Welcome to John Brown Limited

By Shawna Hershfield, Communications Director

In today’s increasingly pressured development environment, many professional and volunteer fundraisers run from imperative task to unmissable meeting. At the end of their term of service (or even just one day), they collapse feeling they’ve done the most they could do to ensure that their charity thrives. Unfortunately, though well intentioned, they are probably wrong. Unless an organization focuses on fulfilling activities that reinforce brand identity, staff and volunteers have a greater chance of spinning their wheels without moving forward.

What is brand identity? Brand identity is more easily defined in the for-profit world. When I think of State Farm insurance, I think that “like a good neighbor, [they are] there” when I need them. My State Farm agent recognizes clients by name, is active in our community and calls us personally to help with issues as they arise. In the same way, your charitable organization has a brand identity to promote. Those that don’t do so consistently have problems raising money.

I sit on one Board in which our brand identity could be described as an educational charity that makes history fun. The organization owns historic buildings, costumes and artifacts and has programs for adults that include wine and live music and kids’ programs that put them in replica costumes living the history we teach.

It seemed like a strong brand. It’s a great mission. So how could there be a problem with our identity? Before we started paying attention to our brand identity in the community, we didn’t know that donors thought we were a government agency or operated as part of another organization. We had to sit down as a board and consider how all of our donor relationships and activities could be reworked to reflect our identity. Since it is a conceptual issue that focuses sub-activities that the charity undertakes, the board essentially defines what an organization is and is NOT.

From that directive, our wonderful public relations staff and volunteers now manage our identity by ensuring consistent, coherent themes that build awareness to be conveyed from every volunteer or staff member who interacts with the public.

How can you ensure your own organization’s brand identity? For some of John Brown Limited’s client organizations, we lead them through a simple limited term sub-committee activity to define appropriate messages and types of activities over a three month period. We distill our activities into a plan that the development and communications team can use. For others, with more complicated or confused brand identities, we work with several limited term volunteer teams to undergo a strategic planning process that carries our clients through a 1-5 year plan.

Brand identity becomes more complicated in a typical development office that divides donors into the kinds of giving they do. Planned gifts, annual gifts, restricted major gifts, campaign gifts and tickets to special events might all be made because of solicitations from different people. Sometimes, for political, geographical or time-constraint reasons, an organization’s solicitors don’t know that their colleagues are visiting their donors. Beware. Consistency and communication between solicitors is key to maintaining brand identity with your donor community. One of the best ways we support our clients is to create a communication system that carries a donor seamlessly from acquisition to retention without a sense of being passed around.

In the next edition of the JBL eNewsletter, we will discuss brand identity and need, the aspect of brand identity unique to nonprofit organizations. Watch for Everything Speaks: Brand Identity for Nonprofits Part 2 due out December 2005.

October 2006 Contents

Katrina Emergency Tax Relief Act: Special Tax Incentives to Increase Charitable Gifts

Everything Speaks: Brand Identity for Nonprofits (Part 1 of 2)

October 2006 Contents

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December 2009:

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