When I started at Constructive I spent a lot of time answering the question “what do I do with my spare batteries/unidentifiable computer cables/assorted plastics, etc.?” For a time, my default response was a blank stare that was eventually followed by “Um, let me get back to you on that.” I was hired as an operations manager, not as a sustainability expert after all, and it was overwhelming—what did I know about workplace sustainability?
The truth is, approaching sustainability can seem like a daunting task, and rightly so. The UN defines sustainability as consumption that doesn’t jeopardize future access to resources and which spans the fields of science, policy, economics, and morality. If your company is falling very short of this ideal, you’re not alone. As an entity that relies on the constant stream of energy and resources just to function, businesses’ operational status quo can be pretty unsustainable. And while being irrevocably tied to the global supply chain might mean there’s no way to completely solve the problem of sustainability from your office, there’s still a lot of progress to be made. Here are a few ideas and tips that I’ve picked up while working to incorporate more sustainable practices at Constructive.
Accept Your Limits and Understand Your Local Context
The size and complexity of sustainability can make the lack of tangible progress a demoralizing prospect. There’s no one path or solution that will tip the scales. But passive victories are still victories, and it’s important to take credit for them! Distinguishing which variables you actually have control over—and which ones are out of reach —is an important first step that can help you prioritize initiatives and understand what change is actually achievable within your business’s context.
As tenants, we don’t have control over where our electric power comes from or making improvements to our building’s environmental rating. Still, it’s important to recognize that we choose to operate in a densely populated urban area with ample public transportation and bike infrastructure. All of these factors might seem circumstantial but they add up. Lush natural landscapes aren’t exactly the first images that come to mind when you think of the New York Subway, but relying on mass transit is one of the most impactful decisions an individual can make towards sustainability. It’s important to recognize an office’s contribution towards giving its employees better alternatives whether that be ways to commute, reusable cups and utensils, or prioritizing digital communications over paper ones.
Become a Resource for Your Team
While the onus of becoming more sustainable shouldn’t fall on only one person, it’s important that someone on your team steps up to be the point person for accumulating and sharing new resources and developing an action plan for making these changes. Back to the personal anecdote I opened with: once I had an informed answer to their question, I made sure to offer not only a response but an explanation. In doing so, I came to understand that one of the best ways to gain company buy-in is by educating yourself and acting as a resource to your colleagues.
It takes time and awareness to keep up with government policies, new products, and technology. Being available to field questions, and explain the logic behind processes allows your team to police themselves and foster a proactive culture around sustainability. Empowering others to make informed decisions, and innovate allows our office to operate more efficiently, but also gives individuals the know-how to approach sustainable practices in their personal lives too.
Recognize Your Company’s Consumer Power
Your company has power as a consumer and it should be used to consume smarter. You may already nominally support environmental causes as a company, but how is that translating into your actions as a consumer? Are you thinking about how to reduce waste throughout the purchasing process, from determining a need through to considering the use and post-use of the item? The collective purchasing power of even a few people can’t be overstated. You aren’t accountable for the waste associated with manufacturing, transporting, and recycling of goods you never buy.
When making new purchases, I try and map out its lifespan from start to finish. Whether it can be found used or refurbished, resold, recycled, or repaired helps inform what I buy and how I buy it. But you don’t have to avoid making purchases entirely to consume in a more sustainable way. Exploring secondary markets can have compounding effects of saving money and keeping products in use for longer. We’ve used Craigslist, Chairish, Mac of All Trades, factory refurbished items on Newegg, and Seating Mind to name a few.
Extend the Life Cycle of Your Products
Attempting repairs yourself (if possible) can give your existing equipment an added lifespan and alternative uses. Recently, for example, a small plastic piece on our refrigerator broke. I attempted to find a replacement part but was told that the price of the unit did not justify any spare parts, whether it was under warranty or not. The failure of a tiny piece of plastic worth no more than a few cents would relegate the entire refrigerator to the scrap heap by design! So I got crafty and ended up fixing it with a command hook and a bungee cord. In total, it cost about $2.00 and we’re looking forward to many more years of use.
DIY for the win!
Selling goods is one of the most obvious ways to extend the life cycle of products. But in some cases, the item you’re trying to sell might lack a viable secondary market. To avoid sending such items sent straight to the landfill, you can research and assemble a network of neighbors, charities, nonprofits, environmentally conscious companies, and government agencies, who likely have programs to help you recycle less common goods.
In New York, for example, recycling hard plastics and paper is handled by our building, but we need to involve local businesses or nonprofits to dispose of plastic bags and electronics properly like the Lower East Side Ecology Center. Many more companies are taking an active role in recycling their own or similar goods on their own or through services like Terracycle. There’s even an ecosystem in our building where tenants will exchange furniture and equipment, often for free. For me, this has built up my awareness about the life cycle of items in and out of our office.
Companies like Amazon might make it easy to make purchases based solely on price, but they also make it easy to ignore the impacts of shipping and packaging on the environment, or item’s potential for reuse. Adding these factors into how you make purchases can inform the true value of local vendors. Buying locally and in bulk are two great best practices to start with. As a small company, we definitely understand the necessity of reeling in costs—but prioritizing buying things cheaply overlooks the complex calculus for what makes goods more or less sustainable.
Conclusion
Preserving our resources and environment is a lifelong pursuit that extends well beyond the walls of your office. It’s an issue that’s constantly changing and that you can always return to and improve upon. No matter how intimidating it seems, considering your local context, educating yourself, leveraging your consumer power, and finding secondary uses/markers for your equipment are crucial first steps in helping your office and colleagues champion sustainability.
So make sure you set your thermostat according to efficiency guidelines, put your computers in sleep mode before you clock out, and don’t forget to pat yourself on the back!
Designers often talk about “design intent”, or the overall visual structure of what we want to design based on our intentions at the beginning of the project. During design projects, ommunicating our design intent to clients can sometimes be tough—it’s often abstract and relies on a few creative leaps to understand. This is especially true when partnering with clients who have varying degrees of experience with design teams. We realized that to more clearly communicate with clients, we’d have to build better methods of showcasing our visual and interactive ideas before jumping right into design comps, full layouts, or refined brand elements. That’s where concept boards come in.
Why We Started Using Concept Boards
We started using concept boards about a year ago as a way to clarify our thinking to clients. Each board is organized around a specific theme. Those themes relate to the strategic goals of the organization. For example, an organization may be trying to tell a story about health care in the developing world. The two concept boards may then be called Clean Initiatives, and Bright Future. The visual ideas on each board would be based on that two or three-word theme or title.
