Welcome to the Brand Idea, The Secret to Managing Your Values Based Brand. My name is Becky Wiegand and I'm the Webinar Program Manager here at TechSoup. I've been with the organization for nearly 7 years and prior to that I spent a decade working at small nonprofits in Washington D.C. and Oakland, California where I was regularly the accidental techie having to select not only our technology products but work on our communications and brand plans as well. So I'm glad to be your host for today's event. Also joining us we have two noted experts and scholars on this topic. The first is Natalie Laidler-Thylinder who teaches a graduate level and executive education courses in Management, Leadership, and Marketing at Harvard's Kennedy School. She's been researching and writing about nonprofit brands for over a decade and has held senior marketing positions in both the private and public sectors. And she is one of the authors of the Brand Idea, the book that will be highlighting snippets from in today's presentation. Also joining us is Julia Shepherd-Spencil who is a consultant who works with nonprofits and is an active nonprofit board member. Both are graduates of Harvard's Business School. So we are very happy to have them joining us. You'll also see on the back-end assisting with the chat is Alibaz Dikian, TechSoup's Interactive Events and Video Producer. So she'll be on hand to answer your questions and help you along the way. Here's a quick look at our introduction and agenda. I'll do an introduction to TechSoup. We'll talk about the background and research that Natalie and Julia went through to develop their materials. Talk about what is a brand and get your input on what you believe a brand is. Then we'll talk about the role of a brand in nonprofit organizations. We'll talk about how the paradigm is shifting and we'll talk about the brand idea framework that they've developed and come up with through this whole process. We'll have some time talking about how to implement the brand idea and time for Q&A. So quickly looking at where we are, TechSoup is located here in our San Francisco headquarters, but Natalie and Julia are located in Chicago and Boston. So go ahead and chat into the window and let us know where you're joining us from. Go ahead and let us know. We have about 60 people on the line with us right now and that number is sure to climb in the next few minutes. There are people saying Atlanta, Georgia, Arizona, Denver, Chicago, Louisiana, Illinois, Texas, North Carolina. Looks like somebody is bouncing my slides around a bit. So go ahead and chat in. While you do that, I'll be giving a quick introduction to TechSoup. We are a global network and we are a nonprofit as well. We have 63 partner NGOs working in 121 countries around the world trying to deliver the best of technology resources, support, and knowledge to nonprofits and public libraries around the world. We've done this, like I said, in over 121 countries reaching 615,000 nonprofits and serving up nearly $5 billion in technology products and resources to the NGO sector for the greater good. And I am proud to have been a TechSoup user long before I was a TechSoup staff person and so you can learn more about our programs at TechSoup.org. Now to get to the meat of today's presentation, we want to talk about the brand idea. And what that means for your organization, how you can employ some of these strategies and use the research that Natalie and Julia have compiled and delivered out in this great book to help you better communicate what your organization is doing, how it's doing it, how it's successful, and to make it work for you for greater impact. So here's a quick look again at the agenda that they'll be covering today. And I'd love to have Natalie and Julia join us on the line to add anything they'd like to the introduction and get us going. Thanks so much for joining us. Welcome to the program. Hi, this is Natalie Leidler-Keylander. Thank you so much for having us today. I'd like to just start by talking a little bit about what we'd like to discuss today. And we'd like to start with talking a little bit about where the research originated and then maybe dive straight into this question of what is a brand and how can nonprofit brands be managed differently. I'm going to give you a little background just on the research itself. I've been working on nonprofit brands for about a decade now and got started to get interested in it because Edelman PR every year does some research and puts out a report on the world's most trusted brands. And consistently within the most trusted brands are large well-known nonprofit organizations. And yet there have been very little or had at the time very little work being done on nonprofit brands and whether they might be different from full-profit brands. So that sort of started the journey for me. And so I did some research from PhD on that. And recently with my co-author Julia published a book. And this book is the result of interviews with about 100 nonprofit organizations really trying to identify how nonprofits manage their brands and whether that is different than full-profit organizations. So one of the first questions I guess we'd like to ask and maybe we can get a little help on this. But I'd like to ask all the participants if they could sort of chat in how they might define a brand. What brand might mean for them and how they might define a brand. Yep, go ahead and chat into the window what you think is a definition of a brand or how you would define it. And Natalie I can go ahead and advance the slides for you since they are not working for some reason on your end. So we have people chiming in in the chat that a brand is who we are. It's a three-second sale. It means how you recognize your reputation, how you're known. Your brand is what people say it is. It's your reputation. It's the essence of your organization, your promise. Some people are saying it's your logo, your trademark, your identity. How you identify with or how others identify your