- Build a great team – Senior marketing, communications and fundraising personnel with genuine delegated authority, reporting to ‘Project Board’ incorporating executive, trustees and senior stakeholders.
- Write a great brief
- Define your success measures – This might be to minimise opposition, maximise integration and synergies between the two organisations. Creating clarity of purpose. Driving up awareness. Deepening emotional engagement and brand loyalty. Improving fundraising appeal.
- Engage the right agency partner(s)
- Map your key stakeholders – Who are they and what is their relative importance: 2 x 2 power/influence matrix helpful here. Plan how to keep them informed throughout the process.
- Conduct a listening exercise – Cover off internal and external audiences using rigorous qualitative and quantitative research.
Qual = 1 to 1 interviews and focus groups. These will generate deep insight in small numbers.
Quant = e-surveys of larger sample groups to provide statistical integrity to qual findings.
Research scale dependent upon organisational appetite for research, available budget and timescales.
- Research analysis – Two reports: one is a summary of all we’ve heard from every audience, but key one is top ten behaviour changing findings. Don’t stop at ‘here’s what we heard’, move onto ‘so what?’.
- Competitor mapping – Consider competitive landscape, establish existing position, identify USPs and select desired future position.
- Socialise the findings – Clear research findings will directly drive all subsequent creative and marketing / communications activity – thus ensuring opposition is minimised. It’s hard to argue with data.
- Existing names – Ideally take baseline measure of existing brand equity (unprompted and prompted awareness) of both charities from which to measure progress.
- Identify ‘hygiene’ words – These are essential, descriptive words that define the ‘space’ in which you operate. These may include disease name plus words like charity.
- Territories – These are not geographic. We’re looking for ‘areas of meaning’. E.g. ‘research’ and ‘care’. Naming is typically a workshop process followed by longlisting and shortlisting.
- Testing – Where multiple possible solutions remain, return to the people you spoke to in the research phase to test. A great opportunity to re-involve key audiences.
- Brand architecture – What entities lie beneath the ‘parent’ brand? How can we organise them to ensure their proximity and relative importance are clear to outsiders?
- Core beliefs and value proposition, messages and tone of voice – Again, best undertaken through workshops and then over to copywriters. Messages should be: differentiated by audience; communicated with a defined tone of voice; and drive toward key calls to action.
- Visual identity – This goes way beyond logo into the realms of colours, fonts, use of imagery, textures, shapes etc. It must be ‘digital first’: optimised for web and social.
- Brand guidelines – These encapsulate your brand and enable you to police and protect all this investment.
- Templates for key collateral – Templates enable ongoing independence from brand agency: they typically include Word, PowerPoint and Adobe InDesign files.
- Don’t forget your website(s) – Leaving your website (your key digital comms tool) until the new unified brand is ready to launch is a classic error. Far better to run the brand and website projects in parallel. Website research can be integrated into brand research (which delivers economies) and a single agency for brand and web can deliver a more integrated approach within a shorter timeline.
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