Doing it this way helps us to make some strong differentiating choices early on, so the client has a real sense of which visual direction they can go. It might be something clean and minimal, or something warm and lively. Those choices are ones we explore with our clients, using the concept boards as the focus of those discussions. We found that having two of them provided enough of a differentiator that clients could make some clear choices about which one felt ‘right’ for their digital brand. For larger brand initiatives, we might use more concept boards as a way to focus our client’s attention on a wider set of choices.
What We Learned
After using concept boards for the better part of a year, we’ve come to a few key conclusions.
First, it is critically important to explain how the concept board process will benefit clients. As part of our initial conversations with a new client, we go over how the boards work and why we find them useful. Where necessary, we include them in our scope of work as a separate deliverable. When speaking with a client about our design process and methodology, we can pair these concept boards with finished products in case studies, to show how our approach works. For organizations that may have a tighter budget or time constraints, we pitch concept boards as a very effective way to communicate design without a longer investigative process.
Second, you need to dedicate time to selecting and editing images that relate to your client’s brand and area of expertise. We start with quick investigations into interface and typography and pair them with images and other visual artifacts. Those elements, combined with the organization’s brand colors, logo, or key photos, can help tell a much more effective story. Essentially, what we show and what we don’t show can really make or break the conversation.
Third, how you deliver the concept boards matters. Many of our clients are not in New York or would struggle to schedule office visits, so we need to do a lot of things virtually. Our first attempt at concept boards used large jpegs or PDFs that were difficult to view over screen share or on laptops. Those weren’t really effective. The format wasn’t one that a lot of clients were comfortable navigating, and the files got really large. For our subsequent attempts, we started to look at digital tools which could help facilitate that delivery. Pinterest was one we looked at briefly, mostly because of their in-browser sharing tools. We also looked at InVision Boards and decided to keep using it. Their tools worked with a lot of our other design workflows, and features like public link sharing and commenting made the client communication bit much easier.
When reviewing concept boards in client meetings we found it helpful to do a few things to set up the conversation. First, we need to explain what concept boards are (and what they aren’t). We tell clients that these visual design conversations are directional, and not completed designs. Creating a false sense of a solution before we had actually started design would hurt us later on as we explored ideas in more detail.
Clients often like to mix and match elements they find in each concept board. That might mean those clear choices we defined early on got slightly muted. Ultimately, however, it means our clients get more involved early in the design process, and we get feedback on what is (and isn’t) going to work for their brand and their project.
To Conclude…
Concept boards clarify our design intent in a number of ways. Starting with client conversations to explain our process, we clarify concept boards as a design and communications tool. While creating the boards, we focus attention on our client’s needs and their overall brand goals by selecting appropriate images, patterns, and sample user interface concepts. When presenting the concept boards, we clearly explain how they’re used and what feedback we are looking for from the client.
Since everyone needs time to digest and think about these more visual presentations, we use InVision or other digital platforms to share the concept boards with the client. This way, they can look at them independently and speak privately with their team. Overall, concept boards are a very effective way for us to communicate our design intent, and we are very happy with the results!
Receiving feedback and iterating on creative work is a huge part of what we do every day at Constructive. Whether we’re conducting an internal review between our designers and art directors, or discussing work with clients,collaboration is crucial to improving our work.
It’s easy to go through the motions of this feedback loop without thinking critically about how to optimize the delivery of feedback when deadlines are approaching, budgets are tight, and multiple projects are being juggled. In my role as a project manager, we’ve experienced countless meetings to discuss feedback and seen teams (ours and our clients’) use different tactics to deliver feedback with varying degrees of success. What we’ve found is that the difference between good and bad feedback can make a real impact on the final output and overall success of a project, so we believe it’s worth paying attention to. So much so that we want to share some tips on how you can give great design feedback.
How to Give Great Design Feedback
1. Ask questions
A successful design process is collaborative, and by asking thoughtful questions, communication between the client and the design team is strengthened. Rather than sending a list of specific changes that need to be made, posing questions opens up the lines of communication, encourages further discussion, and ensures that no assumptions are being made. Ultimately, we look to our clients for their expertise in the issue areas they work in, and often times we learn more about their needs and their audiences’ needs when they question our design choices and conversation ensues.
2. Communicate problems, not solutions
It can be tempting to review a design and propose solutions to things you don’t think are working. Instead, communicate what the problem is, and why said design decision is troublesome. For example, if you don’t like the placement of a newsletter call-to-action and suggest moving it to another page, telling us more about why users might be more inclined to sign up for the newsletter when reading another content type (news updates vs. insights for example), will give us more insight about your audience and help us propose better solutions. By describing the problem, you’re equipping the designer with more knowledge to explore other solutions, rather than feeding a solution that might not be the best one.
3. Keep the focus on strategic goals
Visual design can be subjective, so keeping the conversation focused on whether or not the design is meeting the stated goals is a great way to keep feedback discussions productive and move projects in the right direction. Instead of asking yourself if you like the new design, pause to recall the strategic goals and key audiences. Does the design successfully address the needs of the audiences it serves? For example, if the stated goal of a research hub on a website is to be the go-to resource for policymakers in X field, does the layout support their need of finding timely updates and skimming dense articles? If so, great! If not, it’s the right time to start asking questions and describing the problem (see tip 1 & 2).
4. Consolidate feedback
Establishing a clear process for feedback delivery is critical to the success of a project, even more so when many stakeholders are involved. Consider this example: several stakeholders are reviewing a design mockup and provide comments that contradict one another. Some think highlighting metrics on a grantee’s performance will be too difficult to maintain on the website, while others feel strongly they should be included. Not only does sorting through this feedback take time, it also puts the onus on the designer to makes sense of competing opinions and decide which one is a priority.
To avoid this cringe-inducing scenario (a project manager’s worst nightmare) we ask our clients to deliver feedback that’s representative of the client team’s final opinions. When projects warrant it, we advise clients to define roles on a project using a RACI matrix, or responsibility assignment matrix. We suggest having one team member be “responsible” for delivering feedback, but ensure those who need to be “consulted” had a chance to voice their opinions.
5. Don’t forget to share the good
Everyone likes to receive affirmation on a job well done. Even though feedback meetings typically focus more on ways to improve work, we love it when clients share what’s working really well within a design. Not only does this pat on the back give us encouragement to keep working hard for our clients, but it also allows us to build up a knowledge base of what our clients like so that we can bring more ideas to the table that align with their tastes.
Wrapping Up
Paying attention to the way in which design feedback is delivered can have a real impact on the success of a project. By implementing these five tips, collaboration is fostered, roles are defined, strategic goals are brought to the forefront of decision-making, and projects can run a little more smoothly.
We have a lot of clients who come to us with clearly defined priorities for their branding and design projects. Often they’ve identified their problems and the solutions—they’re looking for a partner to simply execute their vision. We think as an agency, we sell our clients short if we take all of their priorities as gospel. In fact, our process is designed to first ask Why, not How, we’ll deliver the goods.
