June 14, 2001 | Read Time: 4 minutes
By VIKKI SPRUILL
In recent years, nonprofit groups have embraced few ideas more zealously than one called branding, a marketing practice used widely in the for-profit world to build loyalty among customers and investors and one-up the competition.
But the nonprofit world — especially advocacy groups working in fields such as health, education, and the environment — can ill afford to wage corporate-style branding battles. Instead of helping charitable groups work together to build a broad base of support from donors, volunteers, and activists, branding becomes a barrier. It fosters unhealthy competition among nonprofit groups for visibility, promotes the hoarding of proprietary information, and leaves donors confused about how their support is making a difference.
Foundations are partly responsible for the misguided emphasis on branding. They often fall into the trap of competing to burnish their own reputations instead of working together on behalf of the broader causes they champion. And even though foundations are devoting more resources to encouraging collaboration among the nonprofit groups they support, such an approach simply will not work when the grantees are also intent on protecting their various brands.
To be sure, pressure to achieve recognition for program activities is very real. Membership and communications staffs, together with boards of directors, want to achieve and maintain a high profile for their organizations, for obvious reasons. But an important distinction exists between the public profile of an organization and its ability to get things done.
As the executive director of an organization that works to preserve ocean environments, I have seen advocacy groups expend enormous energy and resources jockeying for visibility in efforts to create their own version of brand recognition. Led by their membership, development, and communications departments, they aim their branding messages at foundations and other supporters, potential members, and even their own boards of directors. Yet, while those efforts may succeed in drawing attention to the organizations, I am not convinced that they succeed in advancing the causes that the organizations were created to serve.
For example, ocean-conservation groups are talking about the creation of marine wilderness areas, which are similar in concept to national parks in the sea. But individual groups should not be branding the cause of protecting marine wildernesses as solely their own, to the exclusion of other organizations engaged in the same work.
Rather, the issue should be cast as a broad movement that has the full support of all conservation organizations. In other words, it is the movement — and not any single group — that our organizations should work collectively to “brand.”
The collective branding effort should have strategically defined goals, a set of consistent and provocative messages, and well-coordinated activities. The collective force of this sort of coordinated effort outweighs the institutional needs of any sole organization. The whole really is greater than the sum of its parts.
To build cohesiveness, the nonprofit world must replace organizational branding with a collaborative strategy that fosters social change — what might be called “issue branding.” Rather than positioning organizations in relation to one another, such an approach would encourage all groups to apply their individual strengths and expertise collectively in the search for solutions to social problems, be they environmental degradation, poverty, or substandard schools.
In the not-too-distant past, the advocacy world included many separate groups doing different things in different ways. Some groups concentrated on mobilizing citizens and engaging in activist grass-roots campaigns. Some specialized in waging — and winning — court fights. And some focused on such activities as lobbying, economic analysis, and public education.
But today, virtually every advocacy group engages in lobbying, communications, and grass-roots campaigns, and many pursue lawsuits to press their agendas. As a result, the advocacy world’s limited resources are scattered, competition for donors and members has set in, and the ability of groups to focus on the issues has suffered. Instead of distinguishing themselves and their issues through the judicious use of branding, advocacy organizations have saturated the market and caused people to forget why the organizations exist in the first place.
Social causes would be better served if advocacy groups focused on their respective and inherent missions. Where does the soul of the organization lie? What was the impetus behind its formation? What need did it fill then, and does that need still exist? Those are tough questions that demand honest answers.
Greater attention to organizations’ missions would encourage a candid assessment of each group’s strengths — assessments that are missing in many collaborations today. Instead of seeking to do it all, organizations should be showcasing their individual ways of doing business, the unique skills and expertise that they bring to the issues. What are they good at? Is it policy, law, communications, grass-roots cultivation, or something else?
A success indicator for social-change organizations in the future should not be how visible they are or how many times the organizations’ names appear in print, but how often they are able to increase the visibility of their respective issues and say they have advanced the cause. Only then will they have a clear sense that they are putting issue priorities ahead of organizational ones and leaving behind a better world.
Vikki Spruill, a former public-relations executive in Washington, is executive director of SeaWeb, a communications-oriented advocacy organization in Washington that focuses on ocean conservation.