organization. It's your integrity. It's what we do. It's your promise of value. So lots of different suggestions coming in what you stand for. It's your image, your perception. So how do all of those things that are coming in mesh with how you define a brand? I'll go ahead and show that slide. Thank you. So I collected on this slide, hopefully one of the same slide, but I collected on this slide some definitions and it echoes what a lot of the participants have been talking about. But the American Marketing Association defines a brand as an identifier. So it's either a name or a symbol or a design or a logo or some kind of feature that identifies an organization as distinct from another. So that's sort of one of the ways of thinking about brand. The other thing to realize is that a brand is an asset. It's an intangible asset. But for many organizations including nonprofits, it's probably one of the most valuable assets they have. And so when you have an asset that is of value, you have to treat it and think about it in those terms so that you can protect it, invest in it, and manage it accordingly. So I think that's the second point to kind of keep in mind. I heard one of the answers was a promise and so we often talk about brand promises and this is what Philip Kotler would define and he's sort of in the for-profit sector one of the great brand gurus and he would suggest that really a brand is a promise to deliver a set of specific features or benefits to customers. The other interesting thing to keep in mind is that along with this idea of intangible asset, a brand is really just a psychological construct. It's just an idea and this idea resides in the minds of brand audiences. And so that's a little tricky to think about but in fact what it really suggests is that the brand is not or your organization's brand doesn't belong to you, right? It really belongs to your brand audiences and it resides as a concept in the minds of those audiences. And so although you as an organization or a company may own the logo and the tagline and those registered trademarks, the brand itself belongs to the brand audiences. So I think that's something important to keep in mind. Other people have described the brand as sort of the soul or the essence of an organization. And finally we think that brand or at least a brand identity really should answer this question, who you are, what you do and why that's important. And so if the brand can capture or can start answering those three questions and reflect that in the psychological construct that's held in the minds of those brand audiences as sort of the job, the main sort of job of the brand, we can advance to the next slide. So another aspect to think about in terms of brand is that there are two components to brand and we heard this in a little bit of the responses, right? There's an internal sort of definition, the brand identity, that is really sort of held by the organization itself. And this brand identity is anchored for nonprofits in both the organization's mission and its values. And we'll talk about that a little bit more later. But the brand image is the external component, this idea of the psychological construct held in the minds of external audiences. And so you've got these two dimensions of brand, this internal identity and then this external image. And the external image is really the perception held outside of the organization. And it's really tied to the differentiation and positioning that is perceived by those external audiences. Sometimes I'm asked or people say to me, well I'm too small and I don't have enough money really to manage my brand. And so we don't really have a brand. And I think we would suggest that everyone and everything has a brand. So the question is not whether to manage the brand or whether to do branding, but the question is how do you want to manage this asset that you have? That's great. And it sounds like a lot of our suggestions that came in were smart suggestions that tapped into a lot of these different ideas of what a brand is. So here's another question for our audience to go ahead and chime in in the chat window again. What role does a brand play? Go ahead and tell us what you think the roles are that a brand might play for your organization, for your work. I'll read off some of the suggestions that come in as they roll in. But so far it seems like we've had a lot of smart folks in our audience. Donna comments, recognition, Mary repeats recognition of the organization and how the public can utilize it. It can help further your mission, impact your reputation, shape the customer's perceptions of your services, portrays the image of the product or individual. It can help your marketing. Lots of suggestions attracting new customers, bringing organization to mind, brings your organization to mind, connects with emotional ties. So a lot of great suggestions coming in, helping your organization seem worthy of donations. So a lot of good reasons to look at your brand and what role it can play. I'm going to go ahead and shift to that slide so if you want to talk about the roles that a brand plays, now would be a great time to do it. Yeah, that's super. Thank you. No, those are great suggestions. So we sort of raised this idea that a brand is an asset and that it's worth managing. But I also want to spend a little bit of time before we dive into some of the results of our research, thinking about what brand does for us. And I think this is really important to just pause and think about that. So we found that for both for-profits and non-profits, one of the roles that brand plays and some of this came out in the suggestions that participants captured is that it's sort of a shortcut to decision-making. It simplifies the decision to be made. And so very often brand is used as a proxy or as a guide in decision-making. And this is both in the for-profit world as well as our sector. Somebody talked about communication or eliciting emotional responses. And I think that's true as well. In the for-profit