As collaboration becomes a necessity, branding becomes an issue

As nonprofit organizations pursue a variety of collaborative models, it will be increasingly important for the collaborators to understand how to effectively maintain and leverage their own organizational sub-brand while building a new master brand for the collaborative effort.

There are three keys to creating a strong brand perception for your collaborative effort:

• Know yourself: Understand what your internal stakeholders (senior leadership, boards, staff, volunteers for the involved organizations) want and expect the collaboration to be, now and in the future;

•Know your audience: Be clear on what your key external constituencies need and expect from the collaboration;

• Know your competition: Have a clear perspective on the other options your audiences have in terms of services, giving, volunteering, etc.

Know yourself

Start with the strategic plan for the collaboration (if you don’t have a strategic plan for the collaboration, stop reading immediately and get to work on a strategic plan! It’s extraordinarily difficult to develop a brand strategy without the foundation and consensus that emerge from the strategic planning process).

Make sure you know the answers to a core set of questions: What is the mission of the collaboration? What are our goals? What is the model – how tightly integrated will the organizations be? What are the strengths of the collaboration? What are the weaknesses?

Perhaps the most important aspect of knowing yourself is understanding how you want the collaboration to be perceived. What do you want people (your respective boards, donors, served populations, the media, etc.) to be saying about the collaboration? That desired perception is what your communications and interactions should be building in the marketplace.

There are a number of different ways to successfully answer these questions – often, a combination of facilitated brainstorm sessions and individual interviews with key internal stakeholders (staff, board, volunteers) yields the richest results.

Know your audience

Many organizations (nonprofit and for-profit alike) find it challenging to agree on their most important audiences. That can become even more challenging in a collaborative situation.�½ After all, it can be a bit counterintuitive – if you are trying to increase the number of people who support or use you, wouldn’t you cast the net as wide as possible?

The problem is that most organizations simply don’t have the resources to effectively market to that many people. Again, look to the mission and strategic plan to identify and prioritize the target audiences for the collaboration.

Then, ask a representative sample of those audience members what they want, need, expect from the collaboration, understanding that it might be broader, or more narrow, than what each participating organization provides.

As was the case with your internal supporters, a combination of focus groups and individual interviews typically provides the type and level of information you need to really know your audience.

It may not look like competition, and you may not be comfortable calling it competition, but at the end of the day, your served population, your donors, your volunteers, etc. almost always have options – other places they can go to get what you want them to get from you (or give what you want them to give to you).

And a collaborative effort might very well have different competition than the individual organizations typically face. So, think long and hard and, by the way, ask your internal and external constituents: What options are out there? How do they brand and market themselves? Who do they serve?

Understanding the options helps you determine how to position the collaboration in the context of those options. It allows you to learn from others’ best practices and from their mistakes.

Once you have collected and analyzed all the information that emerges from this brand planning process, you will be ready to build a messaging framework for the collaborative effort.

That framework should include the following core elements:

• Mission statement (the collaboration’s reason for being),

• Elevator pitch (the concise answer to the question, “Who are you as a collaboration?”),

• Brand promise (the unique and specific thing the collaboration promises to your stakeholders),

• Brand personality (the emotional side of your brand; what it’s like to interact with the collaboration),

• Brand proof points (often called “reasons to believe”),

• Audience message matrix (a group of supporting messages versioned by audience segment) and

• Product-service brand hierarchy (how your sub-branded products and services fit together).

It’s important to remember that you need to demonstrate the synergies among the collaborating brands. To that end, the messaging for the collaboration should leverage and support the messaging for the individual participating organizations and vice versa.

With your strategy and messaging in place, you will have a strong foundation from which to take the next steps – building the brand perception and delivering what the collaborative brand promises.

As a team, you will be well equipped to tackle crucial questions such as:

• What does it look like (name, logo, visual identity),

• How do you get the word out (integrated communications plan) and

•How do you ensure that each organization delivers on the promise of the collaboration (internal brand rollout/brand training).

Michele Levy, based in Newton, considers herself a brand therapist for nonprofit organizations. Her consulting work includes research, brand strategy, message development, communications planning and training.