building your brand from the inside out

Developing Your Brand and Image Conference 30 March 2011

Building your brand from the inside out

CharityComms is the professional membership body for charity communicators. We believe charity communications are integral to each charity’s work for a better world.

W: www.charitycomms.org.uk T: 0207 426 8877 E: emma@charitycomms.org.uk

Building your brand

from the inside out

Helen de Soyza

Brand Manager

• Getting staff, including senior colleagues, to understand the importance of

brand

• How to engage staff to communicate your brand effectively

• Brand vs brand identity – getting over the „brand police‟ issue!

• Making brand fun

• Top tips

Purpose of today’s session

Action for Children – context

• One of the UK‟s largest charities

• 140 year history

• Over 6,000 staff and around 480 services right across the UK

• “Doers” not “talkers” – working directly with the most vulnerable children and

young people

• Most of our staff work on the front line, often with limited time to access PCs

• Local authority brand alliance

• Extremely complex stakeholder network - internal and external!

• Brand audit in 2006 started brand programme (NCH who?)

• Huge rebrand, launched in September 2008, required staff buy-in to be

successful

Key challenges• Lack of understanding of brand among staff

• 139 years culture of reticence and “modesty”

• Policy of not advertising and not investing in

promotion

• Lack of organisational buy-in to fundraising

objectives

• Organisational culture that seriously impeded both

brand promotion and brand implementation

• Over 75% staff against rebranding before brand

launch

Revisited and defined our

stakeholder groups

• 10 key stakeholder groups:

- Commissioners

- Donors and supporters

- Staff and volunteers

- General public

- Policy makers

- Service users

- Methodists

- Media

- Trustees and EMT

- Old boys and girls

Major internal engagement project was

key to success

• Engaging internal comms strategy designed to

engender brand ownership

• 6,000 staff and 3,000 volunteers = excellent sales force

• Creative engagement tools included:- Competition bringing our brand platform to life

- Poster competition to engage staff in new core values

- Intranet/staff magazine interviews with respected companies to highlight

importance of brand (eg. Innocent)

- Brandwagon roadshow 2 months before go live date

- Talking up – building a buzz via internal comms channels leading up to

our Switchover day

- Switchover guide

- Simultaneous switchover day briefings and celebrations at 500 locations

- Brand hotline

Teaser – our identity, what’s next?

Competition bringing our brand platform to life

Switchover guide

Making brand fun!

Spot the brand…

Because you’re worth itBecause you’re worth it

Group exercise – visualising brand

Group 1: If your brand was a dog, what breed would it be?

Is it different to what you would like it to be?

Group 2: If your brand was a theme park, what rides would

there be and what experience would the customers get?

Are those the right rides/experiences or would you prefer

them to be different? How could you influence the change?

Practical brand tools

Brand tools

• Brand toolkit: http://brand.actionforchildren.org.uk

- writing style

- imagery style

- logo request form

- signage

• Sonic toolkit

• Web2print

• Templates – Word and PowerPoint

• Bremy asset library

• Intranet…

Example with two images

Shaun Kelly

Head of Safeguarding

Dame Clare Tickell

Chief Executive

Finally, we surrounded them

with the brand...

Did we stop there?

So we need to try new methods of keeping

staff engaged with the brand…• Brand clinic with staff from Children’s Services as well as Policy, Fundraising, Brand

and Comms.

• Brand guidelines on toolkit site, intranet and in booklet

• Using internal comms channels to regularly remind people of the importance of brand

• HR

- Recruitment – advertising, job descriptions

- Inductions – training

• Setting up a formal brand champions scheme to get others to spread the good word (I am but one person)

• Engaging with people about their work and helping them understand how brand should lead their work – it’s a two way street, not a dictatorship

• Young people and the brand – involving young people in developing our brand portfolio and ensuring we represent them accurately and in a way they approve of (and they’re not backwards at sharing their opinions)

• Regular brand research – sharing updates on the impact brand is having

• Showing before and after pictures/leaflets/templates and proving how much more effective our brand really is and that it works…

Before...

After...

THANK YOU!

brand@actionforchildren.org.uk

helen.desoyza@actionforchildren.org.uk