The recession is slowly lifting. Corporations are banking huge profits. Donors are getting out their checkbooks again. If your nonprofit weathered the storm, are you poised to take advantage of the new market landscape?  Do you have a marketing and branding strategy that positions you well for leadership, funding, and volunteers?

Nonprofits often resist marketing. Marketing and sales smack of for-profit activities. In the best of cases, marketing dollars are viewed as an expenditure that reduces money for core mission projects. Worst case, branding, marketing and brand management are considered downright inappropriate.

But whether you acknowledge it or not, you’re already selling your mission. The question is to whom, how, and how effectively?

In today’s highly competitive marketplace of ideas, your non-profit organization has very little emotional space in which to differentiate itself from the pack. When a nonprofit calls, or when a friend emails a Facebook link for donating, we look at this request not just against a backdrop of all our nonprofit investments but also against the other competing interests in our lives—our son’s Little League team, our work picnic, the birthday party we are hosting next weekend.

Here’s where a strong brand comes into play.

When a household already contributes to a church and a Little League Team and a PTA, they may feel that their nonprofit “basket” is full. To make an impression on this family, a nonprofit has to make a bold and memorable case for support. Having a strong brand already in place can help open the door or close the sale. For example, when my local volunteer fire department comes knocking at the door for their annual donation drive, I already understand their brand. They volunteer at our schools to explain fire safety to the children. The firehouse hosts kids’ parties and we’ve all taken the tour and tried to lift the 100-plus pounds of gear each firefighter wears in a fire. And a few years ago, they put out a fire on my street. They have a strong brand and they don’t need to tell me what they do. So the conversation is focused on what level of donation I am able and willing to give for the cause.

Not everyone can have as compelling and easy a case to understand as the local volunteer fire department. But if you don’t, you need to work hard to make it easy for people both inside and outside your organization to “get” what change you make in the world. A simple, uniform message across web, social media, email and print goes a long way. That doesn’t mean you can’t differentiate sub-markets. But the overall mission must fit into a sentence or two. Then, the trick is that once you’ve invested time and dollars making your brand known, you need to manage your brand so that there’s no slippage.

Your “brand promise” has to be delivered as expected every time your organization or its name/logo is used.

And that means Every Time, or you may have done lasting damage to your mission by reducing your ability to raise funds and attract talented staff and volunteers. This includes even what might appear to be non-marketing materials, such as a letter home to parents explaining an independent school’s decision about a health incident, or how a hospital handles patient family members during a blizzard, or how a university human resources department communicates–or doesn’t–to job applicants .  In today’s 24-hour news cycle, everything you do and everyone who does it reflects on your brand.

Do you have a brand success story or brand crisis? Please share (names can be changed to protect organizational anonymity)!

CNN ran a story today about how well organized pirates on the high seas have become. As you’ve probably read or heard, pirate attacks are becoming a frequent hazard for sailors –particularly in areas such as off the coast of Somalia, with its highly unstable—some would say non-existent—government.  While pirates may appear to be rag-tag bunches of young men in small boats, it turns out they have significant organizations behind them.  Ones with strategic business plans.  And tactical structures like advisory boards and directors of logistics.  They don’t spend their money on fancy boats, but they do outfit their teams with the latest technologies, including GPS.  These are deployed systematically, through grass-roots teams on well-equipped small boats, which often foil larger ships with more sailors.

The management approach of pirates got me thinking about what grassroots organizations could learn from pirates.   The best know you don’t have to have the fancy ship, but you do have to have a plan for outmaneuvering those with more money and personnel.  For starters, having a business plan is essential. Not just for the organization, but also for each program, and even each outreach component.  So, for example, to deploy a new YouTube video to members, it’s critical to have a strategy, and then identify a tactical team, a logistics plan, and means of harnessing technologies–not just the medium for the message, but the tools to get eyeballs there and turn those viewers into positive outcomes for your organization.

So one of my New Year’s plans is to remind myself—and my clients—to think more like pirates. But for a much better cause.

It’s time to kick off the New Year.  Are you ready? Here are some of my resolutions, when it comes to branding and marketing, that is.

