Is your nonprofit an environmentally-focused organization that uses vibrant green hues, forest imagery, and a serious tone in your branding? Or, does your brand feature primary colors and round, playful fonts to represent your child-friendly mission?
You’ve likely put a lot of thought into how you chose design elements to create a brand that represents your organization’s mission. Your ultimate goal involves using these elements to promote awareness of your mission and support for your initiatives, such as your fundraising efforts. But if your brand isn’t aligned across your various digital marketing platforms. In that case, you won’t be able to effectively introduce virtual audiences to your nonprofit, let alone acquire their long-term support.
In this post, we’ll explore the steps of creating a unified digital brand with the following points:
DNL OmniMedia’s nonprofit branding guide points out that your organization’s brand is more than just a visual identity. It creates an emotional connection between your supporters and mission, represents the populations you serve, and provides a unifying force for your nonprofit staff to rally around. When your digital brand elements are aligned, you’ll be able to reinforce these benefits across your marketing platforms. Let’s dive in!
Your digital marketing platforms are impactful channels for making meaningful connections with your nonprofit’s supporters, from your donors to your volunteers and other advocates.
Your brand provides a visual representation of everything your organization stands for. Ensuring your branding is consistent across all platforms:
When your brand is aligned across digital platforms, you can present all audience members with a seamless, professional image. Standardizing your branding is an easy step you can take to boost your organization’s trustworthiness and credibility.
Your brand isn’t just your logo or font choices — it’s a combination of a variety of components that work in harmony to tell your nonprofit’s story.
Carefully consider how you can unify each of your brand elements and standardize them. Here are the brand elements to consider:
Aligning these brand elements ensures your organization is instantly recognizable whether a supporter encounters you in their Facebook feed, email inbox, or through a Google search.
Now that you have a clear idea of the types of brand components to standardize, you can start creating a plan to successfully present your digital brand. Here are a few best practices to get you started on the right path:
Adapt your brand elements to match each unique platform.
Each digital communication platform is unique, so the way you use your brand elements on each channel should be tailored to fit the circumstances. Let’s take a closer look at each platform:
Consider how you’ll present your brand elements on each digital platform your organization uses. For instance, can you put your logo as your profile photo on LinkedIn and Facebook? Can you brand your weekly newsletter using the same color palette and font choices as your website’s blog? All of these actions help reinforce your brand across virtual channels.
Use a digital brand style guide to keep team members on the same page.
You likely have a brand style guide that you follow to create marketing materials. Include a digital-focused section in that style guide to give staff members guidelines for incorporating your brand on virtual platforms.
Your digital section should include information guidelines for:
Share these updates with your team members and ask for their feedback to ensure your digital brand guidelines accurately reflect your brand story.
Get creative.
An effective nonprofit branding strategy isn’t completely set in stone. Of course, as soon as you determine your digital brand guidelines, use them uniformly for a period of time.
Then, once you’ve established a strong sense of brand awareness, determine where you can bend the rules to get creative and offer audience members something they haven’t seen before. For instance, perhaps you might incorporate videos and gifs into your multimedia toolkit, or create sub-brands for certain events or fundraising campaigns. This keeps audience members engaged in your offerings and shows them that your organization is flexible and ever-evolving.
Work with a nonprofit strategy consultant as needed.
If it’s time to revamp your organization’s brand or take a more strategic approach to digital branding, a nonprofit marketing strategy consultant can set you on the right path. These professionals offer digital strategy services such as:
A consultant can carry out your strategy to align your nonprofit’s brand across digital platforms and ensure you’re using your technology platforms effectively to support this effort.
With the rise of online fundraising and virtual events, your nonprofit’s digital platforms are more important than ever. When you unify your brand elements across platforms, you can increase your audience’s engagement and trust in your organization to help your campaigns succeed. Good luck!