Standing out from the crowd

Professional Fundraising

August 2007

Back to Press coverage

The charity marketplace has never been more crowded. With thousands of organisations all competing for the donor £1, how can fundraisers make their organisation stand out? BECKY SLACK investigates

The average Briton receives more than 1,600 commercial messages a day. That’s 1,600 requests for people to part with their hard-earned cash, be it buying a new car, visiting the Caribbean, trying a new form of ice cream – or making a gift to charity.

While some in the sector may like to think that being a good cause alone is enough to persuade people to give them their share of the pound, unfortunately this is no longer the case.

As the Economic and Social Research Council & NCVO 2005 report, Charitable Giving and Donor Motivation, highlights, “donors’ motives can be fickle. They may take offence at the attitude or conduct of the charity they are ‘buying’ from. Or they may get carried away with a new fashion encouraging ‘shopping’ elsewhere or on something else”.

The decision-making process associated with charitable giving therefore is the same as when making commercial purchases. And a major influencing factor is the strength of a brand.

However, an increase in commercial communications isn’t the only reason why branding is so important. A change in the way donations are collected, particularly since the introduction of paperless direct debits, has also had an influence, as Chris Greenwood, joint managing director at nfpSynergy explains: “As charities have got better at sourcing bigger gifts and regular payments it has changed the way they appear in the public eye, therefore organisations have to think much more about exactly how they appear.”

Who are you?

A brand is not just the visual identity of an organisation but is what creates “the gut feel a customer or potential customer has about an organisation”, says Alan Clayton, managing director of creative agency, Cascaid, emphasising how this involves not just the emotional reaction created by the visual executions but also the reputation of the charity and the communications of all its representatives.

Max du Bois of branding agency Spencer du Bois, adds to this by saying that while a brand defines what an organisation is about, charities also need to understand how that enables it to engage with its different audiences.

“It’s not about one-size-fits-all but coherence,” he explains. “Each audience may require a different tone of voice. It is knowing that you can answer the question, ‘why should I support you over a different organisation?’.”

So how can fundraisers go about strengthening a brand? The first step is to take a long hard look at where an organisation currently sits in the marketplace. “It’s no different to launching a soft drink,” says Richard Sunderland, managing director at branding agency Heavenly. “Soft drinks go through a rigorous process before they launch to ensure whatever they do can be owned in the marketplace and that the consumer will ‘get’ it. Charities should do the same.” He recommends charities conduct a brand audit involving a SWOT (Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats) analysis, a comparison of how the public and staff perceive it in order to identify inconsistencies, plus analysis of other brands with a similar vision and mission.

An animal charity, for example, recently did some research into public perceptions of its work and reputation. It established that despite senior management and trustees believing it was an intellectual and authoritative organisation, the public actually viewed it as fluffy and cuddly. This posed a challenge – changing the brand to represent how the charity wanted to be perceived could have alienated supporters. Therefore, the decision was made to educate supporters about the ‘intellectual’ side of the organisation once they had been recruited (while working within the boundaries of what was legal and truthful).

Creating a USP

One of the most critical factors in strengthening a brand is making it look and feel different to what competing charities are doing. There are often comments from both in and outside the sector regarding the similarity between charities, ranging from the “big pink blur” of the breast cancer charities to “what exactly do they do?” when it comes to children’s charities, to “they all look the same to me” when discussing international aid agencies. Yet these are issues rarely associated with animal charities, the majority of which have successfully managed to carve out their own niche in the sector. The RSPCA, for example, doesn’t give a human personality to dogs while the Dogs Trust does – resulting in two very distinctive brands.

However, developing a brand and changing perceptions takes time and generally large sums of money, which few fundraisers have. Is it possible, therefore, for those without the big budgets to make an impact?

“Yes it is, but you need to do it by prioritising those audiences that are important to you,” says nfpSynergy’s Greenwood. “By measuring and changing your brand among those people first you won’t need a huge television advertising budget. And when developing your key messages, think about what those individuals want to hear, rather than what you want to say – as they are often two very different things.”

However, a somewhat more brutal answer comes from Robert Jones, brand consultant at Wolff Olins. “In every field there are half a dozen charities doing the same thing and it is very hard for small organisations that are doing the same as large organisations to reach people. Therefore I think that consolidation and merger is inevitable,” he says. “However, there are ways to avoid this. For example, one might be for charities to group together to create strong platform brands. For example, the Fairtrade Foundation is a tiny charity that has made a big impact by linking with 200-odd food producers from around the world.”

But even if this does happen, there are still benefits for charities investing in their own brands. As nfpSynergy’s Greenwood points out: “We have become ultra professional at direct mail – even better than other sectors. Now we need to become expert at managing our brands. If we approach this with the same rigour that we’ve approached DM the sector will be in great shape in ten years’ time.”

Back to Press coverage