1. Add more video content. YouTube is the second most popular search engine after Google. So it’s important that people searching for a brand find the content there. I’ve been primarily using Vimeo, because I prefer its copyright protections, but this year I may have to give in and post some clips on YouTube.  I already have video clips on my site, but I could do more to keep them fresh–I am a video producer, after all!

2. Set aside less time for email, more time for social media.  According to Neilsen Research, social media has now surpassed email for communication. I want to be sure I’m working in this space and not still getting sucked into the batting-away-emails mode.  Facebook also just surpassed Google in terms of most sought website. So maybe I have to suck it up and put a professional page there, in addition to my personal one. What do you think?

3. Be a more consistent blogger. I’ll admit this year I fell off the wagon a few times and didn’t post weekly. That reduces pickup by Google and other search engines. Guest posting was really successful and I want to add some more guest bloggers this year. Let me know if you’d like to be one!

4. More speaking engagements.  I got pretty tied up with content production this year, and only did a handful of engagements. This year I’ll be giving 5 workshops at the NAB Convention in Vegas, so I’m already on my way to doing more presentations in 2011.  It’s a great way to meet people, and take time to consider the big picture of social media, marketing and brand strategy.

5. More comments from you.  I’ll admit it, I’m a little anxious about posting on controversial subjects. It gets more hits but the comments can get rough. But I’ll try to be a little more daring this year. Shoot me a topic you’d like to hear more about.

Happy New Year to you and yours. May it be a great year for advancing your mission, raising awareness about your issue, or bringing more impact for your company.

Last week Claire Gaudiani wrote in the San Francisco Examiner about organizations such as the Greenlining Institute and the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, who charge that today’s private foundations do not sufficiently meet the needs of society’s poorest and most marginalized populations. In other words, they think private foundations have a poor brand–often for good reason–and it needs fixing. Greenlining and NCRP have been advocating both for set percentages of funding (as much as 50%) for such groups, and also that foundations report the ethnic and racial composition of their boards and staffs.  In many ways, these actions could serve to increase the responsiveness of the foundation sector to people in need. In other ways, these goals could be counterproductive.

First, let’s take the diversity goal. When I work with nonprofit boards, particularly in the area of governance, I am always pushing for diversity. But what I often find is not so much a lack of racial and ethnic diversity as a lack of economic and age diversity.  Age, what’s that got to do with it, you say? Well, a lot.  When I poll boards before working with them, I typically find the bulk of members are within a ten-year age range.  While some boards skew older and some younger, in most cases they are missing members in their 20’s and 30’s and those in their 70’s and 80’s.  From the younger group they could gain a better understanding of the power of social media–with tools like social networks, web video, podcasts, and mobile technologies–to reach donors and service-users alike. (For example, mobile phone use is very high in so-called under-served populations.)  In the older group, they would find experience running organizations, managing investments, and excellent community connections.

In terms of the charge that private foundations should provide more grants to marginalized populations, one of the key stumbling blocks to this funding may be ensuring the readiness of grantees to actually manage the grant, with its reporting, communications, and financial responsibilities. The US Agency for International Development (USAID) provides a good model in the way it provides capacity-building grants to nonprofit re-granting organizations that act as bridges, helping communities and very small nonprofits learn to manage the funding process, build community-based solutions and improve their capacity, so that in the future AID can make them direct grants.  This is a model followed by many private foundations as well, and so the target measurements should take this into account.

There’s no question private foundations can improve their work, and their image. The question is how to do it in a way that benefits society, and builds more capacity within the donor organizations, too.

This week Wikileaks started publishing more than 250,000 US embassy cables—the largest number of confidential documents released to the public so far.  Imagine if something like this happened to your organization. What would happen to your brand? How would it affect your ability to do business? To compete? To negotiate new deals? To hire and retain talent?  These are the questions now bouncing from diplomatic circles to executive boardrooms to newsrooms across the globe. As well as “how could this happen?”

But another question raised in my mind is how much information should organizations really share—even if they think it is being done privately–through the internet?  And how do you train your workforce to understand the advantages and perils of file-sharing and social networks?

To answer these questions, let’s back up and see just how this leak happened.  Starting in 2000, as part of a number of federal initiatives to improve information-sharing between  agencies, the State Department made software changes that effectively lowered its inter-agency firewall so that Pentagon staff could now peer into embassy cables, among other documents.  Of course, there were restrictions in place on who could do this, but obviously an industrious army private was able to defeat them rather easily.

