Commercial-style branding can do bad things to your charity, says Jeff Brooks. 

“Our fundraising results have dropped since we put our new brand standards in place, but that’s OK because the new brand so brilliantly articulates who we are as an organisation.” – Charity marketing director.

Don’t laugh. I’ve heard this statement and others like it many times.

It points out the bankruptcy that lies at the heart of so many charity branding efforts. According to some, communication standards that hurt fundraising effectiveness but make people inside the organisation feel good are perfectly fine. Call me old-fashioned, but I’d say anything you do with your communication that demotivates donors from giving should be considered a dismal failure. Silly me.

Almost every time a charity goes through a rebranding and creates a commercial-style brand for itself, fundraising revenue falls. Sometimes steeply.

Why would a discipline that’s specifically designed to make companies more distinct, likeable, memorable, and sales-worthy wreak so much damage in the charity world? Because it’s the wrong tool. Commercial-style branding is radically misapplied when attached to a charity.

Here’s how commercial-style branding works. It takes one of these approaches: “Buy our stuff because we are great.” (That’s the old kind of branding, still very much in use.) “Buy our stuff and you’ll be great.” (That’s the new, more enlightened approach.)

In either case, the customer ends up having direct experience with the product. If you buy an iPhone, you’ll quickly know whether it lives up to the promise of the brand. When the brand and product are well-aligned, the customer turns into a fan. If not, they typically stop being a customer.

But the whole premise collapses when you apply that product-based logic to a charity. If the charity is smart and competent, you get a prompt, thorough, and specific acknowledgement. That’s nice, but it isn’t a first-hand experience with a brand. Charitable giving is a fundamentally different activity from buying products.

Donors give to specifics, not symbolic representations

Look at Nike, a brilliant commercial brand that managed to make shoes stand for aspiration and achievement. That’s a well-built commercial brand.

But look what happens when you bring the same thinking to a charity. The starting point, the ‘shoe’, is the donor’s gift. The brand experts see that as a mere transaction, the equivalent of the shoe purchase. So they go upstream from there.

To where? Not to the specifics of what the charity does – because under commercial branding logic, that would be like Nike focusing on leather and rubber. So they go to the ideal, the platonic, the spiritual meaning of the charity’s work. The ‘Just Do It’.

The problem is that ideal is invariably a lovely abstraction. Instead of providing meals for hungry people, it is something inspiring but vague, like ‘fuelling hope’. And that’s weak fundraising. Donors give to specifics, not to symbolic representations.

But it gets even worse. Most of the time, charity branding efforts compound the error by focusing on the aspirations of people inside the charity, not the donors. This takes the messaging even farther off-target for fundraising, since the charity insiders are very different from their donors.

This moves the branding from a mistake to a fiasco. It makes a communication platform that’s confusing, inappropriate, and unattractively boastful. That’s what really slaughters fundraising revenue. That’s why charities that have never been through the branding exercise often have stronger brands than those that have. Those rare charities that don’t suffer fundraising disaster after a rebrand are generally those with well-defined offers. They have the calls to action that everyone understands and that can’t be obliterated by a fog of aspirational abstraction.

I’m not recommending that you ignore branding altogether. (Though if you have to choose between a commercial-style brand and none at all, you’re much better off with none at all.) There’s a way to get the advantages of branding without shortcircuiting the psychology of charitable giving.

An effective charity brand does two things very well: it is built on action and it is obsessively donor-focused.

So when someone comes to you offering to help you build a commercial-style, superpolished, look-at-me brand, just don’t do it! Instead, focus on your offer and your donors. And watch your results improve.