You Know What they Say about Assuming…
One of the most important roles we can play as strategic partners is to identify and politely probe at our clients’ assumptions. We want to make sure that we’re fully understanding our clients’ problems and needs before we all agree on solutions. My worst fear (OK there are worse ones if I’m honest) is establishing a strategy based a faulty hunch and then realizing half-way through the project that we’ve made a poor decision, wasting time and money.
To make this more tangible, here’s how these assumptions/push-back typically plays out:
Client: We’ve heard from our constituents that they struggle to find our offices [Problem]. A priority for our new website is an interactive map that shows every one of our offices [Solution based on Assumptions].
Now, we’re confident that we can make a great interactive map. But are we absolutely sure that the interactive map is a solution to this client’s challenge?
This is a perfect opportunity to dissect the problem and identify questions we need answers to. Perhaps we should ask who can’t find the offices? How are they searching for them? What information are they finding and not finding?
Probing assumptions at the beginning of a project almost invariably confirms the need to speak directly with the people who will use your website, interact with your designs, or read your messages. There are countless examples of user research providing completely unexpected and critical insight for projects. By asking questions that shed light on our information gaps related to our audiences, we’re able to prioritize learning about their needs and perspective.
So short of employing the somewhat reductive 5 Whys Method (which we still dig in the right setting), how do we structure engagements to focus on the right questions, get answers, and not move at a glacial pace?
The 5 Whys Method, in all its inquisitive glory.
Putting Inquiry into Practice
In a nutshell, as we begin the Discovery phase of a project, our team focuses our energy on identifying all of our information gaps and any assumptions. From there, we group these questions thematically into areas of inquiry. Then we try to capture these areas of inquiries in 3-5 specific and concise Key Discovery Questions that we’ll present to our clients and use to guide our research activities.
To make this slightly less abstract, I’ll use a (very silly) example:
The Society for the Promotion of Nontoxic Spoons, (SPNS) partners with us to design a new website. They tell us one of their primary goals is to create a more user-friendly knowledge hub that will drive traffic to their plethora of thought leadership on spoons. They tell us the current knowledge hub is difficult to navigate and search.
First, we begin by listing all of the questions we have about SPNS, their audiences, their thought leadership, and their current website. From a long list, we’re able to focus our areas of inquiry on several Key Discovery Questions:
Who is currently reading your thought leadership?
Are these your target audiences?
What information do your target audiences need and how do they need it delivered?
After sharing and refining our list of Key Discovery Questions with SPNS, we design a set of sub-questions that we’ll ask over the course of our research to gain deeper insight. Then we establish which research activities will help us get answers to these questions. To stick with our ridiculous example:
Who’s currently reading your thought leadership? → What can analytics tell us about their behavior? (Analytics Review)
Are these your target audiences?→ What do you hope to achieve with each audience? What specific actions do you want each audience to take on your website? How do these actions serve your broader mission? (Staff Survey & Workshop)
What information do your target audiences need and how do they need it delivered? → Why and how do users find their way to the website, and the knowledge hub specifically? How do they prefer to consume information? (User Research)
I’d love to go into the details of our research intake process here, but it’s probably best to save that for a future insight. Regardless, once we’ve finished our intake, it’s time to make sense of our findings in order to present them in a way that establishes clear recommendations/priorities for executing future work. For digital projects, like PHI or Surdna Foundation, these recommendations often take the shape of business requirements and a project roadmap. Similarly, for brand strategy projects, we present a brand assessment and project roadmap. In both cases, our Key Discovery Questions serve as both a framework for structuring our findings and recommendations and provide a strong foundation from which to launch a project.
Some of our research findings in a brand assessment.
Summing Up
Exhausted yet? It’s a lot of inquiry. It might be easier to just build the interactive map or the knowledge hub. But the question-asking pays off when we have a ton of data and insights to back up our conclusions. We’re able to set priorities and measurable goals for the project based on a broader perspective on our client’s challenges and their audience’s needs. And perhaps most importantly, we establish an ethos for the rest of the project around testing assumptions and exploring ideas that will serve all of us as we navigate decision-making. With a little luck, our partners will be on board with the idea of continuing to test our work as we move into the execution phases with message testing, user-research, and prototyping
Let’s say your organization wants to redesign its website. You do your research, craft a thoughtful RFP, send it to a short-list of impressive agencies, and have a few promising conversations. After follow-up discussions with those agencies, proposals land in your inbox. Exciting stuff! Now it’s time to start reviewing them. But what distinguishes a good proposal from a great one? And how do agencies assess your project and create a plan and budget without knowing you all that well?
The reality is that even after having a few conversations with you, agencies still have limited insight into your organization and project needs at this point. It’s why we often ask so many questions before developing a proposal! With strategic brand and design work in particular, the variations in how a project could play out and what the outcomes need to be are pretty massive.
Our job when making a proposal is to mold our limited insights about your project into a document that articulates how we’ll meet your goals and what working with us will be like. This is no small task considering we’ve only just met!
The Bread and Butter of a Great Proposal
So how do we grapple with this uncertainty and create a proposal that really resonates? Well, if you’re anything like me—which is to say, a mediocre yet overconfident home cook whose culinary education came entirely from Chopped—you might best understand the elements of a proposal the same way I’ve come to: in terms of food.
As with any good recipe, there are a few key ingredients that make a proposal successful. These elements add specificity and depth to an agency’s understanding of your project; without them, we risk pitching a project based on assumptions. Would you make guacamole without limes, salt, or cilantro? You could try…but you’d basically just have mushy avocado. Still edible, but not quite what your dinner guests were expecting.
Craving tacos now? Me too, all the time. But before you ditch this article for your nearest taco joint, let’s talk about the key ingredients of a thoughtful proposal. While every agency has a bit of a different recipe, we find that understanding your goals and your project’s working rhythms, process, scope, and budget lead to a more robust and accurate proposal. This isn’t a secret recipe, either. In fact, we’re eager to share it in the hopes that doing so will help you develop more detailed RFPs, better prepare for calls with agencies, and evaluate proposals with a clearer understanding of the process that goes into creating them.
Four Essential Ingredients
Ingredient #1: Your Goals
Before we open up InDesign to start working on your proposal, we need to have a good understanding of what’s going on at your organization, the main drivers of this work, and your overall goals for the engagement. (Luckily, InDesign takes so long to load that we can afford to be quite reflective while we wait!)
If you read our insights often, you’ll know that we’re big believers in the power of brand and design to help organizations advance their impact and improve internal cohesion. So it follows that the success of your project can play a critical role in helping advance your larger organizational goals too.
Understanding these top-level goals and how your project relates to them contextualizes your project in our proposal and make the case for the approach we’re presenting. It also helps you make the case for this work to other stakeholders by demonstrating its connection to larger internal and/or programmatic ambitions.
