United Ways Hope to Enhance Their Profiles With New Marketing Technique

Federal Express does it.

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‘Branding’: a Hot Trend for Charities

So do Kmart and I.B.M.

And now United Way of America is doing it too.

The national organization is undertaking a pilot program aimed at enhancing its institutional identity — or “brand” image — as an organization that listens to its donors and tries to improve people’s lives. Its goal is to make its 1,400 local United Ways more competitive in bringing in revenue and volunteers and, ultimately, to become more effective in dealing with health and social-services issues.

The “Brand Initiative” began in 1998 in eight cities and is scheduled to expand nationwide next year. Officials say the program’s long-term goals include helping local United Ways enhance their profiles among competing non-profit organizations.

Kathleen Markey, who heads the branding effort for United Way of America, says the project’s chief aim is to raise “the awareness of United Way’s value in communities in the hearts and minds of individuals who have the potential to volunteer their time or contribute money.” The pilot programs, she adds, “are helping us to understand how you manage a United Way in the context of this strategy.”

United Way found in studies that many donors have a weak understanding of how the organization serves their communities and often are unable to distinguish between the benefits provided by local United Ways and those provided by other charities. Even the most loyal United Way donors have a “positive, yet impersonal and distant, relationship with United Way,” the organization says.

The branding project, Ms. Markey says, is aimed at delivering on “promises” that reflect what donors have said they want from United Way.

“We want our donors to have a consistent experience with United Way, so that they know what United Way stands for,” she says.

The imagery of promises and experiences is especially resonant for United Way. In Santa Clara County, Cal., the local United Way this month disclosed that it is facing serious financial problems, which appear to result from poor financial management. (Story is available.) In 1992 the national organization’s former president, William Aramony, was fired for what amounted to breaking a promise to a trusting public. With two colleagues, Mr. Aramony siphoned hundreds of thousands of dollars from United Way and indulged in travel on the Concorde and other expensive perks. The scandal, which resulted in Mr. Aramony’s conviction and imprisonment, severely damaged United Way’s name and eroded its fund raising.

Many local United Way officials say the Aramony debacle was a primary catalyst for a number of changes within United Way, including the branding program.

“It created soul searching that went to the very core of what United Way’s purpose is in each community and how it should be achieving that purpose,” says Ron Stevens, executive director of the United Way of Santa Fe County (N.M.), one of the eight groups in the pilot branding program.

But United Way officials say the branding effort also is meant to deal with shortcomings that go back to the 1980s, long before Mr. Aramony became big news.

United Way’s market share — its slice of total charitable giving in the United States — has been shrinking for more than a decade, the organization says. In 1987, United Ways took in 3.2 per cent of charitable dollars. By 1991 — the year before the scandal came to light — the proportion had slipped to 3 per cent. In 1997, the latest year for which figures are available, it was down to 2.4 per cent.

“Whether Bill Aramony ever stepped onto a Concorde, we were losing market share before ’92,” says United Way spokesman Anthony DeCristofaro.

United Way has been testing its branding concepts in Denver; New Orleans; Sacramento, Cal.; Honolulu; Louisville, Ky.; Monroe, La., and Chippewa Falls, Wis., as well as in Santa Fe.

In Santa Fe, Mr. Stevens says the project has helped him focus anew on the importance of finding ways to define and demonstrate programmatic success.

One example he cites is a change in the way the Santa Fe United Way crafts messages to its supporters. When the United Way this year raised more than $1-million — the first time it reached that milestone in its history — the invitations for an annual awards reception included a “thank you” message focusing on the fund-raising achievement. It was the way Mr. Stevens and his United Way had always done such invitations, he says.

The branding program, however, helped Mr. Stevens realize that the approach perpetuated the image of United Way as simply a fund raiser, he says. “We were making mistakes in what we were communicating and how it influenced the way people thought of us,” he says. “It reinforced attitudes that were too narrow.”

As a result, Mr. Stevens says, the invitations and some of the awards were changed so that they highlighted the United Way’s success not just at fund raising but also at four other endeavors, including a collaborative youth-education program with the Santa Fe public schools.

Branding also has been changing the way the United Way for the Greater New Orleans Area is looking at its operations, says Gary Ostroske, the organization’s president.

Seven years ago, the New Orleans United Way began a strategic-planning process — similar in many ways to a branding program — that led it to examine some of its practices. For example, the organization used to sponsor a six-county relay race in which company-sponsored teams demonstrated their support for United Way. In 1994 the race was replaced with a “Day of Caring” in which corporate-employee teams work with United Way-supported charities on painting, repairs, and other improvements to New Orleans neighborhoods.

“We’re not in the running-shoe business or the race business,” Mr. Ostroske says. The race “didn’t demonstrate to the public what we do.”

United Way’s national branding effort is likely to result in more change, Mr. Ostroske says.

For example, he is exploring the feasibility of a project in which United Way volunteers would coordinate work-site employee programs on such matters as dealing with teen-agers and caring for aging parents. Social-services groups that receive United Way money would deliver the programs.

The United Way would charge companies a “reasonable” fee for the sessions, Mr. Ostroske says. In the long run, he contends, the project would save companies money by helping to alleviate employees’ personal problems before they led to absenteeism, poor job performance, or the need for costly intervention.

“It brings United Way much closer to home,” Mr. Ostroske says of such a project. “It’s trying to deal with people’s problems before they occur.”

Such an effort would also bring in revenue for United Way and help raise its visibility among New Orleans residents, Mr. Ostroske says. Not only that, he adds, the program might lead employees of the companies to donate a bigger portion of their own pay to United Way because they would be able to see “firsthand results” of what the organization does.

And that, he says, is what branding is all about.

“We would be providing a service to people as well as informing them of the value of United Way. We’re looking at it truly as a business.”