Nonprofit Branding Tips to Help You Connect & Grow

Branding your nonprofit can feel like an overwhelming task. If you aren’t entirely sure how to brand your organization correctly – you’re in the right place! I’m here to share some of my best tips for creating a cohesive brand. Strong branding will help your organization become a recognizable part of your community, spread your message, and make a greater impact. These nonprofit branding tips will help you start building your impactful brand.

#1: Understand Your Nonprofit Brand Beyond a Logo

Let’s start by defining what a brand is. Marketing expert Seth Godin explains it best:

“A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.”

This quote is in the context of for-profit business, but know that the concept is the same for nonprofits. Your brand is the overall experience, feeling, and story that someone associates with your organization. Logos and color palettes are part of visual storytelling, but they are not all there is to your brand.

When creating programs, social media posts, planning events, developing volunteer guidelines, etc. consider the following:

• What does our organization want to be known for?
• What experience do we want to cultivate for those we serve and anyone who interacts with our nonprofit?

Being able to answer these questions will help you better understand the bigger picture of the brand you are building.

#2: Know Your Audience & Build a Brand That Connects with Them

All marketing, whether for a business or nonprofit, should be audience-focused. This means that you understand WHO you’re trying to reach, and HOW to communicate with them.

For nonprofits, deciding on a target audience can feel difficult. You might be trying to reach several different groups of people. This could include the people who benefit from your programs, donors, and volunteers.

My best advice is to create a brand that resonates with your primary audience. These are the people that interact with your brand the most.

Real-life Nonprofit Branding Examples

While this will look different from organization to organization, here some examples to help you determine your primary audience:

• Girl Scouts provides leadership development programs for girls. Their branding is colorful and minimal, with fun doodles to appeal to the modern girl.
• ASPCA organizes efforts to stop and prevent animal cruelty, and provides care for abused animals. The organization uses animal photography, the color orange, and funky fonts, icons, and merch to give their brand personality. This brand style appeals to millennial animal lovers who want to get involved with their mission.
• Headbands of Hope sells and donates headbands to support children battling cancer. Their cheerful colors, chic fabric designs, and tagline “Pretty Headbands with a Prettier Cause” appeals to the millennial and Gen Z women who will buy their products.

Sometimes the primary audience of a nonprofit is the people who directly benefit from its programs (like the Girl Scouts). Other times, branding is targeted towards the people who will be donating (like Headbands of Hope).

To decide which is best for your organization, consider your goals and how the audience you serve, donors, and volunteers will be interacting with your brand to help you accomplish them.

Nonprofit Branding for Education & Awareness-Based Organizations

If the primary goal of your nonprofit is to raise awareness or encourage activism surrounding a particular topic, build a brand that:

• Sets the tone for the conversations you want to take place
• Appeals to the audience that you are trying to educate

#3: Build a Brand that Embodies Your Mission

Lastly, make your mission and “your why” a driving force for your brand. Share it as often as possible to help people connect with the importance of what you do. This is something that often comes naturally to nonprofit leaders!

Here are a few ways to put this into action:

• Include your organization’s core values and mission on your website and Instagram bio
• Create social media content that embodies your organization’s values and starts conversations surrounding what you do
• Encourage volunteers and donors to share your mission through merch like t-shirts and stickers, as well as hands-on events, that make them feel like they are part of something bigger

Next Steps: Putting These Nonprofit Branding Tips into Action

If you’ve made it here, I’m giving you a virtual high-five for reading this whole blog post! To recap, here are 3 things to focus on as you build a brand for your growing nonprofit:

1. Understand that your brand is more than just a logo. It is the overall story, experience, and message that is associated with your nonprofit. Create messaging centered around what your organization wants to be known for, and the experience you want to cultivate for all who interact with you.
2. Create an audience-focused brand. While nonprofits often have more than one target audience, focus on building a brand that resonates with the primary audience that will interact with you most as you accomplish your mission.
3. Build a brand that embodies your mission. Making the importance of what and why you do what you do front and center in all of your marketing will help people connect with the deeper purpose of what you do.

Take a moment to write down how these three elements could play out for your organization. How can you cultivate an intentional experience? Who is your primary audience and how will you reach them? How can you further embody your mission and values, while inviting others to do the same?

Ready to dive deeper into brand strategy and intentional design for your nonprofit? Check out my all-inclusive brand and website design services. I’d love to help you use design to have a greater impact!