The main purpose of nonprofit branding is to communicate who your organization is and what you stand for. Even though you aren’t selling a product or service—which is how for-profit organizations use their brands—you’re essentially “selling” your impact to encourage engagement among current and prospective supporters.
However, your brand isn’t something you create once and never revisit. As your organization grows and evolves, you may consider rebranding to ensure your visuals and messaging continue to align with your mission and help you achieve your goals.
In this guide, we’ll walk through four steps your nonprofit can take to get started with rebranding, including how to:
- Define Your Brand Identity
- Choose Which Brand Elements to Update
- Consider Use Cases for Your Rebrand
- Develop a Rebranding Communication Plan
As you go through this process, keep in mind that the scope of changes to your nonprofit branding may vary. In some cases, you may just want to make a few small updates, while other situations may require a full brand overhaul. Plan carefully before you begin to ensure you rebrand at the right level for your organization. Let’s dive in!
1. Define Your Brand Identity
Your brand not only represents your mission, but it also makes your organization memorable to supporters and helps differentiate you from similar nonprofits. Therefore, branding is an important part of your organization’s identity, and you’ll need to think about how that identity has evolved to rebrand effectively.
To define your organization’s brand identity, consider concepts such as your:
- Mission statement. This statement is the driving force behind everything you do, including communicating with supporters. So, it should be the foundation of your brand.
- Values. These include both your nonprofit’s vision for your community and the principles you use to guide your organization’s day-to-day work.
- Impact. While your values define the present and future of your organization, your impact covers what you’ve accomplished in the past to get to where you are.
- Personality. Your nonprofit’s personality affects the way you tell its story. Think about how your organization would describe itself: are you optimistic, passionate, helpful, or something else? Then, consider how to incorporate those traits into your communications.
These aspects of your organization’s identity inform all of the major elements of your brand. While they directly give meaning to your messaging, they also indirectly influence the visuals you use to represent your nonprofit.
2. Choose Which Brand Elements to Update
Depending on how you define your organization’s brand identity, as well as the scope of your rebrand, the brand aspects that you update will vary. You might choose to change any or all of the following elements:
- Color scheme. Colors have natural associations with specific feelings and ideas, so if you want to convey an updated brand personality, you might choose new colors. For example, if your primary brand color is red, but you would prefer to convey the idea of growth rather than the passion and strength that red usually represents, you could incorporate green into your color scheme instead.
- Typography. If you currently use just one typeface in branded materials, you could add a second complementary one for visual variety. You could also change your typography entirely if you discover new fonts that are more readable or better express your nonprofit’s personality.
- Logo. Besides creating a new logo to better encapsulate your brand identity, you could also update it to reflect current trends in graphic design. Or, you might develop new iterations of your existing logo so you can choose the option that works with the design of each of your marketing materials.
- Messaging. The way you write content for your nonprofit is just as important as the visual elements of your brand. Consider whether you need to edit the tone and style of your writing or use different terminology to describe your work in order to convey your mission and values accurately.
According to Loop, a best practice in nonprofit design is to compile all of your brand elements into a unified brand guide. Treat this resource as a living document—as you rebrand your organization, make sure you can easily update your brand guide.
3. Consider Use Cases for Your Rebrand
The purpose of your nonprofit’s brand guide is to maintain consistency across marketing channels. With this document, anyone inside or outside your organization who creates content has a reference for what your brand looks like and how it should be used.
As you rebrand, consider how your updates will figure into digital marketing materials such as:
- Your nonprofit’s website. Take every page of your site into consideration, from your homepage to your blog.
- Email marketing. Create email templates that use the new visual elements of your brand, and remember to use any updated messaging guidelines in the copy.
- Social media. In addition to designing graphics that include your updated colors and typography, change your nonprofit’s profile picture on each platform to your new logo.
- Digital ads. Double the Donation’s guide to nonprofit advertising explains that nonprofits can leverage several categories of digital ads, including Google search, social media, and retargeted ads. No matter which of these types you use, make sure to design and release new ads with updated visuals as you rebrand.
Include samples of each of these materials in your brand guide so you can see how your new brand elements work in practice. As you create this example content, you might tweak some aspects of your rebrand based on observing their applications.
4. Develop a Communication Plan
Because your brand influences awareness of your organization and its mission, it’s important to communicate with internal and external stakeholders as you rebrand to ensure you maintain the same level of recognizability. So, you’ll want to create a rebranding communication plan that includes the following audiences:
- Board members. Your board of directors will likely need to sign off on your rebrand before it goes live, so share regular process updates in board reports and meetings.
- Staff members. In addition to being involved in content development, your nonprofit’s employees can share unique insights drawn from their day-to-day work that can improve your brand.
- Supporters. Keep your longtime donors and volunteers in the loop as you rebrand to increase brand awareness, and consider sending out surveys or conducting focus groups to get outside feedback on potential changes.
By communicating consistently with these groups, you’ll show them that your organization values their input. Plus, you’ll gain a variety of perspectives on your proposed updates that can strengthen your end result.
Rebranding is a significant undertaking for any nonprofit. However, with careful planning and the right strategies on your side, you’ll be able to make the process go smoothly and ultimately benefit your organization. Use the steps in this guide to get started, and don’t hesitate to reach out to creative design experts if you need help or have questions along the way.
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