Guaranteeing a Great Proposal:
Before you reach out to any agencies, take time with your wider team to reflect on what’s driving this project, why your current brand or website isn’t working for you, and what you’re hoping a new one will do. It can be tempting to start listing out specific details like features on a new site, but trust us when we say it’s a better use of your time at this point to focus primarily, though not exclusively, on organizational goals—even if they’re vague.
When you’re reviewing proposals, look for alignment with your expressed goals. In our opinion, it’s a great marker that an agency understands the broader context of your project.
Ingredient #2: Working Rhythms
Next, we need to know what you’re expecting a partnership to look like. A slightly corny question we ask to get at this when we’re chatting with organizations is “What are you looking for in a partner?” It typically takes folks by surprise—maybe because it sounds more like an eHarmony question than one about a creative project—but since brand and design work is highly collaborative, understanding your expectations goes a long way in beginning to build a relationship of trust.
Answers to this question shed light on how our relationship will play out over the course of the project and allow us to dig a bit deeper into the dynamics of a potential partnership. By gaining an understanding of your project team, key decision-makers, and deliberation styles, we can start to gauge how long different phases of the project might take and how involved in creative deliberations your team will be—this will be important for determining the scope of our work with you. And like your goals, this information helps us contextualize details about our process, outlining one that best fits your working style.
Guaranteeing a Great Proposal:
Think about what you’re looking for in a partner as you begin to have conversations with agencies. Do you need a partner who takes a strong lead to move the project along quickly? Or are you looking for more collaboration and patience because you know your team is quite deliberative when it comes to making decisions? In any case, knowing this in advance will help you get a sense for which agencies would be the best fit.
Establish a project team with defined roles and a process for making decisions. This should include key decision-makers and anyone else at your organization who needs to be consulted about this work. Not only will this help us tailor our process to your unique situation; it also gives you a great question to ask potential partners—do they have experience working in a context similar to yours?
Ingredient #3: Project Process
The project process pages are the meat of any proposal (and you thought I forgot about the food metaphor!) This is the part of the proposal where things start taking shape; where we take what we’ve learned about your goals and working style and adjust our process to best set the project up for success. And while we have a pretty refined process for brand, design, and digital projects, no one engagement is the same. So, knowing that your organization might need ample time to deliver feedback on a new logo, for example, allows us to build additional rounds of revision into the design phase of the project.
Guaranteeing a Great Proposal:
Try to focus your attention on process as you speak with different agencies and make sure you have time to ask questions about it. An agency is always happy to talk to you about their unique approach, and while we can never tell you exactly what project success will look like, we can tell you how we’ll get you there.
Despite the fact that proposals look like quite official and formal documents, none of the information within them is set in stone. A proposal should be the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one, so if you feel as though parts of a suggested process won’t work for you, speak up! An agency should be happy to either incorporate changes or explain their thinking to you.
Ingredient #4: Scope of Work & Budget
Who else agrees I’ve left the best part for last?! No one? Hm…how strange. Not.
It’s no secret that one of the most important (and for agencies, challenging) aspects of a proposal are the scope of our work and the budget. The reality is that when it comes to scope—the clearly defined boundaries of your project—agencies never know exactly what we’ll be creating until we actually start the work. That means that when we put together proposals, we have to rely on past experience with similar projects to understand what makes the most sense to prioritize.
That’s not to say, however, that we can’t make a proposal in cases where the scope is unclear. In fact, in those cases, we’ll propose a Strategic Discovery Engagement as a first step toward clarifying goals and more clearly outlining the details of future work.
A project’s proposed scope is intrinsically connected to its budget because, well, how can we know how much something costs if we don’t have a decent sense of what it’s going to include? Budget is a design consideration like anything else, so being upfront about your expectations and limitations helps us adjust our process to meet your needs. Candid conversations about budget also help ensure that the number we put in front of you in our estimate is in line with expectations.
Guaranteeing a Great Proposal:
If there are any specific elements you want your project to include—a robust analytics assessment, for example—tell agencies about them so we can make sure we’re not missing anything as we think through the scope. On the other hand, don’t be afraid to tell us if your priorities are unclear. Good agencies should have an approach for tackling such situations and can develop a proposal that articulates how they’ll help you define goals and priorities.
Research the costs of brand and design work as you start to think about your budget, then be transparent with agencies about that number as soon as you start talking with them. If you don’t have a budget, giving us a sense of your expectations still helps agencies avoid delivering an unrealistic estimate in our proposal.
Ask questions! Like I mentioned above, we’re happy to justify or clarify different items or make adjustments if necessary, especially with something as important as the budget.
Summing Up
Long story short, it can take a lot of information-gathering for agencies to feel prepared enough to develop a proposal. Like a chef needs access to certain ingredients to make a dish worthy of a 5-star Yelp review, agencies need an understanding of your organization’s unique context to craft a proposal that makes an impact. Using your top-level goals, working rhythms, process, scope, and budget as our guiding lights, agencies can begin to add specificity to your project needs and outline an approach that sets our potential project up for success.
Alright, it’s finally time to get those tacos! Just think how much better they’ll taste now that you’re fully equipped to distinguish between good proposals and great proposals—or, if you’ll indulge me one last time, Guy Fieri proposals and Julia Child proposals.
Let’s go back in time to Monday October, 8th—the Monday before ComNet18. Just as Lexie and Senongo were putting their finishing touches on our pre-conference workshop, the plans for our trip seemed as up in the air as ever. Workers at the Westin San Francisco—the conference venue—were on strike along with thousands of other Marriot-owned hotel workers across the country, citing strenuous and dangerous working conditions, low wages, and other concerns. We didn’t know where we’d be staying, where the conference would be held, and more importantly, whether we’d be asked to sacrifice our values as an agency to cross picket lines.
The good news: We didn’t have to cross any picket lines. The Communications Network team decided to switch venues just a day before things kicked off. Kudos to them for all that last-minute scrambling and what we can only assume were more than a few sleepless nights. You deserve all the applause.
The better news: Just like years past, we learned a lot, met dozens of interesting people, and left inspired and excited to incorporate some of the ideas we learned into our work. So yes, you guessed it! Here comes another conference takeaway blog post.
A Brand’s Actions Speak Just as Loud as Words
One of the biggest themes of this year’s conference from our perspective was inclusive, equitable communications and how an organization can be an advocate, ally, and facilitator of the change they seek in the world with their messaging and actions. Case in point? ComNet deciding to move the conference so no one had to cross picket lines. It wasn’t the easy move, but it was the right move and as a brand committed to improving lives through communications, it was the only move.