world it's very much about creating trust and loyalty. The brand plays a role in creating loyal customers and those loyal customers are what generate profitability and growth for the companies. And for both non-profits and for-profits, a brand can really help in the acquisition of resources. So somebody mentioned donations, that's definitely true. But it also helps in attracting partnerships, employees, volunteers. And so thinking about the brand as more than just a lever to attract donations I think is important. It really provides a way of being a magnet for all kinds of resources in terms of human resources, financial resources, access to knowledge, access to people. I think that's very an important role that it plays. So what we did find that in addition to those key roles the brand plays both in the for-profit and the non-profit sector, for non-profits in addition to what we've talked about, the brand plays this role of both the embodiment and the articulation of the mission. So it's really important to pause here because non-profits exist in order to implement a mission. There's a very different end goal if you will for profit organizations which are really driven by a financial bottom line. For non-profit organizations each of our missions are slightly different but that's really our guiding star and that's what we're trying to accomplish. And so the brand deeply reflects that mission and the organization's values. The second thing that is maybe slightly different than for-profit or traditional branding frameworks is that the non-profit brand drives organizational cohesion. So what I mean by that is that the audience of the brand is as much internal as it is external. And so that the brand plays this really important role in getting all of the employees and volunteers on the same page in terms of delivering on the mission. And then finally I'd say in the for-profit world, and we'll come back to this idea or this difference, but in the for-profit world the brand is really in essence a tool to gain competitive advantage. And so what we're trying to do in the for-profit world is really position our organization or our company or our products in relation to competing products in order to stimulate purchase and demand of our product over and above another company's products. But in the non-profit sector we're interested about implementing a mission. And that mission is often shared, those sort of goals driving the organization are often shared by other organizations. And so the brand is less about a competitive, creating competitive dynamics, but really about implementing the mission and gathering, identifying and drawing partners in order to be able to implement that mission. And so the brand really helps us gain clarity on who we are, what we do, why it's important, and who are the actors in other actors in our ecosystem that we might partner with in order to be able to really drive mission impact. So I want to move to the next slide which is the role of the brand cycle. And this is a graphic that was published first in the Stanford Social Innovation Review back in 2012, but it really sort of captures the role of the brand as we see it in the non-profit sector. So you'll notice a couple of things. First, that the brand cycle is nested in mission and values, but also within organizational strategies. So what we found in our research across these hundred different interviews that we did that really the work of the brand or work on branding goes hand in hand with organizational strategy. So that the brand is really this organizational lever and that when you're thinking about your strategic plan and you're thinking about your strategy to implement your mission, a brand is part of that discussion and that effort. So within sort of the central circle you'll see three smaller circles and each of those have a blue and a green side to them. And the blue side really represents the internal dimension and the green one the external. So we talked a little bit about identity and image which are the two sides of that top smaller circle. And so identity if you'll remember is the internal perception or understanding of the brand whereas the green image or the image which is sort of the green half is the external perception of the brand. And when those two are aligned when in fact the perception of who the organization is, what it does, and why it's important is in fact in line with how it is perceived then you get a couple of things. First you generate this higher trust with external stakeholders and then you are driving internal cohesion which we talked about briefly in the previous slide. And then what happens when you're building trust externally creating cohesion internally you're really able to have mission impact and build capacity at the organizational level. So the capacity again is sort of the internal result of a strong brand and the green part the impact is sort of the influence that you're having as you're moving your mission forward. So obviously as you go about your work and you build your capacity and increase your capabilities that is going to have a direct influence not only on how you perceive your organization internally but how others perceive your organization so that we're back to both the identity and the image. So here's the good news. The good news is that it's not a brand is not static. And so you can do a lot to manage the alignment between identity and image but the bad news is that it's a constant effort. So it's not a question of sort of doing a brand and then being done with it. It's a sort of a constant effort and process of building brand equity. I'm going to go to this next slide which is the paradigm shift before I hand back over to my co-author Julia. And this slide summarizes something that we're seeing in the sector, in the nonprofit sector. And so I think we're in the middle of this transition. A lot of us are in the middle of this transition within our organizations but also within the sector as a whole there's this transitioning, this