Engage From the Inside! (Part 2): The Benefits of Internal Branding for Nonprofits
July 27, 2018
The theme of this series is that "brands are created from the inside-out." So while it’s essential to drive external branding with a well-designed strategy, it's also important to use that strategy "to focus your mission and cultivate the right kind of internal behavior, actions, and culture." The shorthand for this concept is called a "living brand," a concept that’s been part of business management lexicon for some time. Living brands help build and maintain organizational identity and cohesion, which is especially important in the social impact sector, where success is harder to measure than it is in the bottom-line-driven for-profit world.
Unfortunately, nonprofits engaged in strategic planning and brand strategy work often struggle to translate the internal memos and documents generated by the process into broader organizational change. That's because while this work signals an organization's commitment to change and (when done well) offers a path forward, it takes consistent follow-through to get staff aligned with the ideas and concepts behind the strategy.
That's where internal branding shines.
Branding is about engaging and activating audiences, mostly through design (in the broadest sense of the term). But as is the case when engaging audiences outside your organization, you have to do more for your internal audiences than communicate what a brand stands for; you have to demonstrate it. By being purposeful about the experiences created for staff, design can help us translate strategy into something tangible and exciting — something that "lives and breathes" for staff and stakeholders alike.
In other words, positively influencing how staff view and experience their work requires you to be both strategic and creative in how you weave the ideas and concepts behind your brand into everyday workplace situations. It also requires leadership that is committed to the brand and what it stands for. So, assuming you're able to marshal the interest in and resources for an internal branding effort, what will success look like? Here are five benefits of internal branding that underscore its value to nonprofit organizations:
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