The Money-Raising Nonprofit Brand

Motivating Donors to Give, Give Happily, and Keep on Giving. Why commercial-style branding doesn’t work for nonprofits—and what does

Taking its cue from for-profit corporations, the nonprofit world has increasingly turned to commercial-style branding to raise profiles and encourage giving. But it hasn’t worked. Written by a longtime industry insider, this book argues that branding strategies borrowed from for-profit companies hasn’t just failed, but has actually discouraged giving.

“We are rebranding.”

For nonprofit organisations, that should mean something like, “We’re going to improve our marketing and help people love our cause. This will improve our fundraising.”

Far too often, it doesn’t mean anything like that.

Instead, “We are rebranding” at a nonprofit often means several years of disastrously lower fundraising revenue, marketing confusion, and broken careers.

But why does branding—a well-developed discipline with a history of commercial success—fail when applied to nonprofits? The Money-Raising Nonprofit Brand + Website argues that commercial-style branding is the wrong tool applied in the wrong way to the wrong industry.

• Offers a real-world fundraising strategies that work in the nonprofit world
• Disabuses readers of the dangerous notion that commercial-style marketing works in the fundamentally different nonprofit world
• Written by an industry insider with 25 years of experience raising funds for many of the most successful nonprofits in the world

Nonprofit fundraising is a fundamentally different world—financially, emotionally, and practically—than commercial marketing. Here, the author explains why commercial marketing strategies don’t work and provides practical, experience-based alternatives that do.