transition that's happening from sort of the way brand used to be perceived and managed or in some senses is still being perceived and managed in the nonprofit space. And this sort of new way people are thinking and managing about brand. And so a lot of people still think about brand as essentially a logo. And that's really sort of how they would define it. Most participants on this call did not because you gave us a lot of different definitions. But traditionally a lot of people think about a brand as just a logo. And the goal of the brand and sort of the old paradigm is really just fundraising in PR. And so what you get are organizations that really just think about their brand as a fundraising tool and that creates problems because it is often dissociated with the real mission and values of the organization. If you're thinking about it just in terms of the fundraising tool you kind of go to that competitive place or that competitive advantage place which is essentially the model that we've inherited from the for-profit sector. And in that sort of condition you're really just interested in projecting specific images and your target audience is essentially your donors. And responsibility for the brand has typically been within marketing communications. And some of the requirements might be money particularly if you're trying to raise visibility through an ad campaign. But what we're seeing emerging is a sort of a new way of both thinking about brands and managing brands in the nonprofit sector. And so building on what we've talked about in terms of the role of the brand cycle but also how some of you have defined the role of brand. There are a number of nonprofits, quite a number of nonprofits that really think about their brand as a strategic asset that reflects both the mission and values of the organization. And that the brand is really all about achieving mission impact and implementing the mission. And so it's less about competitive advantage and much more about gaining deep understanding and clarity about your specific role in the theory of change that you're trying to achieve and gaining some sense of who it might be useful to partner and collaborate with in order to really drive mission. And so the audiences also change rather than just being about donors. The audiences, the brand audience become a spectrum of different external stakeholders including clients and beneficiaries but also internal stakeholders which may include volunteers depending on how you think about your volunteers. So what's interesting is that it's no longer just about how donors perceive your organization or your brand but it's really understanding how the spectrum of different brand audiences perceive you and how that plays into your brand image. And so when you think about brand as a strategic asset that's really about defining and driving collaborations and partnerships in order to have impact with your mission. The responsibility for brand really is spread throughout the organization and so certainly it would reside with the board and the executive team but essentially everybody's job is about being and becoming a brand ambassador. We'll talk a little bit more about brand ambassadors a little later here. And then finally in terms of what are the requirements it's really much less about money and expertise in terms of trying to build a brand but it's about trying to have a brand management mindset and what I mean by that is really understanding brand as a strategic asset that can help you implement your mission. And it's much less about money and expertise and more about spending the time and the energy to make sure that all the brand audiences are aligned with your brand identity. So I'm sure we'll have a lot of questions but I want to hand over now to my friend and colleague Julia who will kind of walk you through and build off what we've talked about until now and kind of walk you through the brand idea framework and then leave you with some tips about how to manage your brand using that framework. Thanks Natalie. So let me turn now to the brand idea framework which the brand idea stands for integrity, democracy, and affinity. And just to say I know Natalie introduced the research behind this but this really came from interviews with over 100 different organizations both big ones, big and small in a variety of sectors and a variety of scales local, national, international organizations. And the research was really to understand these concepts. And these were the three pieces that I think really capture good management of nonprofit brands. So integrity as we've talked about is aligning the brand with the mission and values of the organization. And you saw that represented in the diagram that showed the role of brand cycle and aligning the identity and the image of the brand. And the democracy is about engaging stakeholders in articulating and communicating the brand and building brand ambassadors. It's really a process of having this participative engagement as we call it that gets you to brand integrity. So integrity and democracy really go hand in hand. You need a process that involves these people to get to this alignment that you're searching for. And also with brand democracy, the goal is to be providing guidance rather than strict controls. It's not about policing your brand anymore. It's about providing guidance and templates and letting people really, as we said, the brand is in the mind of your audiences and so letting those audiences really own part of that brand. And it's possible to do this to let go of that need to control the brand once you have brand integrity. So it's by having this alignment and this strong understanding of who you are, what you do, and why it's important that means you can relax a little bit and let go. The third piece, brand affinity, is really about these partnerships and using your brand to attract and add value to partnerships in service of your shared goals. So now let's turn to each of them. So we'll start with brand integrity. Oh, no, I'm