The full organisation was now committed to a definitive and consistent brand structure which we, as the agencies tasked with raising voluntary income, had to incorporate.
My heart sank. "Oh, shit", I thought, "not again."
As a brand planner, I should have been delighted. Great -- the principles of brand planning applied to charities. All the goodness of a school dinner cooked by Jamie Oliver and served piping hot.
But experience over the past decade has made me dread brand types in the third sector. Nothing is more likely to destroy effective fundraising than consistent brand architecture.? ?
My pessimism wasn't misplaced. Within moments, we were told about "rights", and "dignity", and "campaigning". "We are no longer a charity helping poor, disadvantaged people survive, but are now an organisation working in partnership with communities, helping them in their fight for what is rightfully theirs. In fact, we were no longer providing a simple, tangible, single minded service, but were now part of "the great battle to eliminate injustice".
"Double shit", I thought. I swear I could see £5 notes floating up from the projector, and streaming out the windows.
Yet again, a great organisation had loaded a shotgun, pointed it squarely at its own foot, and pulled the trigger.<
I have come to the conclusion that brand planners are to fundraising what travel promotions are to Hoover: the most effective tool at destroying income.
Why?
Part of the problem lies in the changing attitudes and approaches of charities - sorry, NGOs -- to what they do.
Organisations that in the past helped disadvantaged people out of a sense of compassion, maternal care, or sense of duty no longer believe this to be the right approach. They have rejected the driver of altruism, and replaced it with a demand for justice (or, more often, the anger that wells from injustice).
Current theory in NGO circles in all areas is certain that treating recipients of aid as clients who need tools of empowerment is far more effective -- and morally acceptable -- than treating them as "the white man's burden".
Fine -- makes sense. And of course, no one has the right to tell an organisation that its strategy or proposition is wrong.
But they do have the right to choose not to support it.
Experience has shown, time and time again, that more people are willing to donate more money when their sense of mercy, pity, or charity is evoked rather than when their sense of injustice is provoked. Fact. It's simple psychology, really -- I am more moved to act by a baby's crying than I am by a message that tells me that people are being treated unfairly.
The second message is more rational, and while I may agree with it, it is more complex, and involves a far deeper thought process: it makes me think rather than act.
And the body of people who are most likely to be driven to act tend to want to join in and volunteer rather than donate funds.
Bluntly, I -- of the age and income that makes me a great charity prospect -- want to help suffering people much more than I want to join a fight.
The second part of the problem is the idea of brand consistency. In a commercial organisation, having one brand construct - at least one outward facing brand construct - is sacrosanct. If my mission is to provide "performance engineering", then I say that in every communication to every external audience (even if internally -- and to my shareholders -- I add the word "profitable" to the two words above). Buyers, prospects, dealers, even people in the street hear the same thing, and all want it, or at least appreciate it.
But charitable organisations have a much more complex group of stake holders. Recipients of aid want one thing, programme deliverers and partners want another, campaigners and lobbyists want third, and then - often at the bottom of the list -- donors want something else. So a "one size fits all" brand architecture tends to be a lowest common denominator construct, and all too often, it's the fundraisers who lose out most.
The brand consultant mentioned above extolled the rigour of her investigation with stakeholders. But there had been no investigation -- through research or testing -- with donors or prospects. So everyone agreed -- except the people, the donors who paid for her project.
Somehow, somewhere, brand thinking has moved out of marketing into some mystical world of HR, corporate culture, or cerebral strategists. Perhaps we brand planners encouraged this by harping on about how a brand had to run through an organisation like the message in a stick of Brighton rock. In any case, we are now in danger of being defeated by the very tool we created. Brand as Frankenstein.
I tried to gently suggest that rather than accepting the brand consultancy's kind offer of creating collateral for us -- please kill me now -- that perhaps we should test executions based on their brand construct in the market. After all, if they were right, we should all see a handsome growth in income. 'Perhaps we'd better take a look at that", said the consultant, hesitatingly. "Perhaps you should", I agreed.
"Is there away to square the circle?", I was asked after the meeting by a client who had both brand and fundraising experience. In this particular situation, there may be a subtle way through - and by that I don't mean ignoring the brand guardians entirely and running work they hadn't seen.
The answer is fluffy, but in a way, very obvious.
Marketing, I am told, is the skill of understanding what people want to buy and then highlighting your provision of these things in communication. Sometimes different people want different things -- so you segment your communications to highlight different messages to different people.
The same thinking, I'm afraid, now has to be applied to brand architecture, since it has reduced itself to absurdity.
Fundraisers have to be allowed to pick and choose what elements of the product and brand to communicate in order to attract donors. We have to find and exploit the aspects that drive donating behaviour, and play down elements that don't. We can't lie, or misrepresent, or even obfuscate, but we damn well have to be given the opportunity to communicate messages which donors and prospects want to hear, rather that which the "manufacturers", ie programme people, want to say.
To hell with perfect consistency.
And if we aren't allowed this freedom? Well, then can the last brand planner turn out the light when they leave the empty offices of the perfectly consistent but bankrupt NGO?