3 Quick Tips to Help Your Nonprofit Brand Stand Out in a Crowd and no one’s really doing number 3
The majority of small to medium-sized nonprofits fail due to a lack of funding. It is far and away the most common question I get as a consultant: How can we raise more money?
Thank you for reading this post, don’t forget to subscribe!It’s a crowded market out there, and large, established organizations can overshadow those with more narrowly focused missions. A way to shine in the shadows of the big orgs is through brand recognition.
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Branding might sound like a corporate term if you’re working with a five-person, all-volunteer board and staff, but underestimating its power will be to the detriment of your mission.
3 Ways to Stand Out
Be Consistent: It seems obvious, but you’d be surprised how many extremely smart and thoughtful groups have three different logos that all look like they were designed by an hourly employee at Kinkos in 1995. Build a brand style guide. It doesn’t have to be overly complicated. A consistent logo, three major and three minor colors, and a font are all you need. It adds a level of professionalism that shows you care and becomes an unspoken indicator of who you are as a group.
Leverage Social Networks: This doesn’t mean just social media. Your 544 followers on Facebook love to hear from you, but they aren’t your source for funding your quarter-million-dollar capital campaign; however, their network might be. Regularly posted, consistent messaging that doesn’t contain asks are rare among small organizations. Pick a schedule you can maintain. Define themes that allow for a variety of topics to be covered. Share wins, lessons learned, news in your field, and personal views, and then add an ask. Give more than you ask, but do it rarely.
Be a Community Member: This will be unpopular, but invest your funds to sponsor others who share or represent your message. Look for events, workshops, gatherings where like-minded people might be gathering, and get your message in their hands. All too often, small nonprofits hesitate to dedicate funds to anything other than their mission, but investing in others in grand support of a community will pay dividends in the long run. You will meet others with similar interests, find new members, volunteers, and maybe even an angel donor looking to have a larger impact.
Raising funds for a little-known project or mission can be a hard ask for many. However, with a little extra effort in the right direction, you can make a large splash with a small and focused effort.