Brand Building for Non-Profits

I had so much fun leading this workshop

I recently spoke at my friend Vipe Desai’s Rising Tide Summit in San Pedro, California. Vipe and I go back over 20 years, and we share a deep commitment to environmental action and the ocean economy. While we both serve on environmental non-profits, Vipe has taken this a step further and started a conference around these themes. He gathers tribal leaders from both the non-profit and business communities and creates space for them to share their stories. This mix of business and environmental action allows the energy to be around “we” rather than “us” and “them.” The combination of people underlines the business case for environmental action. And that’s right up my alley.

I wanted to lead a workshop, and not a talk. I shared my years of experience in branding and marketing to lead attendees through a simple four part process. My goal was to get everyone to understand how they could articulate their brand clearly, starting from a mission statement, and then build marketing around that.

The four steps are:

1. Understand your customer
2. Create a mission statement
3. Learn to write a design brief
4. Build a KPI dashboard and measure your progress

This is something any organization, no matter how small or how big, can learn from. I’ve used this process with single person startups, artists, and billion dollar publicly traded businesses. The formula works at any scale.