions - including its brand strategy - based upon its customer ... without prioritizing the consideration of the consumer ... the organization's brand become *far* less consumer relevant than it could be.

All of this is exacerbated by...

2. 1980s-era beliefs about branding and "awareness". Look, thanks to the web, AIDA is dead. OK, that's hyperbole, but there's much truth in it. The notion that AIDA is a process inherently stretched over any substantive amount of time - and, further, that this AIDA Over Time notion should determine our marketing/branding strategy - is nonsense.

As a wonderful DMNews column recently described in its headline: Branding and Response are the Same.
http://www.dmnews.com/Branding-and-response-are-the-same/article/127920/

As a non-profit, your brand will be determined by how effectively you sell tangible, potent impact to your donors.