City Harvest was able to take a leap of faith thanks to strong branding

By Margaret Battistelli Gardner

The collaborative approach to developing messaging not only helps secure the City Harvest brand, but it creates an easier transition as donors mature in their relationship with the organization.

“This strong messaging has better resonance with the donors and is more successful. The major-gifts department will talk about it in a more detailed way than the direct-mail department, for example, but the underlying messaging will be the same,” she explains. “Major gifts will involve more personal, higher-level conversations, but the messaging will be the same and everything will be consistent in terms of statistics and numbers, so it’s not such a jarring transition when you go from one level to another.”