Fish where the fish are biting. (How smart fundraisers can use micro-branding.)
Terry Richey
Fundraising is challenging enough…fundraisers who need to begin a donor conversation by explaining what their organization does are at a distinct disadvantage. Strong brand recognition helps strong fundraisers become even more successful. But does poor brand awareness do the opposite? What can be done to build brand awareness? How can fundraisers help with brand building?
Yes, there is a correlation
Strong brands reduce the cultivation time needed to solicit donors. But the correlation is more than simply brand awareness. When we managed fundraising and marketing at The Nature Conservancy, we saw this first hand. The Conservancy had low brand awareness because for decades it was proud to be “quietly preserving nature.” As a result, it had an unaided brand awareness of 5%. At the same time, Greenpeace had an unaided brand awareness of 76%. If brand were the only factor, Greenpeace would be miles ahead of the Conservancy in fundraising. The reality was that the Conservancy raised 3,500% more than Greenpeace in a typical year. Broad brand awareness is no doubt helpful but not a panacea.
Additionally, broad brand awareness is expensive and takes time. For one national nonprofit, we did a study that indicated that it would cost $3 million of promotional expenditure to gain each percentage point in brand awareness.
Turning brand-building 90 degrees
For fundraisers, it is not broad brand awareness that matters as much as very specific brand awareness among potential donors. By turning the brand dilemma on its side and looking principally at the segment of prospective donors you want to reach, brand-building is far more manageable. For example, if your nonprofit operates in Houston and you are pursuing a major donor strategy, you don’t need to build brand awareness with 2.2 million people, but rather the 11,000 that represent the top half percent in wealth. Even on a limited budget, you can probably imagine that you can become more visible to this group of 11,000.
What is required to turn brand-building on its side is good segmentation work. Segmentation allows you to identify both the demographic characteristics of your potential audience, such as wealth, age, or geography, as well as the psychographic characteristics, such as interests, attitudes, and opinions. Those psychographic qualities help frame propensity for giving to specific causes.
Try micro-branding
Once you’ve accepted that you can’t boil the ocean on brand awareness, you will be surprised at how much you can do to target a specific segment. Taken to the extreme, we even saw one organization purchase a low-cost outdoor board on the commuter route of one if its key campaign prospects!
Take our Houston major gift segment of 11,000 people as an example. Here are just five of literally a hundred options for reaching this cohort cost-effectively:
---Advertise in the Houston Ballet program and other cultural events
---Link your cause to local issues of interest to gain media coverage
---Provide content and a spokesperson to local public radio programming
---Ask your board members to host “friend-raising” cocktail parties and invite their friends to learn about your organization
---Purchase Google ads that link to searches by your prospective audience
Micro-branding begins with smart segmentation work. We use a visual tool called Constituent Mapping to start a team toward a productive segmentation model. You can download an example of this in the “Tools” section of our website: www.TimberlineStrategy.