From Brand-as-Business Bites, here's a chilling thought:
Unless and until your culture is expressed clearly through your customer experience, you have nothing worth communicating.
This is a big problem for many fundraisers. They have nothing distinctive, noticeable, or thrilling to offer donors. Sure, they give donors the opportunity to donate, and that's no small thing. But when it comes to the reason for giving, it's abstract, vague, exactly what almost everyone else says.
What can you do to have something worth communicating?
Exciting, specific, unique, compelling fundraising offers.
If your fundraising consists of the old two-step:
- We are awesome.
- Support us.
...you have nothing. You are in deep trouble, with nothing to look forward to but shrinking revenue until you change this.
If your donors get to do cool things -- specific, interesting, real-world actions that they understand and love -- you have the ingredients (and probably the skills) for a powerful nonprofit brand.
Make your donors part of the action. The real and specific action of the way your organization is changing the world.
This is not color palettes, design guidelines, or brand enforcement. It's what donors get to do when they give.