This prompts several thoughts as we all begin to review internal systems. Organizations with multiple locations and that use servers or file-sharing systems should always be working to ensure the right people are reviewing the right materials.  But what about once a project is completed? Take the time to consider how you are archiving the materials and who has access and for how long.

The next issue is people—always at the heart of both brand and security.  The army private who allegedly got hold of all these documents was able to download them remotely and efficiently.  Was there software missing to detect mass downloads? Was he so clever as to defeat this? Was he able to retrieve redacted material? Regardless of the answers, the question raised is how companies and agencies vet their “army privates.”  Who are the young, digital natives (yes this is ageist of me—bring on the comments!) with access to critical information affecting your brand? The reality is that right now–and this will change over time–the younger generation is more likely to know how to defeat security systems and navigate social networks to disseminate the information.  Because of this knowledge they can also help you protect it. So plan to include them in those conversations. And consider how you vet and train them–not just about internal systems, but about how critical this information is to your brand and effectiveness.  Also take time to train (and re-train) your older employees–the ones of the cable-writing diplomat’s generation–to ensure they understand social networks and understand file-sharing protocols and the impact on your work.

File-sharing is a dangerous business, but also consistent with the workings of a democratic and open society.  I certainly don’t think we should try to stop it.  But we do need to reconsider people and processes, so we minimize the brand damage to our nation, our organizations, and ourselves.

YouTube is now the number two search engine, after Google. What does that mean for those involved in fundraising, marketing and branding? That people are searching for videos about your people and your organization, not just looking for written content.  So in 2011, you may need to be ramping up your video presence on the web.

What do you need to know about video content best practices?

After having produced hundreds of videos for advocacy, motivation, education and marketing, here are my Ten Commandments of Video Content (OK, really only 7 because 10 is just too long for a blog post):

1.  Know Thy Brand. If you are a 100-year-old institution, you may have a great (and lengthy) brand story. What part of it makes sense to tell through video? Who are the voices that can best evoke your essence? If you’re a new group, do you need to establish some gravitas? How do you do that without being staid? Knowing your brand will help define your creative approach—the most important element in your video toolkit.

2.  Know Thy Target Audience. What compels your prospective audience? How old are they and what is their predisposition towards your subject matter? (translation: how long will watch your video before bailing?) If you don’t spend some time thinking about your audience, and better yet getting to know them through surveys, focus groups and face-to-face contact, you can waste a lot of time and money on video that doesn’t connect.

3.  Know Thy Goals. “To create a really great web video” doesn’t count as a goal! Are you trying to generate support for a fundraising campaign? Promote a new program or initiative? Let people know about a new product or service? Give a window into your people or your operations?  Each type of goal requires a different creative and technical approach, from camera selection to list of interviewees.

4.  Know Thy Technology. I like to shoot in 16×9 Hi-Def whenever possible with cameras that record to P2 cards rather than tape, to avoid lengthy digitizing sessions and ensure great-looking images. Although I recently became enamored of the new DSLR option to shoot video and LOVE the way it looks and feels. [For techies—the Canon 5DMKII with the Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM Lens] If you didn’t acquire hi-res or render your animations in the right way, you will have pixilated, crummy-looking video on any size screen—and often you end up wanting to use web video in a live event context where image quality really matters. Viewers are sophisticated, and this has an impact on their perception of your brand or their consumption of your content.

5.  Know Thy Budget. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been asked to produce a proposal without knowing the client’s budget. This is a waste of time for everyone. Consider this analogy. Would you go to a realtor and say “I’d like to see some houses” and not tell him/her what your price range is? You might see some mansions but not be able to buy any of them. Or, you’ll walk through homes without any of the features you want and need. Figure out what you want to spend not just based on a budget line-item but the cost-per-view or cost-per-acquisition you are willing to pay.  Then your vendors can give you a fair assessment of the best bang for your buck, both technically and creatively.

6.  Know Thy Downstream Uses. If you plan right, you can multi-purpose your raw content for other projects. If you don’t, you can’t.  Most of my projects for return clients use anywhere from 25% to 80% recycled content, but that’s because we’ve discussed in advance asking alternate questions of interviewees, shooting additional b-roll in a particular location, and produced alternate graphics options.

