Brand standards are guidelines — guide rails if you will — to ensure that you clearly and consistently represent your organization, ministry, or church’s brand and all its related programs, products, services, and resources to everyone you serve.
“Sorry, we didn’t recognize you.”
Without consistent standards and usage, your audiences won’t easily recognize or even remember your brand.
Your brand, and all the components that make it yours, all need to be stewarded and officially documented. By setting your standards to establish brand standard guidelines, you will ensure the investment your organization or ministry has made will not only build brand recognition, but also ultimately increase your audience support exponentially.
Sadly, your nonprofit is forgettable.
Research shows that within one hour, most learners forget 50% of the information they consume. After 24 hours, that grows to 70%. And within a week, it goes up to 90%.
General education uses the seven times or “three times and it’s yours” concept as a rule of thumb for repetition in order to establish retention.
But as an ad agency, we know it takes up to 18 repetitions of a TV spot on the same channel on the same day to generate retention and action. Ebinghouse, who conducted memory research, suggested that retention is significantly influenced by the receiver’s will, which means it needs to be something they want to retain. So, it’s likely that all your audiences have to want to remember your organization, ministry, or church as well. Now, because you’re a nonprofit, your cause can be a real important factor in how attached audiences are to you and willing to be mindful about your organization.
But the fact is there are thousands of nonprofits and businesses who look and sound pretty much the same. And the only way to distinguish yours is through consistent branding.
Promise to love, honor, and cherish your nonprofit’s brand.
“We promise to always use an Oxford comma, never use the Comic Sands font, and to remember that there isn’t a hyphen in nonprofit or fundraising.” These may sound nitpicky, but it’s the simple aspects of branding that won’t cost you a dime but will have a huge influence on the audiences you serve if you use them consistently.
God made the human mind to have an unbelievable capacity for detail, but how information is presented and how often is key. In advertising, we call it reach times frequency. But we find when it comes to branding, this concept is often lost because guidelines to ensure repetition aren’t in place or respected by everyone on the team or required by leadership.
We need to make it “pop.”
We hear this almost every day, but beware, this is a lie straight from hell. There is nothing more destructive to your brand than for you to constantly change your brand character in order to make it pop. And what’s important here is it doesn’t look like you when you switch it up. No one has seen the poppy version of your nonprofit before.
You’ve heard the expression, “it’s like putting lipstick on a pig.” Making your communications pop with a gimmick doesn’t necessarily make it look better or more attractive. And it may get attention for a moment, but it won’t be memorable or be recognized as your brand of nonprofit without brand standards.
The truth is, you will get tired of your brand long before your audiences will, and you have to stop yourself when you get the urge to make it pop. It will result in taking 15 steps backward in your brand recognition.
Who’s idea was this?
Respectfully, the recommendation to switch something up in your brand generally comes from someone on your team with a great big holy cow idea. A board member, a well-meaning volunteer, maybe a new employee, or a donor’s son who’s thinks he’s a really good artist.
But they all are usually working from their own personal preferences about what they like and have never been taught how important branding is and how to steward it well. The truth is “they don’t know they don’t know.” They think they do and that’s really dangerous. But the fact is, there are thousands of nonprofits and businesses who look almost identical. And the only way for you to distinguish yourself is through brand management.
Brand standards are rules, not recommendations.
If they aren’t mandatory, everyone will have their way with them. So, leadership, it starts with you. Communications team; you’re the corporate brand cops that make sure everyone associated with your organization and ministry go through formal brand training when they come alongside your cause. We recommend you commit the brand standards to your formal HR manual. It should have its own tab. And everyone should get an annual brand refresher. Annual meetings and retreats are great opportunities for brand review and updates.
You may want to make your brand standard guidelines available for download on your website. There’s a good reason. You don’t want someone to bastardize your brand even with the best intentions. Sorry, but that’s the correct term for the illegitimate usage of a brand.
Here’s a tip. You can learn a lot about good branding by looking through other organization or ministry’s brand standard guides. You’ll see that, for the most part, the sections these guides contain are similar because they are elements that help distinguish your brand from others. And a side note . . . you don’t have to be a multimillion dollar nonprofit or ministry to have brand standards. Your brand is one of your nonprofit’s most valuable assets and it’s worth enough to steward well.
Your go-to resource every time you begin a new activity that includes your brand.
Formally printing your guide is recommended or at least have it handy on your computer desktop for immediate reference for every communications project. At Cahoots, we produce the brand standard guides for our clients using an 8 ½ x 11” landscape or horizontal page format that lends itself to print as well as PowerPoint. It also makes it easy to update any given page or section.
Your brand standard guidelines should cover all the primary design, copy, and format for all your integrated communication channels. As an example, the brand standard guides we create for our clients cover over 20 categories of communications.
Give your audiences something to remember you by.
Stewarding your nonprofit’s brand through the use of a brand standards guide is a way of pledging allegiance to your organization’s mission as it’s realized through integrated branding. So, see to it that your coworkers, board members, volunteers, and vendors are all aware of your brand standards, and you’ll see the returns tenfold when it comes to reaching the audiences you’ve been called to serve.
Consider This Cahoots Course
Subscribers can watch our Cahoots Course, Setting Your Standards — Establishing Brand Standard Guidelines. In this Cahoots Course, we’ll outline and review all the modules that should be included in your Brand Standards Guide, as well as all the details each module should contain.