sorry. We'll start with the drivers of the brand idea. There are really two things that are driving this framework and one is social media. The world has changed so much in the last decade that it's not the same world anymore. You're not just sending one-way communications out by mail to your stakeholders. We've got all sorts of different kinds of dialogue and engagement happening. And so as one person said, you would be crazy to try to control your brand. It's out there and people are talking about your organization whether you want them to or not. So really recognizing that this is happening and trying to embrace that and create more dialogue is important. The second driver is partnerships. And partnerships of all kinds are proliferating. Part of this is coming from funders who want organizations to work together. But there's also this realization that no one organization can do it alone. These goals we're trying to achieve are often complex and it really requires us to work together. So by knowing who you are and what your strengths are and how you are making a difference, it helps you then recognize who do you need to work with to achieve those goals that you have. So let's turn to then brand integrity. Brand integrity, as we've said, is about knowing who you are, what you do, and why it matters. But it's also about knowing who you are not. And sometimes that can be really helpful in clarifying for an organization the essence they are. Let me just give you maybe a few examples. You know, we've talked about having this alignment. And I'd like to just talk about a few organizations that have really worked hard to do this. One of the organizations that we spoke with was Special Olympics. And they really had, after they had gone through a big strategic planning process, they were in the process of ratifying their plan and realized that a lot of people had questions about really who the organization was. And their mission is about sports training and competition for children and adults with developmental disabilities. But there were many, many different interpretations of their brand and the organization had grown significantly and a variety of perspectives had grown with it. So what they did was really to have a very participative process where they had representatives of all of their different stakeholder groups come together and really realign their brand. So they worked to define the guiding idea of Special Olympics which they called Revealing the Champion in All of Us. And so their brand promise is about unleashing the human spirit through the transformative power and joy of sports every day around the world. And that's aligned with their mission which is about sports and competition but it also kind of evokes the essence and the why, the meaning behind all of that. And they found that when they really clarified that and distilled it, they got so much more buy-in and support and consistency in all of their communications. They worked to create templates and tools that people could use and make it easy for people to use those and they ended up with much more consistency than they had thought. Another organization that we've talked to with BRAC which is a very large development organization that works internationally. That's all about empowering people and communities and social change. And they have a very diverse portfolio of development projects, community empowerment, social entrepreneurship efforts. And so for them integrating these very large and diverse programs was a challenge. They also had people within the organization that came from the corporate world, that came from community organizers. And so they said how do we run all of our efforts with the brand identity in mind? What they did through their process was really distill their brand down to the four core values of the organization. And to communicate that along with the history and the approach of the organization and lay out those principles, tell the stories that captured that so that everybody was on the same page and really understanding the who, what, and why of the organization. And we found that depending on the type of organization sometimes the brand is aligned more with the mission and sometimes more with the values of the organization. So for example, BRAC and often the foundations that we spoke with, it was more the values that came that were the common theme that kind of cut across all of their different audiences and brought, you know, were the essence of their brand. And I think it is important to note that for nonprofits one of the challenges is that there are these multiple audiences. It's different than in a for-profit endeavor in many ways. So the brand is really providing this unifying theme that cuts across all of these different audiences. So let's, I think given time, we'll keep moving on to brand democracy. As we've talked about, this is the process of participative engagement, and it's really the way in which you can achieve brand integrity. So encouraging people to participate in the process and then share their stories, making it easy for them to then customize brand materials and allocate the brand in their own way. I'll give you an example here as well from the Lincoln Center. The Lincoln Center was going through a whole structural changing their campus in New York, and as part of that they were trying to really open up their location physically, as well as open up to all of their patrons of the arts. And what they did was to try to really engage people in more of a two-way dialogue, and so they asked people for what had been transformative experiences for them at the Lincoln Center, and they also posted photos of performances that they shared with attendees so that they could share them with friends. And so by really starting to create this dialogue, they really opened up these floodgates of people talking about these transformative experiences they had at Lincoln Center and really created these brand ambassadors who then could really become, reach out to other