Guest Post by Melinda Pearce McKee
We all know what it’s like to outgrow the remnants of your childhood — silly TV shows, favorite foods, kiddie games . . . and of course, clothes.
So what if you’re an organization, perhaps just coming of age, and what you’re wearing no longer fits? It’s the same as with ill-fitting clothes: you feel uncomfortable, and can look a bit awkward.
NCGives was born about 6 years ago with a passion for “Connecting Givers For Good.” At the time, that tagline more or less served its purpose, and it sure sounded nice ‘n’ sweet. But as the organization grew, we began to see how that tagline really wasn’t so great at conveying what we were about. (After all, you’re still in the dark, right?)
I finally decided we had to make a change when Sarah Durham (of Big Duck and Brandraising renown) posed a great question during one of Kivi’s webinars: “Could another organization feasibly use this same tagline?”
In other words, is your tagline so indistinct that you may as well not bother using it? Yikes! Talk about wasted real estate.
Double-Header Dilemma
With our next move, I’d say we jumped the gun a bit in our eagerness to really put a stake in the ground (something we were trying to do as a whole organization, not just with our tagline). We were advised by our then-marketing firm to add what they called a “descriptor line,” something that was more specific and authoritative about our work. So we came up with “North Carolina’s Initiative for Inclusive Philanthropy.”
That’s how we wound up juggling a sweet-but-indistinct “tagline” with an authoritative-but-unexciting (and still sort of unclear) “descriptor line.” To continue the clothing analogy, it was about as weird as someone trying to wear two hats at the same time . . . and it worked about as well, too.
Our challenge was now to find, in eight jargon-free words or fewer, a tagline that simultaneously 1) conveyed the inspiring, empowering spirit behind our work — our core belief that everybody is a philanthropist and that giving comes in many equally important forms; and 2) emphasized our “competitive edge” — that we are North Carolina’s only organization whose whole mission is to make that belief a reality.
The Search Is On
Enter Nancy Schwartz, and her blessed Nonprofit Tagline Report. If you are in the market for a new tagline, this report will be your best friend. There’s a lot of great info in there; my favorite gems are her lists of must-haves (like “make an emotional connection”) and deadly sins (like “don’t use inept references”).
I ran all our tagline ideas through these checklists, then ran the finalists past the staff and our board communications committee, and I’m happy to say, we now have our winner:
Because Every Giver Matters, and Every Gift Counts
Simple? Yes, which is not a bad thing. Intriguingly stirring, perhaps? I think so (if I do say so myself). Does it have an edge that distinguishes us from other nonprofits? Definitely, in North Carolina — and maybe even beyond. Mission accomplished.
Of course, I could have brooded further about how people will still be left wondering about how we do our work, since this tagline doesn’t make it obvious. But NCGives isn’t really a cut-and-dried organization, and I think chasing after a comprehensively cut-and-dried tagline would have been a fool’s errand. To steal one of my executive director’s favorite quotes, “the perfect is the enemy of the good.”
(Besides, people being curious about what you do is probably not a bad thing.)
Now, if only we could hem up our much-too-long mission statement! But that’s another story, for another time.
As a Part II to Melinda’s guest post, tomorrow I’ll share an interview with Nancy Schwartz about her new taglines database and how your nonprofit can use it to revamp your tagline much like Melinda did. ~Kivi
