“We are rebranding.”

Every time I hear those three words, I half-expect a sudden minor chord, the kind you hear in old movies when someone mentions the villain’s name.

I wish that chord were audible. Then I could say—darkly, like a supporting character who's probably doomed—“I have a bad feeling about this.” That would at least bring a film noir drama to the situation, which would have to be better than the dreary and discouraging way rebranding usually goes.

“We are rebranding” should mean something like this: We're going to make systemic changes to the way we connect with the outside world that will help people understand and love our cause. This will improve our fundraising.

If only.

Instead, “We are rebranding” at a nonprofit usually means something more like this: We face one to three years of painfully weak fundraising results. A lot of revenue will be lost, and a number of people will be fired.

It's not just me. Almost anyone who serves the nonprofit sector as a fundraising consultant or agency professional will back me up: That's the ugly course rebranding usually follows.

If every time you tuned your car radio to an AM station your right rear wheel fell off, you'd eventually come to the conclusion that the AM radio and the right rear wheel were connected. You might start to perceive your AM radio as a terrible piece of equipment that you should never, ever use.

Many of the best professionals in fundraising long ago came to the conclusion that branding is a force for evil—that you can have brand, or fundraising, but you can never have both. We need to change that. Because we can't afford to ignore branding. It's far too important.

• • •

I know a guy who collects news accounts of injuries and deaths caused by forklift accidents. He has so many of these stories, he has almost come to believe that forklifts are enemies of the human race. It's as if he's in a bad horror movie from the 1950s, one that ends with the camera pulling back to reveal the city sidewalks thronged with forklifts—and no humans. (Cue scary closing credits music.)

Let's get real: Forklifts are not evil. They're useful machines. Sometimes, something goes wrong with a forklift and someone gets hurt. To my knowledge, it's human error every time.

Branding is that way, too.

Those “branding accidents” are the equivalent of forklifts knocking over stacks of crates or backing off loading docks. It's not the forklifts' fault—it's people wrongly or clumsily operating a powerful tool.

Nonprofit fundraising is like a big warehouse full of forklifts being driven by pretty much anyone who feels like driving one. No certification or training is required. That leads to a lot of accidents.

To make matters worse, people keep hiring fighter-jet pilots to show them how to drive forklifts. These pilots' sense of speed and altitude is radically misaligned with the capabilities of forklifts—and they don't recognize the problem. With predictable results.

Before I take this metaphor so far we can't drag it back,¹ I have good news for you: There's another way to do nonprofit branding. You can build a great brand that won't land you in a horror-movie scenario, but instead measurably boost your fundraising metrics. That includes bottom-line revenue.

This book will show you how, and that's how you'll transform your fundraising.

Think of this book as a training manual for forklift drivers—that is, nonprofit brand builders who need to raise funds. That's you if you are in one of these groups:

• Fundraising or marketing professionals working at a nonprofit organization.
• Leaders or board members who want to provide meaningful leadership to the fundraisers in your organization.
• Agency professionals or consultants who serve nonprofits and want to help clients achieve breakthrough fundraising results.
• Anyone who wants to join the fundraising profession well equipped and clear-eyed about the challenges you'll face.

You'll find a realistic and experienced guide that will help you use the powerful tool of branding.

• • •

Until recently, I was one of those fundraising people who thought branding was evil. That was my best explanation for the repeated branding accidents I saw—the organizations that faced crippling losses of revenue and the derailed careers that resulted. What I didn't know was that I was making the same error as my friend who collects forklift stories. My attitude changed after I witnessed up-close several cases where nonprofit branding helped fundraising soar.

I started to pay close attention to the practices of successful fundraisers who made their brands work for them and not against them. I studied my own clients—where I typically have a lot of inside information—as well as organizations I could only observe from their public activities. I asked a lot of people a lot of questions.

A coherent pattern started to appear. The brands that correlated with successful fundraising had characteristics in common—and they were strikingly different from the commercial brands we know, admire, and often try to imitate.

A light turned on for me: Simply applying the principles of commercial branding to nonprofit fundraising is exactly the wrong thing to do. It's the cause of most branding accidents.

But getting it right, building your brand the way successful fundraisers do, will help you motivate donors to give, give happily, and keep on giving.

Your brand can—and should—do that for you.