audiences. And we want to leave plenty of time for questions, so I think we'll just keep going into brand affinity. Lincoln Center is also a good example here because another thing they did was to work with other organizations in the area, and they realized that those people who attend more than four arts events in a year are really just as likely to then go to many more arts events. So there's kind of like a tipping point there. And so instead of thinking about their patrons in a possessive sense, and thinking that they were competing with other organizations, they realized, no, if we can work together, then we can grow the pie for everybody because we know that these patrons are not just going to come to our events, they're going to go to other events, and if they're a heavy user, they're going to go to even more events. So that was part of working together towards these shared goals to really build capacity and have a bigger impact. So brand affinity is about attracting partners, working together towards shared goals, sharing your assets, and sharing credit as well. And keep moving along. We just were curious to hear a little bit about how all of you feel about defining your organization's brand. Can you succinctly define your organization's brand right now? Go ahead and click on either of these radio buttons on your screen, and if you have something else to comment about your organization's brand, and whether you can succinctly define that, go ahead and chat it into the window for us. And we will give just a few more seconds so that everybody can participate with around 70 people at the moment. And I want to have everybody take the opportunity to chime in, and you can practice it in your head. If you think you can define your organization's brand pretty succinctly, and if you can't, maybe that's an area to focus some work on. The next section will give a little bit more workshop-wise tips on how to do some of that. So I'll give just a couple more seconds. And it looks like around half, a little more than half say that you can clearly succinctly define your organization's brand a little less than half say no. So it looks like there's some work to do. And we have another poll question coming up in just a moment, but I'll let Julia go ahead and cover the next slide first and weigh in on how you perceive these responses. Right, so I think it's great that over half of you can do that. And so for those who can't, let's think for a moment about where do you start? And so we just wanted to kind of give you the very basic building blocks that you need to start with a clear and accurate mission. And because the brand has to be really anchored in the mission and values of the organization, if you don't have a clear mission, then that's the first place to start. The second step is to really get clarity on how you're unique from other organizations. Some of the questions we've asked are what would be lost if your organization didn't exist? How can you really define your differentiation? We've also worked with organizations to help them map the ecosystem in which they operate. And depending on the nature of the organization, you might choose various dimensions to look at, but we've found that it's been helpful for them. So I think maybe we should just skip on ahead so that we have plenty of time for questions to show the diagram with the building blocks of the brand. So for folks to – oh, you wanted to skip that one. Okay, sorry about that. I think we ought to just probably just keep moving. So let's move on to a template that shows, for example, when we've helped an organization look at the ecosystem in which they operate, there might be several different types of work like an environmental organization that might do advocacy and education and litigation type of work, and they might have different focus areas, whether that's air and water and oceans. So we've worked with organizations to then map where do they fit versus other organizations. And sometimes this can be really helpful to then see, oh, okay, so we cut across these organizations because we have this focus or because of the type of work that we do and to help people really get a sense of where their unique value added exists. So I want to keep moving on to implementation issues. So the first piece of implementing brand integrity is about looking at your identity and your image. So the identity is really defining your own organization's brand identity internally and saying, you know, who are you, what do you do, and why is it important. And this is great to have the participation of a variety of your internal stakeholders. And it's interesting when we've asked people how do other internal stakeholders define the brand, often they realize that they're not sure how others define it. And when you actually ask the question, you find sometimes that you get very different answers. So just starting with this who, what, and why and understanding, getting clear on the consensus across these different audiences is important. The image is this external piece of it. And so thinking also about, okay, who are your major brand audiences, understanding those external audiences, and thinking about how they would each define your organization's brand. So this is the kind of thing that you don't necessarily need a consultant to help you with. It's some of these questions that you can do in a small organization, you know, in your staff meeting with your board. And you can have conversations. You can do very simple surveys with some of your stakeholders. It doesn't have to be a full-blown effort. You can start with wherever you are. So implementing, yeah. So this is really just making sure that, you know, starting, asking the question, finding where the differences and similarities are, and then summarizing those common themes. Because ultimately when you look at all these audiences, you're going to find those common themes that cut across your various audiences. So moving on to brand democracy, it's the same, as we've talked about, you