Building a New Brand: No Shortcuts Allowed

October 7, 2024

By: Peter Panepento

Community foundations have been around for well over a century and they positively impact the lives of millions of people in nearly every U.S. ZIP code.

Yet if you approach most adults on the street and ask them to define a community foundation, you’re likely to receive answers like these:

I’d like to be able to say the responses in that video were cherry picked to illustrate a point.

Yet this isn’t the result of slick editing. It’s an accurate reflection of every discussion we had when we approached strangers in three U.S. cities and asked them a simple question: “What is a community foundation?”

This lack of a clear identity is a challenge, to say the least.

After all, if people can’t define who you are and what you stand for, it’s difficult to inspire them to invest in your work. And considering community foundations play an essential role in improving quality of life and addressing key local challenges, that’s a real problem.

It’s against this backdrop that we’ve embarked on a multi-year effort to launch a brand awareness campaign that introduces more potential donors and partners to community foundations.

Working on behalf of the Community Foundation Awareness Initiative, we’ve partnered with the communications teams at more than 40 U.S. community foundations to:

• identify the field's unique value proposition,
  

• create easy-to-understand language about what community foundations do,
  

• develop and pressure test a creative concept that resonates with potential community foundation donors, and

• create a suite of materials that can be used and adapted by individual community foundations in every part of the U.S.

This week, we’re officially rolling out the national campaign — which we’re calling Make More Possible — through a national digital and social media ad buy targeting potential community foundation donors.

Many of the more than 40 community foundations that have agreed to support the campaign have also been launching their own versions of Make More Possible in their home markets.

Some are using print and digital advertising, others are buying billboards, and still others are incorporating Make More Possible into their fundraising events and annual reports.

Over time, we plan to expand the campaign to target additional audiences and to include more community foundation partners — all with the goal of creating a true brand identity for a field that has been misunderstood and overlooked for far too long.

The process has reinforced the idea that you cannot expect to take shortcuts when you’re building a brand identity. This is especially true when you’re branding an entire field and not just one organization.

At each step along the way, we’ve been deliberate in getting input, building consensus, and being willing to adapt to what we hear from our community foundation partners — and from the audiences they’re trying to attract.

After all, if there’s misalignment — either among the organizations in the field or in our messaging — this effort will fall short of success.

We still have a long way to go — and we’ll be tracking engagement and measuring how a consistent and unified message is impacting public perceptions of community foundations.

We’ll also be sharing what we learn with our community foundation partners — and with you.

We’re excited to help build greater awareness and understanding about the pivotal role community foundations play. And we are hopeful that some of the lessons learned will prove valuable to the broader field of philanthropy.