As nonprofit brand strategists, it can be challenging to articulate how a brand is a living representation of your organization’s values and how important that brand is to establishing trust between your organization and its audiences. ComNet 18 showcased this idea in action perfectly. Not only did The COmmunications Network totally change venues at the last minute to align with their brand’s values; they also invited one of Unite Here Local 2’s leaders onstage during the final morning of the conference to talk about what the protest meant to her, her family, and her community. Talk about using your brand as a vehicle to share the stories of others!
Consuelo [didn’t get her last name!], a lobby attendant at @Marriott: “we deserve to have a seat at the table when they make these decisions. all my brothers and sisters are on the streets. it’s hard, but i know we will win.” ✊🏼✊🏼✊🏼 #onejobshouldbeenough#ComNet18pic.twitter.com/0llmfyMoo7
Speaking of stories, “storytelling” has become a buzzword in the nonprofit world over the last few years. And for good reason—sharing the stories of the communities we work with is a great way to illustrate and build empathy for the issues we’re tackling. But storytelling isn’t that simple. The stories we tell and the ways in which we tell them can make or break the way they are interpreted by our audiences.
Our pre-conference workshop, With All Due Respect, touched on this idea. That while stories can be a powerful tool for change, they can also reinforce biases if they aren’t told carefully. In her portion of our workshop, Lexie discussed the ways in which our brains fill gaps in stories with pre-programmed, implicit biases. To overcome this tendency, we should tell stories that make systems a leading character, explaining the connections between individual challenges and systemic barriers so the audience doesn’t have to rely on their own assumptions to connect the dots.
An action shot of some of the lovely folks at our workshop writing explanatory stories.
We dove a bit deeper into the complex facets of storytelling on Thursday morning at What We’re Up Against, the Second Stage presentation led by Shaun Adamec of Adamec Communications and Nat Kendall-Taylor of the Frameworks Institute. They began their discussion with this question: why is it that our messages are so often misinterpreted by our audiences? In other words, what is it that comes between what “you say” as an organization and what “they think” as your audience? The answer is culture. More specifically, it’s a set of pervasive cultural myths that shape our interpretations of various social dynamics and issues. One of these myths is “fatalism,” or the idea that the problems we face are too big and deeply rooted to ever change. Framing our messages in a way that balances the problem with potential solutions is a powerful way to ensure our audiences’ brains don’t default to a fatalistic way of thinking.
Brand isn’t a Bad Word Anymore
Ten years ago, it was uncommon and unpopular to talk about branding in the nonprofit sector. The “b” word, as we like to call it, was reserved for the for-profit world. But over the last few years, brand has become much less of a dirty word—in fact, the topic of brand made quite a strong showing throughout this year’s breakout sessions. During one of ComNet’s new Dialogue sessions, the Walton Family Foundation discussed their recent, large-scale brand rollout and the ways in which they used the process as a tool to generate enthusiasm across departments. The room was packed full of folks with engaging questions and comments about the benefits of branding.
Of course this is great news for everyone in the agency world, but it’s also great news for the nonprofit world. Why? Stronger nonprofit brands lead to nonprofits with more focused missions, more devoted teams, and an increased capacity to create impact. We could talk for pages about this idea alone, but since that’s not what you came here for, here’s a link in case you want to learn more about that.
See You Next Year?
I could go on about ComNet18 for hours. But for the sake of your time and attention, I’ll stop myself here. Actually, one more thing: Lena Waithe and Cecile Richards totally blew our minds with their insights about sharing stories and perspectives that otherwise might go unheard or untold. Can one of you please run for president in 2020? Okay now I’m done. See you next year in Austin!
Our happy (and relieved) team after our pre-conference workshop!
Since the beginning of time (i.e. August 6, 1991), web designers and developers have been working to perfect the process of creating websites. It’s a process that’s never complete because things keep changing in digital communications. When it comes to nonprofits looking to deliver engaging digital experiences that involve large volumes of content, there are a lot of things we must take into consideration: planning, architecture, design, development, front-end coding, testing, and deployment. And the more content-heavy a nonprofit’s website, the more difficult this can be. The general process many web design firms have traditionally used goes something like this:
This approach may work well for certain kinds of projects, but when it comes to large, content-heavy websites with a large number of page types and content types, there is room for improvement. Over the years, a lot has been written about “Content First” approaches to site development (Luke Wroblewski, Jeffrey Zeldman, Georgy Cohen), especially in the age of responsive design. These ideas are all well and good, but in the real world, having content developed before initiating the site build isn’t usually realistic. However, we can (and should!) include content in the process sooner and more often than often is the case. This is exactly the kind of thinking that goes into developing content strategy for websites.
Content Development is Hard!
Let’s get this out of the way first: content development is always, always, always the hardest part of a website project. Yet how often do we underestimate the amount of effort it takes to collect, analyze, write and edit good site copy? Never mind getting good images, which are also content but somehow treated separately. Hours spent, from needle-in-the-haystack scrolling through stock photos to hiring photographers and illustrators to create custom imagery.
The main reason people visit our websites is to read our content. Yet, time and again, (especially in the world of nonprofit websites), content treated as a separate thing—handled by the client (often for budgeting reasons), divorced from the design and development. The problem with this approach is that once the visual design work is done, unless a design firm is handling content development as an integrated part of the process, clients are left to make the content to work within a content strategy and website designs that expect idealized content.
Now, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing; a little structure is good to help focus our content. Good wireframes and design comps can help give clients an idea of how a new site design will help them frame the discussion and focus their message. But unless a content team is integrated into the process, rarely do the results live up to the promise once designs have been approved and it’s time to get to writing.
The Discontents of Our Content
Over the years, we’ve continuously refined our design and development process to reflect the needs of delivering great content for the nonprofits we work with. And one thing is clear: approaching a website by designing lots of great-looking comps and/or prototypes, building them, and then populating with content can be problematic.
When it comes to designing content-rich nonprofit websites, we can run into serious trouble when real content is integrated into the idealized world of our design comps. Symptoms include content that doesn’t consistently fit the templates, content that exists but has no place to live, content that breaks the visual designs, and so on.
And this problem extends to the development side as well: when final content is delivered after a CMSs is architected, it rarely fits into the neat little boxes we create to support it—or unanticipated content creates problems, forcing the redevelopment of pages or features.
As a result, for many projects, after content is entered, there is a period of fixing where designers and developers spend countless hours working together to get the pages to “work”—tightening up all the loose ends and pushing ever closer to those idyllic design comps the client (and designers) fell in love with. This introduces a painful period of rework into the process that looks like this diagram, and points to a flaw in how we plan and design for the real content.
