Branding Your Organization
Through Your Web Site

By Laura Quinn
Your Web site says a lot about you. Each word, image, feature, and link helps to form or alter the public perception of your organization -- also known as your brand.

While "branding" sometimes refers to graphic design elements such as a logo, it's really a much bigger concept. A brand is the impression that the public shares about an organization. Your organization already has a brand: it's what the public thinks about you. This brand may or not be accurate, however - or flattering.

Brands are influenced by all sorts of things -- in fact, by pretty much everything you do and say. But your Web site is a key ambassador. Many visitors to your site won't have any other contact with you. Do you want people to see your organization as knowledgeable? Friendly? Politically savvy? Then your Web site needs to demonstrate these qualities.

advertisement

To do this, start by brainstorming how you would like to be perceived. What should people see as your strengths? What are the things that make you different? Create a set of unique and compelling statements that sum up your organization. For instance, branding statements for an organization like the American Red Cross might hypothetically look something like this:

We save lives by providing disaster relief care and helping people prevent and prepare for emergencies
We are neutral, international, politically savvy, logistically sophisticated

Once you have your messages defined, you can begin to integrate them into your Web site. But this doesn't mean just slapping up some text -- your Web site speaks in many ways, and it's important to communicate a unified message. Consider five different ways that your Web site can communicate your brand:

Branding Through Statements. The most straightforward way to convey a brand message is to simply state it in words. For instance, you could include a prominent sentence on your homepage about what you do and why it's important. A tagline -- a short phrase that accompanies your logo -- can also be a very useful way to state what you do on almost every page of your site. Be careful not to take your statements too far beyond simple facts ("We are extremely trustworthy!"), though, or they'll appear insincere.

Branding Through Tone. The voice of the text throughout your site also says something about you. For instance, it's very different to solicit comments by writing "Got opinions? Lay 'em on us" compared to "Submit comments to publication staff." Consider the messages your text may be sending, whether informality, hipness (or lack thereof), academic rigor, or friendliness.

Branding Through Information and Functionality. Information and functionality makes up the "meat" of your Web site. Make sure that it also echoes the brand messages you want to convey.

If you're trying to show yourself as a resource to the community, it follows that your Web site ought to include helpful resources. If you want to convey that you're an expert, use white papers or research. Stories about your services can show the impact and human side of your work. Pictures and videos can highlight things that are hard to say in words. A clearinghouse of news and information in your field from across the web can position you as a central player in your area of expertise.

The sky is the limit. Brainstorm information or functionalities that will be useful to your constituents while reinforcing the perception of your organization you'd like them to have. There's no more genuine way to brand yourself than to make your Web site itself advance your mission.

Branding Through Prioritization. Web sites invariably have a lot of information. Prioritize to draw your visitors to key things that you want them to see and do. Start by choosing only a few things to highlight on your homepage.

Think through the elements in your navigation - these menu items summarize your site and your priorities as an organization. Use eye-catching "teasers", with a catchy headline and an image, to direct visitors to key parts of your site. Remember, if you feature everything, you emphasize nothing.

Branding Through Graphic Design. A clean graphic design is critical in establishing you as a professional and credible organization. A high level of graphic design polish can go even farther, to make you look bigger and more established than you are. While it's difficult to give concrete graphic advice, the colors, fonts, shapes, images and overall feel projected by your design strongly influence your message. They can make a site seem "fun", "expert", "quirky"- an infinite number of messages. Choose your design and your designer carefully.

The key is to make all the elements of your site that send messages about your organization come together in a cohesive way. In this way, you can build a Web site that feels unique, compelling, and highlights the uniqueness of your organization.

***
Laura Quinn is the founder of Idealware in San Francisco. Her email is laura@idealware.org

advertisement