really want to engage your audiences more and create more of a dialogue and create templates and tools to support your brand ambassadors. And by involving people throughout in this process, and it's not just a one-time thing. You need to continue this and have this ongoing process involve all of your audiences. Once you've started that and started these dialogues, it becomes easier to maintain that. So just for some final thoughts on the presentation before we go to the Q&A, you don't need to have consultants or experts. It's really something that any organization can think about in terms of managing their brand with this concept of integrity and democracy and affinity. And it really starts by changing your mindset and as Natalie explained in the paradigm shift, it's all about, you know, seeing your brand as a strategic asset. We've started here with just some questions about brand integrity and brand democracy that hopefully you can refer back to and help you then involve others, use this participative process, find the essence of the organization, and then start to let go of some of that control and share your brand assets. Let me see if Natalie wants to add anything more here. Can we move on? No, let's get to some questions. I think that would be great. Great. And for those of you who answered no in that poll around whether you could succinctly define your organization's brand, I think taking that paradigm shift table and showing the old versus the new to your leadership if you're not the leadership, if it's taking it to your board or your executive director, and then taking these last few slides here that showed the questions to ask that you can be asking your internal stakeholders, your board, your staff, your volunteers, your key external stakeholders, your clients or your patrons or your users, your constituents, I think those are terrific resources to be able to get started on really honing it. And if you answered yes, that you think you can succinctly define your brand, but you can use these tools to help further clarify it and further hone it. I think it's really a great package of what seems really simple but can help really create some monumental change in your organization's perception and brand. And so I love these, you know, the simple way that they're framed here because I think they can do so much. So we have some questions in the queue already. And for those of you who'd like to learn more about this, you can also check out the full book, The Brand Idea at thenonprofitbrandidea.com. And we have a question from Stephen who asks, how do you brand a nonprofit with different programs?  You know, if one organization does all of those things, what do you recommend for them to start if they have all of those different work areas? So I'll take a shot at that. I think it's important to really anchor the brand and the mission, right? And so the mission has got to be what's reflected in the brand. And Julia talked briefly about BRAC, which is an organization that is very broad in its activity. So it does do education and health care and microfinance and a variety of different activities. And so for them it's a bit difficult to kind of have a succinct and very clear brand. So they have gone back to their values and used their values as the anchor to their brand. But the brand, remember, is a differentiator. So it has to stand for something and for someone or for some group of people. And so that notion of who I am, what I do and why it's important, even if an organization has a range of activities and it's pretty complex, that's the first thing to do is to try to succinctly articulate that. That's great. I was just going to say that sometimes, with BRAC it was really interesting how the values kind of connected with the theme that connected across their different activities. And we think it's really important that there is an organizational brand that holds the whole content of that portfolio. When organizations focus on sub-brands and they have a different brand for each of those types of activities that they're doing, they're not as well able to leverage that and really be successful in their overall mission. So we would definitely encourage you to work on finding that common theme that cuts across those different programs and that can be an umbrella rather than trying to create sub-brands. That's great. And the idea of being so many things and so many different entities can sometimes muddle a brand. I've seen that happen too. So I like that idea of having that theme be the overarching connector between all of those things. So Nancy asks, she says, our board does not like you to change anything. How do we expand our messaging? And in general, if you are on staff at an organization and you think you really need to do some branding or rebranding and you don't know how to get leadership buy-in, I recommend that an organization or staff person do to try and get leadership on board. That's a great question and one that we get a lot, right? And so I think within organizations, maybe this is true in all organizations, but the really smart people are not necessarily at the top or at the board. So how do you bring along some of that top management or some of the board members? And that's a challenge that I've heard again and again. So I think the first thing to do is to put brand on the agenda and to start this dialogue of what they think brand is and why it's important and how it conserves the organization. So feel free to use any of our slides. Feel free to use the SSIR article in 2012. But your job, I think, is to start shifting everyone in the organization from sort of the old paradigm to the new paradigm. I think you can do that unless you engage them actively in dialogue and start breaking down some of the – and start sort of breaking down perceptions about what brand is. There's a lot of people that really are very skeptical about brand and the use of brand in the nonprofit sector. And so making that first step is sort of getting over that skepticism and really