Process Adjustments
Given all of these issues, it seems clear that what’s needed are “content reality checks” along the way. Because, ultimately, the real content must meet the real designs and decisions need to be made when there are issues. So, as part of our ever-evolving digital process, we’ve added check-ins throughout the design and development process that make it easy for everyone to translate our content strategy into effective designs, saving a lot of time, money, and headaches. It looks something like this:
Two things are different here:
There are periodic check-ins between the content developers, the designers, and the developers. The designers and developers should have access to some of the content plans and the content developers need to have some idea of what is going on with design and development. There is a lot of efficiency to be gained if visual designers, developers, and content developers can work together more.
Deferring Theming (which includes front end coding and its integration with the CMS) until at least some representative content is entered into the CMS allows the front-end coders to make real-life decisions on how pages will render. This also prevents them from having to refactor their front-end code to handle last-minute changes to the site. Additionally, this is a major boon when working on projects with a responsive design component, as the front-end coder can test real-world content on a variety of devices and screen-sizes while they’re coding.
A More Integrated Approach
When greater effort is made to incorporate content strategy and content creation into the website design/development process, teams save significant time and effort—and their results will be brand experiences for audiences where content, design, and technology work together in harmony to engage audiences.
When I first began as a designer, I felt like my designs had to be “complete” before I could show them to anyone. I think this vulnerability stems from a feeling that, as designers, we want to think through every element before we can call a design complete. But here’s the thing: another person on your team has likely solved similar challenges. But the concept of the solitary creative genius is a myth. The truth is that a collaborative design process—a design process that’s inclusive—emphasizes co-creation and is the best way to produce effective design. And when our design work is strategic and ethical human-centered design for nonprofits, having social impact on complex issues takes a diversity of perspectives and expertise.
Over the years, I’ve come to learn that designing collaboratively means putting your ego aside to make something that transcends the sum of its creators. A collaborative design process can be challenging at times—especially at first. But getting out of our own heads and incorporating collaboration into our design process is worth the effort because it improves our work. Especially if you’re collaborating not just with other designers, but with people who add different perspectives and lived experience that enriches our work.
I spend most of my days independently thinking through design concepts and ways to execute them with prototypes, wireframes, sketches (lots of sketches!), and of course .jpgs, .pdfs and some .sketch files. But the truth is that a computer can be one of the worst tools for problem-solving. And it’s definitely the worst place to start. That’s because we usually limit our design thinking based on what the tool can do, not what our strategic design goals are.
Design is about working with ideas—translating intangible concepts into something that can be seen or interacted with. It’s much better to start the design process by discussing design goals and outcomes. Then have regular conversations as you work to make the design process more inclusive. And grounding your design practice with brand strategy is key, because it centers our design conversations on a nonprofit’s impact strategies.
At Constructive, we use these conversations—which always start with client teams at the nonprofits we’re working with—to establish what we call “Design Principles.” By articulating 5-7 clear design principles into our work, we can be sure that what a nonprofit’s branding, communications, or website design must embody is always front of mind.
2. Embrace Internal Design Reviews
We always review internally as a team before presenting our design work to the nonprofits that Constructive works with. We spend a lot of time together discussing things both big and small—evaluating design from a micro and macro level. Talking through a nonprofit’s identity design system adds invaluable expert perspectives to your thinking that usually makes the work better.
What I’ve learned is that internal reviews are probably my most valuable time I have when designing. That’s what makes working on a team so great—you’re not on your own! Designers are experts in design language and design thinking, so they tend to know how to give good design feedback. You may not agree with all the feedback, but it’ll all be good food for thought.
After Constructive’s design team critiques my work, I’m more confident about what my next steps are. That’s because I’ve gotten feedback that lets me see things I might not see on my own. It’s easy to justify a system’s flaws in your head when you’re the only person who’s seen the design. Having someone whose opinion you respect give you honest feedback is the perfect antidote to falling in love with design ideas that aren’t working.
Constructive’s design team during one of my internal design critiques
One more note about why internal design reviews are so valuable. They’re great practice for your presentations before you present to a client. What sort of language am I using to describe the design? Are my ideas clear or I have to over-explain my rationale so that people understand the intention? If so, I probably want to make sure those things are more clear in design so that I can explain less.
3. Incorporate Prototype Testing Into Your Design Process
When most people think of design prototypes, they think of an interactive for a website design or product design. But a prototype can be almost anything—a piece of paper, a card-sorting exercise, an series of clickable static design comps, or a fully-coded interactive experience that’s used to gain insights during user testing. And prototypes don’t just have to be for things like nonprofit web design. Prototypes are one of many valuable tools for service design, which can be particularly helpful for nonprofits who use inclusive design and lived experience to design programs that are more responsive to the needs of their end beneficiaries.
When I’m uncertain about an assumption I have about a design, it helps to do some informal user testing with both designers and non-designers. Testing with members of your design team is a really helpful exercise for thinking through basic user experience patterns because everyone brings a unique understanding of web accessibility standards and how to improve usability.
For example, when Constructive was creating The Air Quality Life Index, an environmental data visualization platform and research tool, I conducted several rounds of user testing with our design team early in the design process. We developed static UX design prototypes and tested them internally before conducting user testing with our target audience. As a result, I was able to streamline the interface design for the nonprofit’s data visualization tool early and make the functionality more user-friendly. This, then made our user testing with audiences better and more valuable.
[contentupgrade id=”9329″]
4. Schedule Weekly Design Huddles
In addition to our internal design reviews that are aligned with project schedules, Constructive’s design team checks in with each other regularly throughout the week. We have design stand-ups through Slack that just allow people to let others know what they’re working on—and ask for help if they’re stuck. We also have weekly design huddles, which give us all an opportunity to have more in-deph design conversations about design process, design trends, and design inspiration.
Especially when design teams are working remotely, It’s important to come together as a group. First of all, feeling connected to one another as a team is really important—again, that’s what being part of a team is all about. It also creates the space that designers need to discuss design issues and opportunities that we’re experiencing—and get help from our teammates.
A Constructive design huddle reviewing card sorting in action!
5. Share Design Inspiration—Lots of Design Inspiration!
Designers need inspiration. And inspiration can come from just about anywhere! To keep our design thinking as creative and innovative as possible, Constructive’s team shares tons of examples of great design work that resonates with us keep our deign thinking innovative. We try to share and keep an organized record of all the things we see online that inspire us. We have a channel in Slack just dedicated to design, where our team shares great design throughout the day. And we also use Dropmark to categorize links to branding and website design for nonprofits that we love—as well as design work for other sectors.
Cultivating a culture of continuous learning is one of Constructive’s core values, and this practice of sharing and categorizing design inspiration is a big part of this. What makes this collective sharing of design ideas so valuable is that it keeps our team focused on what great work looks like, it expands our thinking about what great design work can be, and it help us us cultivate a design practice that’s more diverse by drawing on all of our perspective. And this, in turn, makes the design work we’re doing with the nonprofits that Constructive partners with more strategic, more creative, and more effective.
