The NonProfit Times - The Leading Business Publication For Nonprofit Management

While some nonprofits go for a complete overhaul of name and brand, others realize they only need a few nips and tucks.

One of the first things Sharon Saxelby did when she became president and CEO at Friends of the Orphans was get started on updating the logo and brand. The Arlington Heights, Ill.-based nonprofit also added a tagline (“Raising children. Transforming lives.”) sharpening the focus on its mission.

The new brand and logo kicked off in April after a research effort that started this past summer.

Friends of the Orphans raises money for a network of nine Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos (NPH), which translates to “Our Little Brothers and Sisters,” and cares for more than 3,300 children in nine countries. It has 40 employees around the nation with an annual budget of almost $13 million.

Surveying and focus groups resulted in the nonprofit keeping its name, Friends of the Orphans.

“Friends of NPH didn’t mean anything more than Friends of Orphans, which instilled a sense of compassion,” Saxelby said. “When focus groups said, ‘That’s an envelope I’d open,’ I thought, that’s key,” she said.

A tagline is “basically a statement that defines who the organization is,” said Todd Baker, vice president/senior strategist at Grizzard in Atlanta. That’s why he likes to call the tagline an essence statement.

“Sometimes taglines can be just a marketing gimmick, but really when you think about it, the brand discovery process looks at the whole company, inside and out. Once you compile all that information and come up with a statement, this is the essence of who we are,” Baker said. “Hopefully it’s a statement that’s succinct, that everyone can remember and clearly identifies what the promise of the organization is. That helps you in your marketing communication,” he said.

The old logo for Friends of the Orphans had a child with a crutch and a man, representing Father William Wasson, who founded the nonprofit in 1954. Saxelby wanted to keep the nonprofit’s heritage but a child with a crutch no longer represented the organization since half of the kids are not disabled.

The new logo features a man leading three children over an arch. The children represent the journey that the children served by Friends are on, while the man “represents all of us who are on this journey,” Saxelby said.

She estimates that $60,000 has been spent on the branding process so far, and expects to keep the cost less than $100,000. She also will take the opportunity to reduce brochures and consolidate them into a common look. Her plan is to make the logo recognized as Friends of the Orphans, even without the name. “That’s where we want to be in three to five years,” Saxelby said.

Friends is also using the rebranding effort as a cornerstone to kick off Internet marketing initiatives, sending links to its donors to place on its social networking pages. “We’ll use it to help us to do some viral marketing as well as email blasts to all donors,” Saxelby said.

A tagline can make a nonprofit’s name more clear to constituents, and potential donors. The Harvard NeuroDiscovery Center was known as the Harvard Center for Neurodegeneration and Repair until last year.

There was a sense already within the organization to change the name when Patti Stoll arrived as deputy director three years ago. “The name itself was a mouthful,” Stoll said. “There were terms as a layperson I didn’t understand. For us to be effective, and compete effectively in the marketplace, we really needed a zippier name,” she said.

About a half-dozen names were considered and evaluated based on different criteria before the name change and rebranding took effect last year.

The tagline helps individuals quickly interpret the meaning, with the phrase, Collaborating to Cure Neurodegenerative Disease. It provides a little more information while getting the word neurodegeneration out of the name and into the tagline.

Among the goals of rebranding was to “reposition our message to include laypeople,” Stoll said. The center had a terrific reputation within the science community she said, but hadn’t focused on laypeople. “We needed to, number one, broaden our message,” she said, which would help diversify its revenue streams.

Stoll reported positive anecdotal feedback from prospective donors, but also has noticed that the organization’s nine board members seem more engaged. “They’ve become more effective ambassadors for the organization,” she said, and are better able to understand the goals and enthusiasm. “Most important, we’re getting referrals for potential donors and getting into the door better, talking to prospective donors,” Stoll said.

If one thinks of an organization as a person, with communication as their clothes, incremental brand shifts and visual design are like changing outfits, said Eric Norman, a strategist with Sametz Blacksone Associates, a Boston-based consulting firm that worked with the center. Changing a name, however, is like having surgery. “It’s a very invasive change, very disruptive,” he said, so it should be for the right reasons, done in the right way, with the right long-term commitment in mind.

“Very often if your name is your problem, think again. You can manage your brand to mean something. If you find that your brand and name have reached a dead-end, that’s a serious undertaking,” said Norman.

The New England Wild Flower Society was convinced they weren’t reaching the audiences they needed to because the name was wrong. They feared New England was too parochial and wild flower too focused, according to Norman. “Their obsession with their name was getting in the way of their effective communication,” he said.

After intense study with members and prospective members, it was determined not only would the cost be by itself prohibitive, a name change simply was wrong, Norman said. “The meaning around the name needed to be managed better,” he said, so they embarked on a redesign of their logo and type. “We found a new way to execute the name that was the right meaning,” Norman said.

The American Symphony Orchestra League talked about changing its name for 20 years. Forget the unflattering acronym for a moment. Imagine the difficulty in calling a donor and having to get through the clunky introduction.

The American Symphony Orchestra League became the League of American Orchestras after completing a new strategic plan several years ago. While subtle, the switch incorporated the word "league", which is how it came to be known over the years, keeping the name’s equity, said Roger Sametz, president and founder of Sametz Blackstone Associates.

The nonprofit also had some fun with it. At their next conference, member wore buttons proclaiming, “We’re not ASOLs anymore.” Said Sametz: “For a very buttoned up organization, it was a huge morale uptick.”

This article is from NPT Instant Fundraising, a publication of The NonProfit Times.