Brandraising: bring out your dead 501(c)'s, re-do 'em in Helvetica
Sarah Durham’s 2010 Brandraising: How Nonprofits Raise Visibility and Money Through Smart Communications is a comprehensive guide to developing (or redesigning) the entire brand identity for a small to medium sized organization, devoting as many pages to topics such as logos and typography as it does to online media strategy. In this way, it does what it says on the tin: the metaphoric portmanteau of ‘brandraising’ which, “like barnraising, requires everyone in your nonprofit’s community ... [to play] a role in the development of effective communications” is given an almost over-thorough treatment. For instance, Durham recommends that the imaginary receptionist be versed in the organization’s mission and personality. Hopefully they won’t need specific training.
In 1994 Durham founded Big Duck, a New York communications firm for nonprofits, and she seems to be more comfortable writing about offline communications and the overall brand experience (mailings and fundraising campaigns, boilerplate texts and elevator pitches) rather than the details of maintaining an active relationship with Twitter followers or Facebook fans. In a way, this reflects the somewhat conservative and spartan nature of many smaller nonprofits, which prefer to stick with what works (and who gives) for fundraising rather than take unproven risks in a shaky economy. She draws attention to the different messaging channels that might be effective with the various social groups an organization must appeal to: new and prospective donors, programming clients, external media and policy-makers. It is no surprise that when writing about social networks she recommends that the brand communicator consider “where your audiences [are] now and where are they likely to be in the future” and that “perhaps participation ... is worth considering” if the audience is already comfortably connected in an existing online community.
Curiously, she spills almost twice as much ink over user generated content than social networks, an area with far more potential to be tricky. For commercial markers, pitfalls abound in this category, but perhaps the challenge of going viral is less toxic for organizations. Durham doesn’t address this issue, but is enthusiastic about various case studies (that arguably are better suited to the theme of social networks), like a Thanksgiving 2008 fundraiser on Twitter where users tweeted about their contributions of $10 for each brick to build a classroom in Tanzania or a grassroots email movement to donate money to Planned Parenthood in honor of the McCain presidential campaign picking Sarah Palin as their veep nominee. For all her enthusiasm about viral messaging, it is frustrating that she fails to draw attention to some of the elements necessary for a successful campaign that any millennial could rattle off: simplicity, authenticity, desire to pass it along, ability to create a meme, etc.
The author’s enthusiasm about self-starting rhizomatic models for fundraising, while neglecting some of the best practices and techniques of the top-down framework to help facilitate the spread, betrays a certain technological utopianism tempered by social shaping: why wouldn’t users participate (not for the lolz but rather) for the ‘warm fuzzies’ of being involved with an organization’s mission? Perhaps the most valuable section “connecting online with major donors” is left as a (broken) URL to a report that the author says “suggests most organizations a re missing the boat when it comes to getting gifts online from major donors.” Oh well, hope you packed an iPad as a supplement to the book. Along the way, there are other useful suggestions to sites for nonprofits to learn the art of social media communications, in keeping with the tone that the book is a handy primer on nonprofit communication strategy, just not a guide to winning social media skills. For that, we might need to put Big Duck on retainer.
[Note: I submitted this review to the Strand's website – the first review! – but I was not expecting it to be vetted before going live, online. That's a pretty major difference from Amazon's user-moderated space, right?]