A memorable and profitable brand has to run through everything your charity foes. Dan Dufour provides six essential tips for developing and managing your identity.

A brand is much more than just a logo. It is a set of ideas, images and associations that people carry around in their heads about companies, products, or indeed charities. In other words it is the space you occupy in someone’s mind.

Creating a brand that will inspire action is a worthy investment, but it doesn’t have to break the bank. Follow these steps to ensure your brand development is a success. 

The essential building blocks

A strong charity brand is crucial as it helps to connect donors to the cause, but it’s amazing how many people struggle to explain the charity they work for, or support, succinctly.

The essential building blocks of any successful charity brand are a clear articulation of who you are and what you do: 

• Your vision – what you are ultimately striving to achieve; and
• Your mission – the things you do to reach your vision.

Look back at the charity’s history, question the management team or review corporate strategy if you need clarity on this.

Once in place, your vision and mission should be woven through everything you do to inspire support, from campaigning to fundraising.  A logo or visual identity should follow this. Without it they are meaningless.

Experience counts

Perceptions of a brand aren’t only based on design. Experiences count too.  When someone calls a helpline, visits a shop or participates in a fundraising event, their experience informs how they perceive a brand.  This is where values come in.

Values show the world what you believe in and should be used to guide the charity’s culture and behaviour.  These should be integrated into HR policies and practices, such as appraisals, to ensure they are part of the organisational culture.

Some charities choose to have one set of values to guide behaviour and another to influence the way they communicate. Others have a set to cover both.

Ask people for three words to describe your charity today, and another three that they’d like to use to describe your charity in the future. This will help you to identify your values.

More than a logo

Once you have your vision, mission and values in place you’ll want to develop a brand identity to reflect them. Too many charity brands rely heavily on a logo for recognition, but a visual identity is much more.  Do you have a colour palette and signature styles for typography, photography and/or illustration?

The acid test is being able to put your thumb over the logo and still recognise that a piece of communication comes from you.  Macmillan Cancer Support, for example, passes this test with flying colours (pardon the pun) due to its distinctive green typeface and silhouettes.

Don’t forget language

Often you can also recognise a brand through its use of language and tone of voice. Take the tongue and cheek style of Innocent fruit smoothies as an example.  Don’t forget to consider this within your brand development and avoid overlooking a big piece of the jigsaw puzzle. 

Consistency is king

One of the best ways to build brand awareness is through consistency. It’s a strategy applied by all well-known brands regardless of sector, but charity brands in particular have to meet the needs of different departments and audiences.  For this reason there must also be a degree of flexibility built into any strategy.

When developing your visual identity make sure you apply it to different examples of collateral – for example, corporate, campaign and fundraising. This way you’ll manage the balancing act of consistency and flexibility and instantly stand out in your chosen markets.

Differentiation

There are hundreds and thousands of charities in the UK and many of them do very similar things, so always invest the time in studying your competition carefully. This will help you to craft your positioning – the unique place you have within your marketplace. 

Ongoing brand management

If you’re feeling confident that you have covered all of these points and that your vision, mission and values are all in place and present in everything that you do, then make sure you keep it that way.

Conduct regular reviews of everything you produce to ensure consistency. Manage the brand with a carrot and not a stick – communicate the positive messages to your staff, such as the benefits of having an instantly recognisable brand. After all, if people recognise your charity, understand your organisation and trust in your ability to deliver, they will be more likely to support you.

 Dan Dufour as a senior planner at The Good Agency