Thinking about rebranding to improve your fundraising results? Think again. Commercial-style branding is the wrong tool for nonprofits. If you try to attach that type of brand to your organization, you can expect painful drops in revenue and engagement.
The Color Master held us in the palm of his manicured hand.
He was part of a team of Brand Experts who'd been flown in to hand down my client's new brandâa thing of beauty that would launch the organization into a new era of public visibility, skyrocketing revenue, and cutting-edge design. (That's how an energetic memo from the VP of marketing put it.)
The audience of 50 or so âstakeholdersâ sat in a darkened meeting room, staring like goldfish at the Color Master's slides.
The stake I held was helping the organization produce its direct-mail and online fundraising. I was at this daylong seminar with experts from the branding agency to get my âmarching ordersâ on how the new brand would play out in fundraising.
The screen showed a solid rectangle of purple.
âWarm Medium Eggplant,â the Color Master said. None of his colors had regular names like âpurple,â and most of them had two adjectives. âWarm Medium Eggplant creates a sort of visual embrace.â Long pause. âIt makes you feel cozy and included. Like you're six years old and sitting in Grandma's kitchen. It evokes the aroma of bakingâsomething delicious, with a hint of cardamom.â
Everyone in the room swooned. All that from purpleâexcuse meâWarm Medium Eggplant?
âThis is going to be a grand slam,â someone behind me stage-whispered.
While I pondered what a âgrand slamâ might be for a color, images of purple things flashed by quickly on the screen. A thick purple blanket. Grapes. A teapotâold-fashioned, yet purple.
Then the screen went dark. The Color Master's face, floating above his black turtleneck, was the only visible thing in the room. âWarm Medium Eggplant,â he intoned, âis our main primary accent color.â That meant it was one of the two colors of the yet-to-be revealed new logo, and we would be required to use it in great abundance.
âWhoever would have dreamed of purple?â The stage whisperer asked from behind me. âIt's so creative.â
I never would have dreamed of it, I thought. The organization was a venerable American institution that had been helping the poor for three generations. It owned a piece of psychological real estate that most fundraisers would give their firstborn to have: Its donors saw giving as a sign of patriotism. The old, soon-to-be-scrapped logo tapped into that perception: It was red, white, and blue, and included a stylized stars-and-stripes flag.
Reliable sources had it that the rebranding work was costing the organization $300,000. But hey, what's $300,000 when you consider the benefits the new brand was going to bring? According to the Brand Experts, we could look forward to:
- Paradigm-crushing improvements in awareness and revenue! (That's exactly how they put it.)
- Access to an elusive but promising new demographic of young, smart, affluent donors!
- An end to a dated look that was, frankly, a résumé stain for any self-respecting creative person!
The investment in the brand would more than pay offâtangibly and intangiblyâbefore we knew it! (Also exactly how they put it.)
The screen became a block of yellow. A pale yellow, almost white. âLight Vibrant Butter,â the Color Master intoned. He said it with such solemn drama that hearing God say âLet there be lightâ could hardly have been more arresting.
He told us how butter changes hue throughout the year with the diet of cows. In summer, when they're eating green grass, the butter is a darker yellow. In winter while they eat hay, the butter lightens up, almost to white. Light Vibrant Butter, the Color Master said, captures the color of butter after its palest winter hue when grass has just returned to the cows' diets.
Someone near the front of the room made the type of sound you give especially good fireworks displays: Ooooh! Honestly, the Color Master's presentation had earned that reaction. I wish all the business presentations I attend were half as well done.
We watched a series of pale yellow things on the screen. None of them was butter. He followed with a quicker tour of the rest of the palette. There was no flag red. No flag blue. There was a bluish gray called Montana Pine Smoke.
After the Color Master, the presentation went downhill. He was clearly the star player on the team of Brand Experts.
The Font Guy spoke in a soft monotone. He avoided eye contact, preferring to turn to us and look at his own slides on the screen, which was behind and above him. His big reveal was the new brand font: I'll call it Unreadable Sans, along with its sidekick, Unreadable Sans Extraâtall, anorexic fonts. The ascenders were extra-long, while the descenders were oddly short, as if afraid to venture too far from their letters. For most fonts, the word âextraâ means bold. For Unreadable Sans, it meant extra thin.
âThis font will really catch fire,â the Font Guy muttered, âwhen you reverse it against Medium Warm Eggplant.â The idea of flaming type captured my imagination, so I couldn't focus on him any further.
Next up was the Imagist. She would have been called a photographer most places, but the executive who introduced her pointed out that she was no mere shutterbug: She'd had work exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art. He didn't say which Museum of Modern Art.
The Imagist's guidelines for photography under the new brand boiled down to this: We were always to show beautiful, happy children in multiracial groups of three to eight, all of them wearing colors that matched the new palette. A sad, fearful, or even pensive face would undermine the charity's Brand Promise, which was âhope.â
That's rightâthe entire promise had been boiled down to one word: Hope.
The happy children in the photos were always to be cut out from their surroundings and set against backgrounds of Medium Warm Eggplant or Light Vibrant Butterâto avoid the possibility of revealing any squalor, poverty, or other signs of hopelessness that might be lurking in the real world behind them.
Finally, the Wordsmith stepped up to the podium. He was pale and seemed to be in a constant state of flinchingâclearly the lowest in the hierarchy of the Brand Experts. In their world, words are an afterthought. Color, font, and images do the real work.
His only thunder had been stolen by the Imagist when she revealed the Brand Promise, âHope.â
The Wordsmith's hands shook when he held up a copy of the new communications standards document. Among the new rules for copy were that we were required to say âfood insecurityâ rather than âhungry,â and âmarginalizedâ instead of âpoor.â Those tired old terms undercut the dignity of those the organization served, and were ânot up to the standards of a modern brand.â The Wordsmith briefly smiled while he said that last phrase. I suppose he considered it some of his best work.
He went on to explain that all marketing and fundraising materials must use the word hope as often as possible. But it should never be used as a verb, as in They hope someone like you will help themâbecause that would be âhokey.â The brand promise would achieve its full power only as a conceptual noun.
Even the stage whisperer sounded unconvinced. He made a sound like âYuhââit might have been âYeah,â but ...