7.  Measure Impact. How are you rolling out your video? Can you offer sneak previews to a live audience so they can help you promote it online? How will you measure the effectiveness of your project?  How are you driving traffic to it? Who are you enlisting to drive the traffic there? (more in a future post on helping your staff and board use social media to do this).

Last night I watched as much as I could manage of Sarah Palin’s Alaska—the new show on TLC.  It’s basically Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom meets The Brady Bunch (but without good old Alice). If you are as old as I am, then you remember watching Wild Kingdom and wondering “will Jim be swallowed by the giant croc or mangled by that charging lion?!” And on the Brady Bunch side, we pondered “whatever will happen at the Big Dance if Jan can’t get her hair to look right?!”  Well, that’s pretty much the way it goes on Sarah Palin’s Alaska, where you can’t help wondering if Sarah might plunge to her death in a crevasse on national TV or whether Willow will ever finish getting dressed in her room while her boyfriend waits downstairs.

So why is this harmless show the subject of this branding blog?

Because it’s a brilliant move in the re-branding of Sarah Palin.  It’s entertainment that puts her in a much better light that most of her media appearances and political rallies. It makes her human. It shows her dangling uncomfortably from zip lines and doing her homework on the home computer for a Fox TV appearance. It shows her with popular hubby Todd taking their kids fishing, and the kids can’t catch any.  It reveals she’s just like every other working mom, getting chewed out by her daughter for being on her Blackberry too much.

What’s the impact?

Hard to say, when the show has many more weeks to go. But paired with her new book “America by Heart” coming out in a few weeks (already available for pre-order, of course) it could be a nice re-direct and a good way to make a tidy sum (did you see the size of that RV??!!).  And when Republicans take over the House in January, she can also stay on her political soap-box to keep them on task and herself in view. All without being involved in the actual ugly sausage-making of public policy and governing. Sounds like a great re-brand to me.  What do you think?

©2010 Barbara DeLouise

One thing’s for sure about GAP’s recent logo debacle (if you missed it, here’s a quick summary by Huffington Post): they got a lot of visibility for their brand. Hmmm, maybe that was actually the point?  Hard to know, but when changing your corporate logo in this era of social media, it’s important to consider more than what your brand consultants tell you. You need to consult your users.  When considering changing any key aspect of your branding—colors, logo and/or tag line—consider these four points of input:

1.        Current customers/clients/donors.  Organizations that already have deep roots into social networks can use them for feedback. But it’s also good to use old-fashioned focus groups, with a trained professional to run them. However realize that all of these sources are subjective and subject to change from a variety of external pressures you can’t necessarily control.

2.       Prospective customers/clients/donors.  This one is always a bit harder to pinpoint, but a firm specializing in both quantitative and qualitative survey data can help you hone in on key submarkets and assess the resonance of your new branding with them.

3.       Vendors.  I know, on first blush this seems odd. But as one of the people who often has to deal with people’s new logos (for multimedia/video production), I’m often struck by how they don’t work across multiple mediums.  Check in with your favorite printer, video producer, webmaster and be sure the font and color can work in their medium.  See how the logo looks when it is faxed, projected, and seen on various screens (LCD’s being different than some TV screens, for example).  And especially, what happens when you view it on a Blackberry or iPhone?

4.       Your mother.  I know, it’s totally unscientific, but if your mother would hate this logo, you might want to reconsider it.  Call it the “gut check.”  If there’s something bothering you about it now, imagine when it is imprinted on everything around you!

While I don’t fully agree with GAP’s post-logo plan to use crowd-sourcing to design a new logo–and they ultimately pulled the plug on that unwieldy idea–I do agree with the concept that in today’s era of “dialogue,” you need to include the customer in your decision-making. That said, it’s pretty hard to create good design by committee. So ultimately you have to trust your own process. Just be sure to have one.

c 2010 Barbara DeLouise

The recent uproar created by the Forbes Obama article–and no, I’m not going to provide a link!–reminds anyone functioning in the public space how important it is to know how to react to information you deem factually incorrect, mis-informed, or downright salacious.  The echo chamber of social media means that anything that is published gets instantly amplified through re-purposed media, tweets, Facebook mentions, and news aggregator sites.  So when and how do you respond?

