Branding, Fundraising Living in Harmony

This is where our researchers went off the deep end. To accept this crazy hypothesis, you'd have to believe dangerous things like these:

• Brand is not what you do in your marketing. It's what you do in real life — as perceived by your donors.
• A brand guidebook that nails down how everything you do should look and makes your messaging lock-step consistent from now on will make little or no difference to the real brand.
• Brand is built by decades of consistent behavior, not by consultants.
• Unfashionable, out-of-date design might actually communicate something very positive to donors.
• The aspirational approach to branding might be leading donors away from involvement, because it confuses them with high-flown abstractions instead of the specific calls to action.
• Brand is more about donors and what they aspire to than about what organizations seek to be known for.
• Good fundraising — the kind that motivates the most donors to give and keep giving — might be the best way to build a brand.

And that would just be ridiculous. Wouldn't it? FS