Development NGO rebranding: How to get it right

Mission-driven organizations and their leaders tend to take comfort in the notion that their commitment to doing good speaks for itself. It doesn’t. The international development sector is undergoing a seismic shift. Private overseas capital flows have come to dwarf official development assistance. Governments are ramping up efforts to engage local institutions and the private sector — both as investors and implementing partners. Foreign aid budgets remain dwindling and unpredictable, and in the past year alone, two bilateral agencies have been absorbed into their countries’ diplomatic and trade departments. And in the midst of it all, the international community is grasping for a new sustainable development agenda to replace the Millennium Development Goals by the end of 2015. Aid groups need to keep up — and they need to protect and project their image as effective and innovative partners in today’s fast-paced development landscape. It’s not easy to cut through the constant stream of information and chatter, position your organization as a leader and project a greater degree of openness to partnership and collaboration, especially for midsize nongovernmental organizations operating in the space between international giants and local institutions. Some NGOs pursue mergers or acquisitions. Others strategically reposition themselves to stay current. But there are other tools. Leveraging the power of a new brand — the symbols and language an organization uses to project its mission, vision and culture to partners, clients and employees — is one of them. Rebranding is a high-stakes exercise. It means boiling down everything your organization is and wants to be to its essential characteristics, finding a way to translate that into words, shapes and colors, and then watching as the symbolism and messaging you’ve adopted permeate across your employees’ interactions — with one another, with your clients, with beneficiaries and with your partners. But despite that intimate and unique connection between each NGO and its brand, some lessons are generalizable across the international development space. And leaders of mission-driven organizations operating in a global arena today have much to gain from their peers’ experience. Pact, Population Services International and Pyxera Global have all refreshed their brands in recent years, reimagining the image they project outward to partners and inward to employees. Here’s what the executives and leaders who steered those efforts learned along the way: 1. Know who you are and where you’re going before you mess with your brand Mark Viso took over as CEO at Pact almost five years ago. With new leadership in place, and big changes reverberating throughout the U.S. global development sector, members of Pact’s board of directors raised the idea of a rebrand. For Viso, it was an opportunity to update the organization’s image. “Branding is fun,” he told Devex. “It’s sexy. It’s romantic. There are colors involved.” Viso had been through two rebrands at other organizations, and he understood that a brand has to be built on an accepted mission and sound business practices, not vice versa. So instead of jumping headfirst into debates about colors and symbols, Viso led a deep dive into Pact’s core business practices — its mission, strategic vision, metrics and culture — to fix the organization’s “internal pipes.” His mission, Viso said, is to “marry” what he saw to be missing from the development NGO industry — “the rigors of business science” — with the passionate purpose of mission that development workers bring with them to the job. A good brand captures the essence of what an organization is about and where it intends to go. The process of discovering what that essence is, of distilling the archetypal characteristics of your employees and the meaning they derive from their work, requires deep reflection on an organization’s strategic vision. Moving ahead without a clear vision — and a process for engaging staff members — can backfire. “It is dangerous,” Viso said. “Don’t do this until you’re happy with your strategy. It will cause you to reflect on things internally without the fabric around you to do it safely.” For organizations that go through the difficult process of soul-searching, a rebrand can help project the positive results of that work both outward to partners and clients and inward to employees. For Viso, employees’ acceptance of the new brand became a “proxy” for their acceptance of the organization’s strategic direction. “If you’re going to affiliate the brand with the new strategy of where we are going,” he said, “you could have a cohesive group of people who shared a vision, who shared a passion, to make that mission evident.” 2. Do it right, and do it once Pyxera Global (formerly CDC Development Solutions) has had four different names in 25 years. In the beginning, CDC stood for Citizens’ Democracy Corps, but the organization found that its name and brand was getting in the way of its mission. The reference to “democracy” raised suspicions that the organization might be in the “democracy promotion” business, or even a subversive U.S. government agency, when in fact CDC worked at that time to send U.S. business volunteers to provide technical assistance in former Soviet economies transitioning to a market economy. Citizens’ Democracy Corps became Citizens’ Development Corps, to de-emphasize any political connotations while maintaining the original three initials CDC. But those initials were causing problems of their own. People — both in the United States and abroad — were mistaking Citizens’ Development Corps for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — also commonly known as “CDC” — a government agency that works to protect Americans from health threats. “People heard ‘CDC’ and thought CDC.gov, not CDC.org,” Deirdre White, CEO of Pyxera Global, told Devex. “They came to us and said, ‘Where can I get malaria pills to go on my trip to Tanzania?’ That was the annoying part of it.” But the confusion was more than just “annoying” — it was also a business problem, as White pointed out: “We would go to work with local organizations, and … they were asking, where were the malaria drugs?” White and others recognized that the initials were creating confusion and getting in the way of the organization’s mission — and its ability to represent itself effectively abroad. That’s when CDC made the “error of the uninformed.” “There were some people that still really wanted to hold on to some residual of CDC, and there were some of us who wanted to move as far away from it as we could as possible,” White recalled. The rebranding team was unable to get a full consensus on changing the name completely, so they chose to implement a partial change. “We basically went with half a rebrand, and we changed our name to CDC Development Solutions,” White said. The hope was that the organization could distance itself from the U.S. government agency by adopting the initials ‘CDS’ instead of ‘CDC.’ But the result, White said, was mostly inconvenient at a time when the organization was starting to gain traction with private sector clients and developing “brand equity” around the CDC initials. “Essentially, it was just a wasted rebrand,” White said. “We all of a sudden had this new name … and yet we knew that was not the name to stick with for the long haul.” White derived her top rebranding lesson from that experience: Do it right the first time, and if you can’t get everyone on board with the direction you want to head in, don’t do it. 3. Find key advocates to facilitate buy-in While mission-driven NGOs rely on their employees’ emotional investment and passion to succeed, that deep personal association with the organization and its mission can also create challenges for generating buy-in around rebranding. The people with the deepest personal investment in an NGO and its history are often those who occupy positions of leadership and influence, like members of the board of directors. Such is the case with PSI, the global health NGO. “Many of our board members have been involved with the organization for 20 years,” Marshall Stowell, PSI’s director of external relations and communications, told Devex. “There’s a lot of history and a lot of feelings tied into these things. That type of change isn’t taken lightly.” He continued: “Brands are about emotion. When you change that, it’s not a surprise that it’s an emotional reaction from people.” PSI’s current President and CEO Karl Hofmann joined the organization in 2007. Hofmann’s arrival ushered in a new strategic planning process, and also created an opportunity to “reintroduce” PSI under new leadership and display a more “up-to-date view” of how the organization functioned. When PSI decided to revise its mission statement and refresh its brand, Stowell and his colleagues had to make the case to members of the board that the changes were necessary. “The board asked the right questions,” Stowell said. “Why? Why now? And if we’re doing well, why are we changing this?” Stowell had another advantage that endowed the rebrand process with credibility in the eyes of board members who might otherwise have been skeptical of the value of the effort: One of PSI’s board members, Rebecca Van Dyck, is the head of consumer marketing for Facebook, a position she took after working on other major brands, including Levi’s, Nike and Apple. “We had to clearly outline to the board what the problem was we were trying to address,” Stowell said. “We had to engage them and let them be heard and take their feedback seriously.” Van Dyck became a key advocate for winning over other board members who took her word on issues that might have taken longer for others to build consensus around. Van Dyck’s involvement in the process, according to Stowell, created an “efficiency in credibility” that helped the rebrand move forward in a constructive and inclusive way. “Ideally, you go into it more open and more collaborative to see if you can get through that way, because it’s the best way,” Stowell said. “One needs to be ready to draw the line or to say, let’s revisit this in a couple of years, which we did with the mission and values before. This was our second go at it.” “Sometimes,” he added, “you might take a longer view of the process.”. 4. Invest in your mission, and leave some “white space” People working at mission-driven organizations are often wary of paying for an expensive rebranding exercise, in part because they feel their commitment to doing good, to enhancing people’s lives, speaks for itself. Branding is then seen as an extraneous expenditure that redirects money away from the mission to do good and toward trendy shapes and symbols. While that hesitation is understandable, it is also misplaced, according to White. “If your brand is getting in your way, and if your inability to articulate what it is that you’re doing is getting in your way, then you’re not doing your organization and you’re not doing the people you’re looking to have an impact upon any favors by not making an investment in making this change,” she said. There are ways to keep costs down without undercutting the most important pieces of the rebranding process. When Pyxera Global launched its new brand, new name and new mission statement, for instance, it did so with a series of targeted investments instead of extensive advertising, placements and expensive launch parties. “We kept that down so we could invest in the stuff we thought mattered, like the professional consultants, like good materials and a really fantastic website. That’s where we decided to sink our resources,” White said. Similarly, while PSI sent out detailed branding instructions to its network affiliate organizations around the world, those institutions were also instructed to rebrand equipment, office furniture and supplies gradually as they wore out so that the process of transitioning to branded items was done at little additional cost. Leaders at Pact — who had less money to spend on the brand implementation process than a for-profit company might have had — accepted and embraced the notion that global offices, without direct implementation guidance from a branding agency, would interpret the rebrand with more freedom than they otherwise might have. In fact, allowing for some freedom in how the rebrand was implemented around the world helped capture a sense that was missing from the symbols, words and colors alone — what Viso called “organic-ness.” “We just couldn’t get it. We got the color. We got the period. We got the tagline. But we couldn’t get the organic-ness,” Viso said. Since Pact chose not to send its brand consultants around the world to direct implementation, much of it was left to employees themselves. “It goes into the body politic and they open it up,” Viso said. “I don’t think we’ve lost anything, quite frankly. People … can exert their freedoms but in the framework of what makes us whole.” Mark Minelli, whose firm partnered with Pact on the award-winning rebrand, described that freedom as “white space,” a quality that allows supporters of a brand to “fill the blanks around it and complete the narrative in a way that’s personal to them.” “You go to South Sudan or Myanmar and it’s not exactly the same application,” Minelli said. “It’s highly personalized … but there’s a value system there. People want to align around something and they want to have their own individual mark on it, and you have to get those two things right and balanced if you want it to work.” Even with limited funding for launch parties, advertising and implementation, NGO leaders and branding experts we spoke to for this story agreed that it pays to pay for professional help. “We decided that this time we were going to do it right and we were going to invest the time and the finances it requires,” White said about Pyxera Global’s most recent rebrand. After reviewing proposals from four branding agencies, the organization ended up with Forge Branding, a firm that specializes in NGO rebranding. “I knew one of the things that would come out of this was better language to describe what we do and why,” White said. “I knew a new name would come out of it. What I didn’t know was that they would take us through this totally eye-opening process to discover the archetype and the personality of the organization and make sure that that all got built into the brand.” That process can help to motivate staff, propel a brand forward — and turn out to be one of the wisest business decisions an aid executive could make. Join the Devex community and gain access to more in-depth analysis, breaking news and business advice — and a host of other services — on international development, humanitarian aid and global health.