1. First, determine how loud the negative voice really is. That is, does this person/entity have a significant and established following? Will what they say be re-tweeted and picked up by major news organizations?  In the case of the Forbes story, the answer is clearly yes. In the case of one angry person responding to one of your blog posts, maybe not so much. Depends who s/he is and who’s in their network. Responding could just feed the echo chamber and make it worse.

2. Get out your set of facts. You can’t change someone else’s information, but you can put out your own. If you don’t have your own version of Robert Gibbs (hopefully more cheery), get your followers/supporters to put out your side of the story through their own social networks.

3. Make sure you are getting good advance intel of what could be brewing on your issue/company/clients. Use the Twitter subject hashtag (#) to search for tweets that are relevant. Set up Google Alerts not just on yourself and your organization, but that of important donors/clients/thought leaders in your industry.

4. Don’t forget to follow competitors and folks with an opposing viewpoint. Trying to understand where they are coming from and to whom they are speaking is helpful in crafting your response (or lack thereof).

5. Don’t panic. The nightmare of social media is it promotes the 24-hour news cycle. The bonus is it’s only a 24-hour news cycle. How soon they forget.

Finally, a note about disabling discussion on YouTube and Facebook sites. When my clients do it, it concerns me. They always have valid reasons–typically really nasty, obscene or racist comments. But I always prefer to see the community self-correct. Also, when comments are blocked, you have many fewer hits to your site (thus potentially promoting the antagonist sites). Just have a thoughtful discussion if you feel the need to stop comments, and re-consider after a brief interval.

I’ve got a client who has been unable to find key video interviews and archival photos for an important history video project.  These content elements were created with multiple staff and vendors during varioover many years, but were never catalogued into a central indexing system. As a result, the client will spend significant amounts of money either looking for them, recreating them, or working around the missing elements.

This situation has reminded me once again how vital a media library is in a digital age, when content is king.   Whether you invest in content for marketing, donor relations, education or outreach, it’s vital to invest just as much in content management once these elements are created. And yet this is generally where organizations miss the mark.  Understandably, the immediate focus is on the finished product and the deadlines at hand.  And it’s hard to explain an expense line-item for content management. But if you can show it as an asset—as a plus to the bottom line—it may be more clear why it’s so vital.

Here are some key ways to save thousands of dollars with a solid content management system, regardless of which software you use to help you:

  1. Assign a central content manager.  Depending on how many photos and videos you produce every month, this person may need help to get it all indexed, but there should be one point person in the organization who reviews every piece of new content and directs the catalogueing process.
  2. Treat all elements and departments as equally vital to your content mission. For example, if photos are taken of your summer interns, don’t forget to catalogue them just the way you would your board photo. One day you may do a student outreach piece and need to find them, stat!
  3. Let others know when you are investing in new content, in case you can cover additional material that will help their departments or initiatives.  So, for example, if you are taping interviews, you may ask a couple of additional questions that will prompt answers usable for another video.
  4. Advertise your content within the organization. Sometimes the right hand doesn’t have time to know what the left is doing, so be sure people know what content you have acquired that might be useful to their efforts–perhaps in a quarterly internal content update.
  5. Keep track of rights and permissions. For example, for video, make sure you get signed release forms from interviewees and keep PDF’s of these filed digitally along side any video clips from those interviews. For photographs, be sure to keep track of copyright or photographer information, as well as who is pictured.
  6. Keep a master file of all interview transcripts. So many times when producing videos, I rely on sound-bites from a prior interview. This saves my clients time and money.
  7. Use library science standards to create your indexing system. It’s great to have interns and vendors handle your content management work, but be sure they understand the proper way to identify photos or clips. A misfiled piece of content is essentially a lost piece of content.
  8. Get source files/photos/video from vendors as soon as a project is complete! I can’t tell you how many times I have to call around to vendors to see if they still have the masters from XYZ project. Be sure you get this material into your system promptly, while you can still remember who and what it represents.

Video and photos assets are vital tools for organizations to convey what they do, how they do it, and how successful they are. Treat this like the gold mine it is, and you’ll maximize your impact and reduce your costs.