Brand awareness and your nonprofit’s reputation are crucial in attracting donors, volunteers, and potential beneficiaries. However, how can you measure and improve them in both a competitive and dynamic media landscape?

Harmony Vallejo is the CEO and founder of Universal Events Inc., a company dedicated to providing support to nonprofits. Universal Events handles everything from marketing, SEO, and brand awareness to help nonprofits reach their target audiences. Harmony often provides her insights on how nonprofits can improve their brand awareness through various digital platforms.

We will be going over several points to consider in this article.

Define your brand identity

Having a brand identity is the essence of your nonprofit’s mission, vision, values, and personality. It helps to inform your communication, design, and storytelling on all relevant channels and platforms.

In order to define your brand identity, you need to ask yourself what your unique value proposition and impact is, as well as your target audience and what their needs and preferences are, how you want to be remembered by them, and what your brand attributes, tone, and overall voice are.

You can utilize surveys, interviews, focus groups, or even workshops to gather feedback from internal and external stakeholders. In addition, creating a brand guide or manual to document and share your branding identity with your team and partners is ideal.

Monitor your brand awareness

Brand awareness is the extent your nonprofit is recognized and remembered by your target audiences, which really reflects your overall visibility. In order to properly track this, you need to measure key metrics, such as brand recall (how many people can name your nonprofit when asked about a specific cause), brand mentions (how often your nonprofit is mentioned or referred to in the media, social media, etc), and brand sentiment (what opinions/emotions are expressed about your nonprofit in the media and online. You can utilize popular tools such as Google Alerts, Mention, or Brandwatch to monitor your brand awareness across different platforms.

Improve your brand reputation

Brand reputation is the overall impression and trustworthiness that your target audiences have for your brand, which can influence their willingness to support, engage, or even recommend you. In order to improve your brand’s reputation, you have to be consistent, transparent, authentic, and responsive. You need to align your communication, design, and actions with your branding identity and values across all of your platforms.

Share your goals, achievements, challenges, and what you’ve learned with your target audiences and stakeholders. Make sure to tell compelling stories that showcase your nonprofit’s that showcases your nonprofit’s purpose, passion, and personality. Engage with your target audiences and stakeholders on the media as well as online. You can use tools like Mailchimp, Canva, or Storytelling for Good to create content for your nonprofit as well as additional tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, or Sprout Social to manage and optimize your social media presence.

You can also consider utilizing partners such as Universal Events Inc. to help manage the administrative tasks associated with your brand awareness and social presence. Organizations like Harmony Vallejo’s are specifically designed to provide the support needed to allow nonprofit organizations to thrive.

If you utilize these guidance points, you can start developing a thoughtful brand image and begin attracting a wider audience to your cause. Just keep at it, don’t give up, and get your message out there.

Joyce Laroche