Impactful branding is crucial to NGO success
Impactful branding is crucial to NGO success
In an overcrowded market, good branding is the difference between failure and success for modern nongovernmental organizations.
BY Sooyoung Cho
The nongovernmental organization (NGO) industry is at a turning point. With an oversaturation of donation drives attempting to raise money through pity or guilt, many NGOs are struggling to achieve sustainable engagement and impact in the absence of strong, clear branding.
Many NGOs, especially within the children’s charity sector, are overly reliant on “poverty porn:” images of pitiful-looking children, often presented alongside emotionally manipulative text like “Little Charlie hasn’t eaten today. Are you going to let him go hungry?”
While these might generate a short-term impact, they fail to offer audiences meaningful information about how their money or engagement will change little Charlie’s life, or even what percentage of that money will actually reach little Charlie. Charities rarely provide donors with transparent breakdowns of spending and impact. Over time, this erodes trust and discourages audiences from repeatedly engaging with charities.
Differentiation from competitors
In a crowded market, NGOs also struggle to differentiate themselves from competitors, as they’re typically engaged in similar activities. If your charity provides medical aid to war-torn countries, you’ll likely be providing that aid in the same countries as many of your competitors.
This, however, raises an issue for the consumer. If multiple charities are doing fundamentally similar work, which charities are most worthy of their hard-earned cash? In this setting, it is universally the charities and NGOs with the strongest branding that achieve the greatest traction, and therefore generate the greatest impact.
As CEO of the bread and butter, a brand consultancy agency specializing in supporting NGOs and charities, I recommend NGOs take the following steps to maximize success:
Establish a clear but engaging message
Before you can earn the public’s trust and donations, you must establish the core ethos of your brand and communicate it to your audience.
The best way to achieve this is through a two-layer brand strategy:
- A surface layer that includes advertising and publicity campaigns, plus donation drives around specific events and activities
- A more foundational layer of brand identity, encompassing your brand’s values and message, all of which stay consistent across campaigns
Your brand message isn’t just a call to action, but rather a short phrase or sentence that powerfully sums up what your brand does, how it does that, and what makes it different from its competitors.
In our recent work with Child Fund Korea, for example, we established a new brand message for the children’s charity that clearly stated its core mission: “Letting children be children.”
Develop a distinct visual language
In such a heavily oversaturated industry, your NGO needs to work to establish a visual style that sets itself apart from its competitors.
This is where supergraphics come in. These lightweight graphical elements can be superimposed on top of photos and other images to ensure that they are all unified by a consistent visual language.
In the bread and butter’s work with KFHI, which won Best Visual Design at the Kyoto Global Design Awards 2023, we established a series of intersecting green lines and cross shapes that could easily be dropped onto images and subtly alluded to the brand’s intersectional, Christian ethos.
Supergraphics give your brand the flexibility to still share the photos most relevant to your mission, while ensuring that every image reinforces your brand’s recognition and identity.
Focus on sustainability over short-term results
Especially in charity work, it can be all too easy to prioritize short-term results: We want to raise X amount of money to combat Y time-sensitive issue. In reality, though, these don’t serve us. If we focus too much on generating donations in response to campaigns, we lack the capacity to respond quickly and impactfully when necessary.
Instead, take the time to establish a clear brand and lay strong foundations for sustainable growth. This contributes to heightened brand awareness, reputation and engagement, all of which allows you to generate increased donations and magnify your impact in the long-run.
Sooyoung Cho is CEO of the bread and butter brand consulting LLC.
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