Episode 14: Building a Compelling Nonprofit Brand in a Noisy World with Matthew Quint

The Nonprofit Hero Factory

Matthew Quint, Director of the Center on Global Brand Leadership at Columbia Business School, discusses the challenges and opportunities nonprofit brands are facing today. Boris and Matthew talk about what defines a brand and how your brand can be an authentic voice that rises above the noise. They also discuss the importance of understanding your donors and how you can connect with them using your brand’s story to help them understand your purpose and support it.
Episode Links and Shownotes: https://nphf.show/ep14

Concepts and Takeaways:

• 4:41 — One of the biggest core issues brands are facing today is the transition from Shareholder Capitalism towards Stakeholder Capitalism. Fortunately, nonprofits have a head start in this arena.
• 9:23 — Younger generations want to work with and for organizations which they feel are making a positive contribution to society. This is also an area where nonprofits have a head start, but the competition for talent from for-profit and B-corp brands is increasing.
• 11:40 — A brand is not just about marketing and communications. It's not just your brand identity in terms of your name, your logo… a brand is everything that affects the relationship between an organization and its stakeholders
• 17:36 — What makes a brand compelling to the audience is understanding not just what you're doing, but giving some sort of story. As Matthew calls it, the “anec-data” and the data.
• 20:13 — A brand is a mix of functionality and emotion. As a nonprofit, you need that functional demonstration. The deeper layer is beyond the action-oriented numbers and data.
• 24:10 — Predicting the future is folly. But there are indicators that you can go into, such as the shift to greater digital/online programming. That expands the audiences organizations can reach and creates a new opportunity for what they can do.
• 27:43 — The key to expansion is to find pilot projects. Find little things you can do. Just put a little investment in it and see how it goes. Find which ones are getting more attention and making some traction then ramp up on that and pull back the ones that are not.
• 33:08 — One key to breaking through the noise is harnessing the passionate people within a nonprofit’s community. They have great stories that they can share to create word-of-mouth virality or social proof.
• 41:48 — What you say in your fundraising appeal makes a difference — you can appeal to people based on benefits to them, or based on the good that you do. Studies show that one is better than the other, but both might be best.