YOLO: You Only Launch Once.
When the time comes to launch your nonprofit’s new brand, you have a tremendous opportunity at hand. You have the chance to build buy-in from your base, drive engagement with your followers, and reach new audiences. Most importantly, you have a one-time opportunity to demonstrate that your new brand will amplify what really matters: the work your nonprofit is doing to make the world a better place.
While you’re working to wrap up your new brand or rebrand, you might be swamped. There’s legal to go through, letterheads to update—we’re with you (often, literally). But when it comes to making the time to thoughtfully invite engagement with your new brand, a Shakespeare quote comes to mind:
“There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.”
If you’re getting ready to launch your nonprofit’s new brand, it might feel like you’re in a flood of to-dos. But because you only launch your new brand once, we’ve compiled eight tips and resources you can use to turn that flood into fortune for your nonprofit’s new brand.
Eight Tips on Launching Your Nonprofit’s New Brand
1. Write a Launch Announcement
Writing a launch announcement to publish on your website as a news item or press release is a great way to inform your audiences about your new brand. In a launch announcement, you can share what’s changed, why it’s changed, and importantly, what’s stayed the same. So, for example, a nonprofit might update its brand (logo, imagery, visual identity, and more) to better reflect its audiences. Of course, your nonprofit is likely still focused on your core issue area or cause, and you can re-emphasize that commitment to your audiences in your launch release. Your launch announcement can cover all of this plus what the process looked like behind the scenes. And if you need more inspiration, we’ve found a rebrand press release guide you can use.
2. Build a Social Media Template Bank
If you’ve got it, flaunt it. Building a bank of social media templates—a series of templates that you can use for the typical kinds of posts that your nonprofit shares—is an excellent tool for sharing your new brand and maintaining visual consistency across your social media. An advocacy nonprofit might want to build templates for petitions whereas an educational nonprofit might build templates for fun facts or tips. No matter your template plans, Canva and Figma are both excellent, collaborative tools for building this bank of templates. Both of these platforms will let you and your team share, copy, and collaborate on the templates that utilize your new brand.
3. Coordinate Social Media Posts
Announcing your new brand to build buy-in and deepen engagement requires cross-channel coordination. So, if you’re writing a blog, publishing a series of Instagram stories, and sharing a launch announcement on Facebook, you should make sure you coordinate the publication of these posts so that no one group of followers is left behind while other groups learn about your rebrand. Content publishers like Hootsuite, Sprout, or Sprinklr are excellent tools for scheduling and coordinating across channels so you can make sure your announcement is shared with your followers in every stream.
4. Update Your Social Media Profiles
A new brand means it’s time to update your social media profiles. We’ve found it best to start this process by making a checklist of all of the assets that will need to be re-made or updated. You can scan your various social media channels—from your email profile photo and your LinkedIn banner to your Instagram buckets and everything in between—and catalog all that will need to be redesigned. Canva, Figma, or Photoshop can be useful here, and you can use this helpful sizing guide to make sure your assets fit each platform. Then, once you’ve made all of the updated assets you need to build brand cohesion across channels, you can even time the updates to go live with your rebrand announcement.
5. Refresh Your Instagram Feed
If your nonprofit organization has an Instagram account, its profile likely has all of the markings of your old brand. One way to bring your new brand to life on your Instagram is to publish 9-12 new Instagram posts that feature your new visual identity. These pieces of content can start with a series announcing your rebrand, and from there, you can post as you normally would—only this time around, you can use your newly branded social media templates (see tip No. 2) for your posts. Posting 9-12 new posts will help make sure your profile reflects the new you, and you can use an Instagram Planner to help make sure that your audience is engaging with your new but cohesive brand.
6. Send an Email Newsletter Update
To make sure that you’re reaching audiences that might not engage with your social media, sharing an email newsletter announcing your rebrand will help ensure that your entire base knows about the new you. A visually rich newsletter that shows off your new brand, walks your audience through the transformation, and invites them to engage with your visual identity will help make sure that all of your stakeholders know who that new icon in their inbox belongs to. If you’re already using an email marketing platform like Mailchimp or Constant Contact, you can make sure you’ve updated your profile there (see tip No. 4), and then share the new you with your list.
7. Post a Blog or Article
A blog or a long-form article that takes a more editorial approach to your launch announcement is an excellent way to build buy-in and deepen engagement with your nonprofit’s new brand. For a long-time follower of your nonprofit who’s interested in what happened behind the scenes or what inspired the change, a blog can serve as a vehicle for communicating those changes. It can also help you communicate the constants, giving you the space to re-emphasize your commitment to your work—and how your new brand can even help strengthen that work and amplify your impact. Constructive CEO Matt Schwartz wrote a blog on one of our own brand’s changes (for us, it was adding a higher purpose), which might be a helpful example of articulating a shift in your brand.
8. Invite and Track Engagement
Though it might be obvious, it’s too important to leave out: When you’re sharing your new nonprofit brand, you should both invite and track engagement across channels. While you might not want to publish a post soliciting design feedback, you may want to invite your audience to reach out to your team with any questions. Also, it’s important not to let all of your marketing efforts be spent in vain. You can use a new or familiar marketing CRM platform (Hootsuite, Hubspot, Mailchimp, or social media platforms themselves) to track engagement with your brand announcement in service of understanding your audience’s reaction to your nonprofit’s new brand.