Constructive’s Dropmark library organizes our ideas and inspiration to make them easier to reference.
6. Make Sure Large Teams Are Pulling in the Same Direction
Larger design projects, such as content-heavy websites demand even more collaboration—not just between designers, but between strategists, writers, and web developers. These projects highlight the importance of a good design process and teamwork. The more people working on a project, the more complex the project, and the longer that project takes to complete; the more likely it is that your original design intent can break down.
I’ve learned that when something in a design system is bothering one person, it’s usually negatively affecting other people as well. And these impacts can make the jobs of other people on the team more difficult. That’s why you’ve got to stay aligned and make sure you’re having those conversations. Sometimes a static design comp looks great as a jpg, but it turns out that it will be far too complicated for web developers to build (or at least it could be radically simplified). Or, when it’s eventually coded, a nonprofit’s website design falls short of a nonprofit’s accessibility design goals—and as a result creates a less inclusive experience.
Working as part of a multi-disciplinary team is about process and communication. Extend collaboration to everyone on a project team, not just the designers, and large, complex web design projects will have fewer headaches—and will be more effective as a result.
Final Thoughts
Why am I telling you this? The obvious answer is that any team needs to collaborate to work successfully. That holds a nugget of truth, but the real answer goes much further. No matter your discipline—design, development, content, or strategy—I believe we get better each day as individuals by engaging in challenging conversations with each other. This, in turn, creates a much stronger, more powerful team.
Hopefully, what I’ve learned about collaboration techniques by working in Constructive’s design practice are helpful to your design process and can help you have greater social impact as a result.
For many organizations working in the nonprofit or social change space, working with a design agency can be unfamiliar territory. To make matters worse, there’s a lot of jargon thrown around within design agencies that can be a barrier for clients who are unfamiliar with the design process.
As a project manager who made the switch from the nonprofit sector to Constructive, I sympathize with our clients who find the design world rather intimidating. That’s why I’m here, to break down the typical process for a website redesign and make it as approachable as possible!
There are two main phases of the website design process that non-designers should be aware of: information architecture and visual design.
Information Architecture
Once we’ve done our research and clearly defined a digital strategy for a client’s new website, we move into what is called the “information architecture” phase of a project. In layman’s terms, this simply means that we are working to organize a site’s content in a way that is user-friendly and aligns with the organization’s goals for engaging its audiences. During this phase, a designer or UX designer (user experience designer) will be working on two main deliverables: a sitemap and wireframes.
A sitemap is a diagram that lays out a website’s structure and defines the relationships between content and various pages on the site. From a sitemap, you should be able to discern how a user would navigate through your site. For example, if you want to find where a news article “lives”, you’d follow the flow-chart like diagram from Home, to News & Events, and then arrive at your desired destination, a single news article. It provides you with a birds-eye view of your entire website and lays the foundation for what is to come next in the information architecture process. Here’s what they typically look like:
Building on the sitemap, wireframes dig a little deeper and flesh out how content and other elements will be organized on a page by page basis. At Constructive, we start with rough wireframes and incorporate more detail as we receive feedback from clients. You can think of wireframes as being like blueprints for a house一they show you how everything will be laid out, but leave out design details. For example, you’ll see black, white and grey boxes that suggest what content will display where, but you won’t see designed elements just yet (that will come in the next phase)! Before finalizing the wireframes, we’ll also make notes about functionality to remove any ambiguity about how certain features or elements will behave once translated from static comps to the dynamic site.
Visual Design
During this phase, you’ll get to see all our ideas on how to improve content strategy and user experience come to life. A designer will be working on two main deliverables: a concept board and several iterations of a design comp.
Concept boards are a collection of visual elements that convey an overall look and feel to help define a clear direction before jumping into the design of individual pages. We’ll typically provide our clients with two design directions, and work with them to select a direction that feels most fitting for their audience.
Once a direction has been confirmed, we’ll move into designing individual pages of the site, looking at things like color, type, and image treatment (these are called design comps). Designers might throw some unfamiliar words into the mix, so here’s a list of common elements that are found on most of the sites we work on:
Hero image: The image in the header of a page.
Hub page: A page that serves to organize related content. Hub pages are typically found in the navigation and contain unique content, but also group associated content. For instance, the “About Hub” might contain important information about an organization, and then link to a staff and careers page.
CTA: short for “call to action.” This could be a donate button, or newsletter sign-up.
Hamburger menu: a common menu style with three lines in a circle emulating a hamburger.
Kicker: small text above content that serves to reinforce what a user is looking at. For example, a site might display several kinds of research in a research archive, and a kicker would specify if it’s a report, article, book, etc.
Lorem ipsum: placeholder text used to fill design comps to emphasize design elements over content.
Hover state: the interaction when a user hovers over a button or linked text to indicate that clicking the element will take you off the current page.
To Conclude
Demystifying the web design process and defining some of the jargon can make the experience a lot more approachable and ultimately more collaborative. Once you cut through the unfamiliar territory and have an understanding of what to expect during a website redesign, you’re ready to confidently take on the exciting and important task of improving your organization’s digital presence.
When I tell people I work on nonprofit brand strategy, I get a lot of blank stares and raised eyebrows. I get it: brand strategy is a bit of a buzzword these days and it’s not exactly easy to define or understand. Adding to the confusion, there’s a lingering perception that brand strategy belongs exclusively to the corporate world, that it’s something mega brands like Nike, Coca Cola, and Starbucks leverage to woo new customers in a crowded marketplace.
So this article is for all those interested in, confused by, or skeptical about nonprofit brand strategy. It’s my answer to the raised eyebrows, a proclamation of my firmly held conviction that a well-articulated brand strategy can be transformative for organizations working to create social change.
Agreeing on a Definition
Our team has written a lot about brand theory already, and my aim in this article is to move beyond theory and discuss some of the tangible outcomes of a successful nonprofit brand strategy. But to make sure we’re all on the same page, I’d like to quickly review what brand and brand strategy are.
There are many definitions of brand, but for our purposes let me define it as the collective perception of an organization shared by its customers or constituents. Brand lives in the minds and experiences of all the different people who come into contact with an organization, including staff, board members, donors, beneficiaries, etc. As branding/design/all-around genius Marty Neumeier notes, your brand is not what you say it is, it’s what they say it is.
Brand strategy is an organization’s articulation of how its brand is meant to be understood and expressed. At Constructive, we break down brand strategy into the ideas that drive and position an organization, the messages that express them, and the designed experiences that translate these ideas into more tangible deliverables such as a visual identity, communications collateral, and digital presence.
So with that out of the way, how does a successfully defined brand strategy actually help social change organizations accomplish their mission?
A Gut Check
In my opinion, some of the greatest benefits to be gained from a brand strategy engagement come from the process itself, not only from the final deliverables.