understanding using examples if you need to, and understanding that the brand can drive the mission and it's always, always about the mission. So that would be my suggestion. Start the dialogue, provide materials and start them on their journey towards the paradigm shift. But it's a question we get a lot. We did find that some organizations who face that kind of skepticism when you talk about brand in terms of integrity, democracy, and affinity, those terms in that new language helped people overcome that skepticism because some people think, oh, it's a for-profit thing. We don't need to worry about it. But framing it in terms of the mission can help people overcome that. Great. And since you brought up the mission, Mary asks kind of a logistical question here, but how long should a mission statement be? You know, should there be a limit on how long you can make that because it is that thread that should tie kind of everything together? Eight words. Eight words. I like that. Very specific answer. It's not me. There's a wonderful article that suggests the eight-word mission statement and I'm happy to send that on to you, Becky, so you can post it for your membership. That would be great, and we can include that in the post-event email that we send out a little later today. We also have a question from Daniel who asks, what's the difference between sponsors and partnerships? And this is going back sort of toward the beginning where, Natalie, you were talking about, you know, how the brand can help you bring in new partnerships and new sponsors. So Daniel's asking, are the partners the other NPOs we work with or are they those that fund our events? So just asking for clarity on that. That's a great question, and I would say both. I mean, I think about supporters in general, right? And supporters can bring financial support or they can bring support in terms of helping you implement your programs or think about your programs. So I would move away from this source dichotomy and really think about supporters more broadly. And so I think both is sort of the quick answer to that. There's a great article called The Permanent Disruption of Social Media. Many of you might know it, but it really talks about supporters as opposed to donors. And the biggest sort of impact that a brand ambassador or supporter can have might not be initially financial, right? It could be just introducing you to a number of different potential supporters or it could be changing the way you think about a particular problem. So I really would urge people to think beyond financial support to all these other kinds of capacity-building assets. Great. One last question before we go ahead and try and wrap up. Donna asks, how often should you change or update your brand? How frequently should we be revisiting this? So that's sort of the backs of the role of Brand Cycle and Julia, feel free to jump in. But this is a constant process, right? I think older organizations might have a little bit more of a challenge and that there is often a gap between their image and their identity. And part of the reason is that image lags identity. So as you change as an organization, as you build your capacity and implement your mission, your brand identity will evolve. But brand image is a little bit more difficult to change and tends to be more stagnant.  That's really the number one job of brand managers is to manage that alignment of what we call integrity between brand image and brand identity. And we believe you can do that by cultivating brand ambassadors, particularly in this area of social media, right? You cannot rely on sort of one-way communication. It has to be a more participative and engaging process. Right. Our reputations mean so much to us these days and everybody wants reviews before they do anything. So I totally understand that. Go ahead and, you know, participants chat in and let us know one thing that you learned today that you're either going to try to implement or that you found helpful in moving forward with developing your own brand idea for your nonprofit. And thank you so much, Natalie and Julia. Thank you for sharing all of that with us and giving us a taste of the flavor of your book. Which again, if you're interested in reading the full book, you can check out the brand idea at the nonprofit, or sorry, it's www.nonprofitbrandidea.com. And I'd love to just invite you also to join us for any of our upcoming webinars and events. We have one next week on our Tablets Just Toys, How to Get Work Done, and Be Green with Mobile Devices. One participant in that webinar will win a free iPad. So that's pretty exciting. And then for those of you who are joining us from libraries, we'll have an event on libraries as social service referrers. So we often know that you are sending patrons to different social services connected through your library. So join us if you want to learn more about that. We'll have a webinar on how to find free and legal to use images and media online. Launch your 2015 grants plan with GrantStation and copywriting for the web. A lot more to come. Check those out. And our webinar archives on our site. You'll get this full deck of slides later today with that follow-up email. Connect with us at TechSoupGlobal.org, TechSoup.org, and on our Facebook or Twitter. We're so glad to have you all joining us. Thanks again, Natalie and Julia, for taking the time to share your expertise and give us some insight into how we can all improve our brand idea. I'd also like to thank Allie for helping on the back end. And lastly, thank you to our webinar sponsor, ReadyTalk, who provides the use of this platform each week for us to present these webinars to you. Go ahead and please complete the post-event survey that will pop up once this webinar is over. So help us continue to improve our webinar programming and let us know what other topics you'd like us to bring to you in future events. Thanks so much, everyone. Have a terrific day. Bye-bye.


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