The 'underpinnings' of a rebranding

With a keen eye toward building partnerships with individual donors, corporations and like-minded organizations, Vicki Escarra is charting a new path for Opportunity International, a nonprofit that provides innovative financial solutions and training to empower people, create jobs and build vibrant communities. Escarra previously led Feeding America through the most significant period of advancement in its three-decade history, overseeing a massive branding transition and elevating it to become a $1.2 billion organization. Prior to this role, Escarra was the chief marketing officer for Delta Airlines. Opportunity International now benefits from her expertise. The organization has been in operation for more than 40 years and just completed a rebranding to expand its reach and appeal to a wider variety of donors. So how does an organization stay relevant and current in a changing donor environment, and how does a leader successfully manage such a transition? Escarra took time out to talk to Devex. How did you know it was time for a rebrand? The name Opportunity International is a strong and powerful name with regard to offering those in the developing world with capital to start businesses or training to maintain business and work their way out of poverty. But the underpinnings of the brand and how you lift and refresh it have been things I’ve been involved with. We’re a 42-year-old organization that’s distributed more than 21 million loans at a value of about $6 billion. We’ve created 10 million jobs in the last 15 years. But we’re relatively unknown as far as key stakeholders are concerned. Although we’re known very well to the finance community, we knew it was essential to rebrand. The internal audience really didn’t know what we stood for and the external audience didn’t understand the life-changing, transformative work Opportunity was doing. Any brand clearly needs to represent a promise to clients, donors and partners — as well as align around what the organization’s goal and missions are. The interesting thing for us is that we took on this work as we were rolling-up the organization from being five different entities into being a global organization. So now Australia, Canada, the United States, Germany and the U.K. operate as one entity rather than five. You previously oversaw a massive rebranding for Feeding America. Much of the effort is external, but what are some of the internal challenges of a rebranding? How do you get your team behind something like that? We are an organization that operates in 22 countries, we serve close to six million clients, we provide loans, savings, insurance, training … so one of the most challenging parts internally is that the way people think about Opportunity in India from a cultural perspective can be different than … in Rwanda or in the Philippines. It required a very rigorous approach and going line item by line item through the vision, mission and values, making sure that everyone signed off on everything. We’re operating in some very diverse countries with diverse mindsets. Similar to Feeding America, we tested the name. In that case, [previous name] America’s Second Harvest tested poorly, so what we learned is that you would have to [invest] millions of dollars … in getting that name out in the public to highlight it. But if we made a name change — like Feeding America — that is easily recognizable, we could get it in front of donors. We took a similar approach to test our name, and fortunately Opportunity International tested really well. We also crafted a new vision statement and logo. At Feeding America, you increased fundraising by 300 percent, and almost doubled the number of people served. Are there similar plans for Opportunity? What are your big goals? This year, we increased fundraising by 25 percent. By anyone’s estimation, we’re way ahead of the curve of what major organizations are doing to fundraise. We have an overall goal to fundraise $71 million in 2014, which will include 10 percent growth for the U.S. and 10 percent growth for Australia, Canada, U.K. and Germany. We’re really building out our corporate fundraising portfolio. We will soon announce our second largest gift, which will provide support to five countries in Africa to grow jobs for smallholder farmers. We’ve had 20 percent growth in individual major donors; the profile of our donors are entrepreneurs, more male than female and more interested in investing dollars than making donations. As philanthropy becomes more and more sophisticated, donors are asking: “What is the impact? If I give $5,000 to an education program for Opportunity International, how do I know that the program I’m supporting is educating young girls and boys and how is that moving them out of poverty?” You must measure social performance against a number of attributes that answers what will happen if someone makes an investment. There are 16 different metrics we use around social performance, from wages to education to health. People no longer want to give with the idea that it may help today, they want to know what their investment is doing for tomorrow. You’ve worked in some really high level positions and seen a lot of success. When do you know its time to move on? I felt really fortunate to have had a wonderful career at Delta. I moved around and did most every job. I worked at all the airports, all the call centers, all the cargo operations, then ran all of that together, then ran marketing and sales. I had such a broad range of experiences, but right after 9/11 and helping the company through that, I started questioning what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I decided I’d take a year off, I took 2005 off and realized I wanted to take what was great experience and put it to work helping people living in tough situations. Focusing my job search is what led me to Feeding America. I was there for six-and-a-half years, but I had always wanted to work internationally. One of the CEOs I had at Delta, who was a really great mentor to me, told me leadership positions run in lifecycles of about six years. And I think that’s true. I think leaders come in and they have ideas of how they can affect change; it takes six months to learn an organization well and to listen to what donors and clients and staff have to say. Putting together a strategy and framework for the future takes another six to eight months, and then we’re into the second year, affecting change, starting to peak somewhere around three to four years, and [thereafter] to fulfill a lot of the work. I’ve never wanted to stay beyond being effective. When I left Feeding America, we were at the peak of fundraising. I moved to Opportunity International because I was really drawn to the concept of helping women. You’re really successful at motivating others to support your organizations. What motivates you? I’ve been successful in motivating people in that I think great leadership consists of a bold vision for a future that’s achievable. A solid plan that people can rally around includes marketing and branding, bringing a great team together and getting people signed up to do the work. And then making sure that you provide them tools to go about their work. It’s not that difficult. I think people make it too complicated. I think it involves listening and learning the organization, listening and learning from the people, picking the right team and letting them get the job done. I don’t micromanage, I just have a great team. We have a goal of over $100 million in fundraising in the next two to three years, but I don’t have any doubt that we’ll beat that in the next year-and-a-half because I have the right people in place. But what motivates me? I really like winning. Who doesn’t? Even more, I like winning for people who have never had a chance to win at anything. When you walk into a school and you see children who have never been in school before — like I saw in Rwanda last week — and teachers that are being employed for the first time, their enthusiasm makes it easy to be enthusiastic about my job. Because Opportunity makes more than 93 percent of its loans to women, my experience as a mother also plays in. Every mother in the world wants the same thing: you want your children to have a better life than you’ve had, you want them to have meaningful work, you want to make your community a little bit better than it was. That’s what motivates me. Check out more career advice stories online, and subscribe to Doing Good to receive top international development career and recruitment news.