branding

Bumped - Mike

In the wake of articles discussing the destruction of the Republican brand, it is important to look at our own organizations and chapters as brands.

There are some activists that get very angry any time someone refers to a political party, organization, or candidate as a brand, saying that democracy is not a business and all that jazz. Regardless of that utopian view of the political world, your organization's branding and fundraising is pretty similar to the business world.

As a political advocacy/outreach organization your "product" is the impact you will have in reaching a political outcome. For non-partisan voter registration organizations this is new voters. For partisan youth organizations this is getting young voters out to vote as Democrats, and thereby electing Democrats to office.

When you ask a potential donor to contribute money to your organization, they expect a return on their investment (ROI). While in the business world ROI normally refers to revenue, in the advocacy world it is the impact your organization will have in reaching shared goals (your product). The opportunity cost of a donor's contribution to your organization is a contribution to another organization (In actuality, the opportunity cost is anything that could be purchased by the amount of their donation, but we will assume that they have allocated that amount to political contributions). Your organization needs to have the reputation of being extremely successful in reaching its desired outcomes, or else a donor will look somewhere else.

Your brand, then, is essentially the general perception that is held about your organization. Most importantly, what you stand for and the expectations of your efficacy.

Your brand is also what your organization is associated with in people's minds. Are you seen as energetic, active, and hip? Or are you seen as boring, lackluster, and weak? The conceptions people hold and adjectives they would use to describe your organization are extremely powerful.

Maintaining your organization's brand image is extremely important. Recovering a brand that has a tarnished reputation is much harder than building up a brand from scratch.

Here are some tips for developing and monitoring your brand:

Keep track of what people are saying about you.

This involves media monitoring and listening to your supporters. Check out my post on media monitoring for ideas. Frequently ask your members and supporters what they think about the organization and what they have heard people say about it. Word of mouth is extremely powerful and you don't want to let anything negative slip passed you unanswered.

Decide what you want your brand to be.

When companies start out they spend a lot of time determining what the goals of their brand are. A lot of political organizations don't. Think about what adjectives you would want people to use when describing your organization, and then create a plan that would result in that. It is important that your branding is carried out over all aspects of your organization. If you want people to describe you as energetic and active, you don't want to have a boring website that is rarely updated. Your brand is your message. Don't stray off message.

Do your absolute best.

The best marketing team in the world would have a nearly impossible time making an organization that doesn't do anything look like it is extremely active and effective. That is why you need to do everything you can to make your organization the best it can be. In the world of political activism, where your products are results, hard work and continued effort are the best ways to build your brand.

I'm still working on finishing UnChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity. It's a disorienting read. I expected it to be about how young evangelicals were transforming the political direction of the church with their focus on environmentalism and poverty. Instead, it's a full-throated study of Christianity's negative brand and proposals for fixing it. As such, there's a lot of information about what evangelicals "do wrong" in their attempt to bring new people to the faith, and there is a lot of discussion of new best practices that should be adopted to make Christianity more appealing to young people. Some of those new best practices can be transferred to our work in registering voters.

In a chapter entitled "Get Saved!," the authors note that many young people today view evangelism of the Christian faith as a transactional encounter, not a spiritual one. In other words, evangelists are only interested in the raw numbers - in getting as many converts as they can, not in the quality of the conversion or the concerns/experiences of the individual.

A lot of the times, this is the experience of young people with voter registration and issue-canvassing organizations. It is a transaction, not a conversation. We're interested in the numbers - voters registered, voters turned out. I know that I certainly feel that way when talking to street canvassers. Even if I do sign their petition, very rarely do I walk away with good feelings or any kind of connection to the organization or its cause.

This comes into sharp focus when we encounter someone who is already registered. If you are focused on the numbers, and registering the most new voters, the impulse is to move on and give them as little of your time as possible. This isn't necessarily wrong, but it does have it's own negative consequences.

I was discussing this with the folks at the Oregon Bus Project, who agreed that it was a problem. Because when you give that already registered person short shrift, or when you cut short a conversation with someone you do register, you are doing two things. First, you are devaluing that person's concerns and cutting off potential increased participation by that person. Second, you are sending the message that your organization doesn't really care about them beyond their role in meeting your voter registration goals.

The solution might be as simple as some rewarding those folks with swag, giving them an extra minute of your time, or invitations to a local event like Drinking Liberally where they can have that more substantive conversation (and hopefully become a member of your org). It might even be as simple as something cheesy like a "gold star" rewarding them for already being registered.

We're in the midst of the planning season for the 2008 General Election. It would be good for all progressive organizations to think not only of how they can contact and register the most voters, but how they can make those contacts of a higher quality.