Branding, Fundraising Living in Harmony

Here's how it goes: The brand expert says the fundraising campaigns that generate most of your organization's revenue are "undermining the brand." More precisely, fundraising messages don't use the right fonts, aren't faithful to the color pallet and fail to focus on the Statement of Brand Personality. All in all, the corny, old-fashioned messiness and specificity of fundraising are dragging down the brand.

At this point, if you're lucky and/or there are smart people with clout in your organization, you test your fundraising against brand-compliant fundraising. You know, the pretty colors, modern design and complete alignment with the abstract values articulated by the brand experts. This soon reveals the scope of the financial catastrophe that awaits if you follow the brand experts. So you stop listening to them.

Unfortunately, not all organizations are lucky and/or smart. They follow the brand experts with blind faith and no testing at all. They just drive their trains straight off a cliff and wonder what happened when they hit the bottom. I've even seen nonprofits go with the brand even after testing shows it's going to crush revenue — which is like driving full speed over the cliff, knowing exactly what's going to happen, yet somehow confident that this time it won't hurt.

This phenomenon is so widespread and so strange, the research team here at Easier Said Than Done Labs has conducted an in-depth study to find the root causes. Perhaps if we understand why brand and fundraising are so incompatible, we can reconcile them and live out the rest of our days with pretty design, plenty of revenue and endless rainbow juice for our unicorns. Sadly, all the team came up with was, "It's just one of those things. Like dropped toast always landing butter-side down."

So in lieu of solving the problem, here are some of our research hypotheses. Maybe you can figure it out.

Hypothesis: All brand experts are incompetent

Ad hominem arguments are usually wrong. But brand experts certainly show signs of low competence when they create nonprofit brands. They typically mandate things like these: typefaces that are virtually unreadable; subtle, powdery color schemes that will never stir a human being to action; design guidelines that defy both logic and all known emotional triggers; and abstract brand statements that assure donors not only can't get excited about a cause — they can't even comprehend it. (No matter what the organization does, they claim it's all about "hope.")

Brand experts do these things so consistently that they actually undermine this hypothesis. We all know that incompetence wears a thousand faces. They aren't just randomly stumbling through this.

If they aren't doing it out of incompetence, what is driving them? This leads to our second hypothesis.

Hypothesis: All brand experts are evil

Let's face it, branding people spend most of their careers tricking people into believing a particular brand of shampoo will make them sexy and successful. If that's not a form of evil, I don't know what is. Surely, the brand experts had to sell their souls to the Forces of Darkness somewhere along the way.

The only problem is, when you get to know them, they don't seem all that evil. Sometimes arrogant, sometimes a bit snide — but they don't carry the stench of evil. It just doesn't add up. So if they aren't doing it for evil purposes, what does that leave us?

Hypothesis: Brand experts all come from 
Bizarro Earth, where everything is opposite

If we were all characters in a comic book, this would be an obvious explanation. I'm pretty sure we aren't, because I seldom see extremely muscular people wearing tights.

But maybe the true explanation isn't in the motives, abilities or mysterious origins of brand experts at all. Maybe it's the donors.

Hypothesis: Donors are conspiring 
to embarrass your new brand

It would be cool if this were true. Like the most elaborate and hilarious flash mob ever. But think about it. You know how hard it is to get large numbers of donors to do ordinary things like send checks in postage-paid envelopes. They're like a herd of cats. There's just no way they're all cooperating on a practical joke.

Hypothesis: Donors don't get it

This is sometimes put forward by brand experts themselves when other explanations fall flat. They'll go so far as to say the whole thing will finally work once we "fire" our current group of annoying, clueless donors and find new ones who appreciate our branding work.

This is almost believable. After all, donors are typically four or more decades older than brand experts. Does your grandmother "get" the music you listen to? If she listened in on a conversation between you and your friends, would she appreciate what you were saying? So it's quite likely donors don't "get it" when they encounter branding work.

Sometimes brand experts actually anticipate this. I've seen them not only create a brand, but also a 
cleverly named new donor demographic/psychographic that it's aimed at. This never works out, because the new group either doesn't exist in sufficient numbers or (more likely) the group is too young. When you drop below age 55, you just don't find many people who are willing to give to charities on a regular 
basis.

Still, the donors-don't-get-it hypothesis is built on circular reasoning. If the donors don't get the brand, doesn't that mean the brand experts didn't get the donors? Which came first, the donor chicken or the brand egg? That leads us to an even wilder hypothesis.

Hypothesis: True branding is something other than what brand experts peddle

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

Jeff Brooks is creative director at TrueSense Marketing and author of the Future Fundraising Now blog. Reach him at jeff.brooks@truesense.com