The Smallest Nonprofits Should Have The Most Powerful Brands. (Product) Red.
Charity:Water. Toms Shoes. These are just a few of the big brands that engage millions in efforts to address some aspect of poverty at the global level. But at the local level, a lack of strong branding means small grassroots groups don’t get the credit they deserve for being the world’s frontline soldiers in the struggle against poverty. There’s plenty of discussion and research about the growing role of branding for large nonprofits based in wealthy countries--see Harvard’s Hauser Center for the Study of Nonprofits or a long article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review from spring of 2012.
Why Can't We Sell Charity Like We Sell Perfume? The early Puritan settlers in the New World were pulled in opposite directions by competing value systems.
They were extremely aggressive capitalists, but they were also strict Calvinists, taught that self-interest was a sure path to eternal damnation. How could they negotiate this psychological tension? The Role of Brand in the Nonprofit Sector. Many nonprofits continue to use their brands primarily as a fundraising tool, but a growing number of nonprofits are developing a broader and more strategic approach, managing their brands to create greater social impact and tighter organizational cohesion.
Nonprofit brands are visible everywhere. Amnesty International, Habitat for Humanity, and World Wildlife Fund are some of the most widely recognized brands in the world, more trusted by the public than the best-known for-profit brands.1 Large nonprofits, such as the American Cancer Society and the American Red Cross, have detailed policies to manage the use of their names and logos, and even small nonprofits frequently experiment with putting their names on coffee cups, pens, and T-shirts. Branding in the nonprofit sector appears to be at an inflection point in its development.