How to create one brand community?

As a charity, how do you unite everybody across your organisation and beyond in order to build one community?

It’s just one of the discussion points in We Are Acuity's Talking Local #charity podcast, with charity marketing experts Paul Brown and Richard Evens.

Our conversation focusses on the challenges faced by distributed charity brands, so those that operate nationally but through local charity partners whether volunteers, fundraisers, employees, stakeholders, offices, stores, or branches.

Brands like Mind, Age UK, Oxfam, PDSA, Cancer Research UK (CRUK) NSPCC, Michael Sobell House, British Red Cross , The Salvation Army, RSPCA and Dogs Trust amongst many others. Although we focus on charity, in this podcast, marketeers from many sectors will find the topics and themes all too familiar.

How do successful Charity brands maintain their shared sense of purpose? In Paul’s experience charities generally set out to solve a problem and make the world a better place, but with so many stakeholders it can be hard to maintain consistency of purpose across all touch points and not deliver a watered-down interpretation of it at local level.

So how do you maintain a culture where there is mutual respect for all the different parts of the organisation and what they are doing? Richard discusses how connecting the power of the national brand, the fundraising machine, the comms, the advocacy and the back-office functions that come from head office, with the action that takes place locally on the ground can be difficult.

Each has a subtly different experience of your charity. And while they're pulled together at the highest levels by a common purpose, that splits down into different and distinct purposes. This can create barriers between different parts of the business despite the fact that they are ultimately trying to achieve the same things.

People in the centre of the organisation need to be empowered by a good sense of what's happening on the ground. Regular two-way communication means you can nuance how you speak to local partners & make them feel an extension of your head office.

We talk about how your brand is vital in creating a unified community, and by immersing everyone in it, they naturally become an extension of your comms & marketing team, creating consistency at every touch point whether national or local, internal or external.

Interested in hearing more? If you work in the charity sector as a Marketing Executive, Manager, or Director & would like to hear more of the conversation, our Talking Local Marketing Podcast on the charity sector is available now on Spotify and Apple Music as well as Google. Here's the links to listen. Let us know what you think?

Spotify
Click Here.

Apple Music
Click Here.

Your local partners, whether branches, retailers, dealers, franchisees, or affiliates they need your support and you need theirs, get in touch with We Are Acuity today for a FREE marketing audit by clicking HERE.

Or if you'd like to read more about Local Marketing have a look at our blog page "Local Thinking': https://www.weareacuity.com/local-thinking-our-blog

#marketing #fundraising #branding