Nonprofit brand strategy engagements typically (and always should) begin with extensive research and analysis of the organization and its existing brand. At Constructive, this phase is known as “discovery,” and our research can take the form of interviews with internal and external audiences, surveys, peer analyses, and workshops with organizational leadership and staff. The culmination of this phase is a brand assessment that articulates the organizational goals for the brand strategy engagement, the perceived weaknesses and strengths of the organization’s current brand, and a plan for mitigating challenges and leveraging opportunities.
Regardless of the exact nature of this up-front research and assessment phase, the value-add is the same: invaluable insights on how people — from junior staff to leadership, donors to beneficiaries — perceive your brand. It’s a rare opportunity to gain visibility into how all these audiences think about and value your work.
These perspectives can be incorporated into organizational strategy as well as brand strategy, helping organizations address internal challenges that emerge down the road or adjust their priorities based on audience feedback. For what it’s worth, I’ve never worked on a nonprofit brand strategy engagement that didn’t illuminate organizational challenges and help inform leadership’s response to those challenges.
An Authentic, Democratized Identity
At Constructive, we often say brand strategy should be built from the ground up and embraced from the top down. Why? Because brands that reflect the ideas and perspectives of only a few at the top of the organization and/or a small team of consultants are far less likely to resonate with a wider audience — including the staff and volunteers responsible for sustaining most nonprofit organizations.
Hey, nonprofits-that-have-messaging-and/or-visual-branding-that-either-has-never-resonated-or-no-longer resonates-with-staff, I’m speaking to you! You know what you also have? Staff who might feel demoralized and disconnected from the organization. Staff usually bear the burden of an outdated or dysfunctional brand because they’re the ones tasked with developing bespoke communications material from scratch or visual workarounds to overcome the fact that the organization’s brand is no longer an asset but an affliction. And that, understandably, can lead to frustration, resentment, and reduced productivity.
For external audiences, outdated visual branding is always a turn-off, especially given the level of visual sophistication that most of us, in the age of Behance and Instagram, have come to expect. By the same token, if a nonprofit’s messaging no longer accurately reflects the work it is doing, its audiences are going to be confused. And who needs that?
Because it’s built on the perspectives of many, not just a few, a well-executed brand strategy engagement ensures that a nonprofit’s brand resonates with both internal and external audiences. And by understanding what motivates staff to do the work, donors to donate, and partners to engage, an organization will find itself in a much better position to communicate these key ideas in its messaging and designed experiences, transforming its brand into one of its greatest resources.
Bringing Clarity to the Cause
Many of our clients come to us for help because their external audiences seem to struggle to understand what they do and why it matters. They know that a well-articulated brand strategy can provide clarity to folks outside an organization, helping them understand the change an organization is seeking to create, how it plans to accomplish its goal(s), and how they can engage with the organization to bring about that change. It almost goes without saying that the more clarity a nonprofit can provide its audiences, the better positioned it will be to capture their attention, change their hearts and minds, and galvanize them to act.
That said, a related benefit of brand strategy that’s often overlooked is the clarity of purpose it provides internal stakeholders.
Having worked in nonprofit leadership, I’ve seen first-hand the disparate ideas floating around about brand values/roles/personality/logos/etc. Board meetings that touched on brand issues were a particular pleasure. (Not.) Now that I’ve switched to consulting, it never surprises me when nonprofit staff, leaders, and board members offer different versions of their organization’s vision and goals, not to mention the path forward for achieving them. It’s understandable — the business of change is complex, and lots of nonprofits go at it through different programs, services, and initiatives. It’s sort of like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, with each person describing that part of an organization’s work with which they are most familiar.
Again, one of the most transformative benefits of a successful brand strategy engagement is that the process, when executed well, brings together a range of unique perspectives that, in their totality, articulate the shared ideas that drive the organization’s programs and motivate its people.
When staff, leadership, and board members feel that their perspectives have been heard, and their ideas (and concerns) are reflected in a vision and brand narrative that captures that totality, they are better able to understand how their specific piece of the puzzle fits into the bigger picture (or, to continue the analogy; how each elephant part is attached to the others). That kind of unity and shared understanding can be enormously valuable for organizations used to struggling with programmatic silos, miscommunications, duplicated effort, and staff frustration and burnout.
Greater Consistency — and Trust
We’ve all heard the phrase “that’s not on brand,” an expression that inspires eye rolls from even committed brand enthusiasts. But if nonprofits hope to convey consistency and build trust, they need to be able to assess what does (and doesn’t) fit their brand. Here, too, an effective brand strategy can provide a much-needed framework.
Consistency is key to building trust with audiences. Humans tend not to like surprises and feel most comfortable when they know what to expect from others. We tend to like—and trust—people who are dependable (even if they’re dependably flaky), and whose responses in a range of situations are more or less predictable. The same applies for brands — to build trust with your audiences, you want them to feel confident about what they can expect from you.
This idea is especially important in a nonprofit context, as organizations routinely ask supporters and potential supporters to put a great deal of faith in them: they ask us to give them our attention over many other worthy causes, ask to be trusted as thought leaders, and ask for our hard-earned dollars. But every time someone perceives an inconsistency in a nonprofit’s brand — maybe they notice different versions of a logo on a website, or come across different versions of a mission statement in collateral, or land on a donation page that doesn’t work properly — it undermines their confidence and trust in an organization.
That’s why nonprofits need to take the idea of projecting consistency seriously. It’s not just the job of a communications manager to make sure the team is using the correct logo. You need a brand strategy that articulates a coherent messaging framework and provides internal stakeholders with everything they might need in the way of brand guidelines to convince your supporters and potential supporters that yours is a consistent, dependable organization.
Nonprofit Brand Strategy Increases Capacity and Impact
Let’s be real: the most brilliant nonprofit brand strategy will not boost an organization’s impact by itself. No, the value of an effective brand strategy lies in its usefulness to the real heroes of the show — the people who do the work.
People—committed, talented staff who bring their expertise to the hard work of creating positive change—are the most important assets a nonprofit possesses. And, in most cases, their job shouldn’t require them to think about the organization’s brand; their job is to create impact. By providing them with consistent brand messaging, compelling collateral, and a clear set of brand guidelines, brand strategy can be an invaluable tool that supports and amplifies their work.
So when people ask me what nonprofit brand strategy is good for, I tell them this: brand strategy is a sort of North Star that helps inform an organization’s strategies and ensures that its talented staff arrive safely at their destination. By articulating messaging and brand experiences that express shared ideas, it helps organizations communicate with clarity and consistency to their audiences, and, in turn, helps audiences better understand a nonprofit’s vision and how they can engage with it to advance a good cause.
And the end result of all that? Greater impact. So there.
