Supporter acquisition and retention are both critical to your nonprofit’s success. Getting new donors, volunteers, and advocates interested in your cause allows your organization to grow and make a greater impact over time. Then, encouraging those individuals to stay involved helps build a stable support base for your mission.
Your nonprofit’s brand is a key tool for boosting both acquisition and retention. Branding makes your organization more recognizable in the community and educates new audiences about its identity so they can decide whether to get involved. It also keeps your mission top of mind for existing supporters, boosting loyalty and support.
In this guide, we’ll walk through three strategies for building a nonprofit brand that’s both recognizable and memorable to help you engage your entire community. Let’s dive in!
1. Create Memorable Visuals
Try to picture the Nike “swoosh,” the color “Tiffany Blue,” or the words “Coca-Cola” written in a Spencerian script font. If you can call these images to mind, you know how powerful brand visuals can be for any organization—including your nonprofit.
As you develop your organization’s brand, clearly define the following aspects:
- Your nonprofit logo. This graphic should encapsulate your mission and values with a simple but unique combination of words and symbols. It also serves as a stamp of approval that gives supporters confidence that a communication has come from your nonprofit, so make the design adaptable to any type of content in its colors and orientation.
- Color palette. Choose colors that are commonly associated with the values and personality you want your brand to convey. For example, red is a favorite color of healthcare organizations because it evokes boldness and urgency, while many environmental nonprofits use green because of its associations with growth and the natural world.
- Typography. Fonts can also impact how audiences perceive your nonprofit—bold fonts make you seem serious, while rounded ones convey openness and friendliness. Remember to also consider readability (sans serif fonts are easier to read on a screen) and how different typefaces complement each other when choosing brand fonts.
- Imagery. Most organizations either lean toward graphics or photography with their brand imagery. If your nonprofit chooses the former, ensure your graphic style is distinctive but consistent throughout your communications. If you go with the latter, establish guidelines for photo quality, sourcing, and subject consent.
Loop’s nonprofit branding guide recommends compiling all of these elements into a single document for easy reference and being specific to ensure consistency. Rather than just writing the names of colors and fonts in your brand guide, include the hex codes for each shade (e.g., the code for the aforementioned Tiffany Blue is #81D8D0) and the typefaces you use within each font family (e.g., if your primary brand font is Poppins, you might specify Poppins Bold for headings and Poppins Regular for body text).
2. Develop Messaging Guidelines
In addition to visuals, branding encompasses how your nonprofit talks about itself and tells its story in written content. As you create your brand guidelines, consider the following elements of messaging and corresponding questions:
- Mission statement. Does your organization’s mission statement encapsulate its purpose effectively? Can it be distilled into a tagline to make it easier to incorporate into written content? How could the way it’s worded influence the rest of your messaging?
- Tone. How do you want your nonprofit to come across as you build supporter relationships through your communications? Are you optimistic, welcoming, passionate, or something else?
- Word choice. What terms and phrases most accurately describe what your organization does and how you interact with your community? For instance, is your animal nonprofit a “rescue,” “shelter,” “society,” or “sanctuary?” And do you serve “homeless animals” or “animals in need?”
- Mechanics. What guidelines should your team follow for capitalization, punctuation, and other stylistic elements of writing? Will you use an established style guide like the Chicago Manual of Style or the Associated Press Stylebook, or will you adapt the rules to develop your own style guide?
It’s helpful to get feedback on these questions from several staff members at your nonprofit, since they may have different perspectives on how your audience will respond to your messaging. You might also adjust your guidelines based on internal preferences—for example, if you establish that your organization uses AP Style but find yourself editing the Oxford comma out of every piece of content that other staff members write, you could amend the rules to “AP Style, but we use the Oxford comma” to save time and satisfy your team.
3. Brand All Audience Touchpoints
The reason consistency is so important with branding is because the more your audience sees your organization’s brand, the more closely they’ll associate it with your nonprofit, which builds trust and encourages them to engage with your mission. Once you’ve outlined all of your visual and messaging guidelines, dedicate a section of your brand guide to examples of elements being used in practice so your team knows how to apply them appropriately.
Make sure to brand all of the community-facing materials you can, including:
- Marketing content on both digital (emails, social media posts, text messages, etc.) and print channels (e.g., flyers and direct mail).
- Fundraising supplies, from the donation page on your nonprofit’s website to bid sheets for a silent auction.
- Merchandise like apparel, stickers, and beverage containers so supporters can boost brand awareness as they wear or use these products in their daily lives.
- Thank-you messages—as eCardWidget’s guide to donor thank-you emails explains, “By presenting a consistent voice and personality [when thanking supporters], your nonprofit can come across as more authentic and trustworthy. Then, infuse your colors and logo into your thank-you emails to [make them] visually stand out.”
- Program or service materials to reinforce your brand with those you serve as well as with supporters.
If your fundraising strategy involves peer-to-peer campaigns, social media challenges, or other activities that require participants to create content, provide them with branding guidelines to ensure all aspects of your campaign (including user-generated ones) stay consistent. You could even provide downloadable assets like PNG versions of your logo and templates featuring your brand colors to make it easier for supporters to follow your instructions.
Once you’ve added your visuals, messaging specifications, and content examples to your brand guide, make sure your team uses it regularly to strengthen your brand’s presence in the community. Additionally, treat the guide as a living document—whenever you adjust your strategy in minor ways based on audience and staff feedback or decide to completely rebrand your organization, update your guidelines so they’re always accurate and up to date.
Joshua Layton is a multi-disciplinary social-impact designer based on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm Territory (currently known as Vancouver, Canada). Having worked with some of the leading non-profit organizations at both grassroots and global scales, Josh enjoys exploring the intersections of design and social good. He is particularly passionate about creating brand and web experiences for changemakers addressing issues of 2SLGBTQ+ rights, criminal justice, and food security. Josh co-founded Loop: Design For Social Good in 2012, where he collaborates with an inspiring creative team and clients across the social impact spectrum.
