Embracing complexity: Brand heresy in nonprofit comms

I’m sure you’ve heard these sayings from Mies van der Rohe and Kelly Johnson many times. And if, like me, you work in communications or have ever wrestled with identifying your organisation’s core purpose, then sentiments like these are probably something of a mantra. 

Here’s another one, from an American folk legend: 

Social Finance burst onto the scene in 2010 with a big idea for changing how social impact is funded and delivered: social impact bonds. Now called social outcomes contracts (or payment by results in the US and elsewhere) this idea has mobilised over £600m for a huge range of projects to improve lives. Since then we’ve grown from a handful of people in a basement to a team of 120 working across multiple social issues and countries, and with many more tools than SIBs at our disposal. 

So, what’s the problem? Complexity. 

Someone once said a brand is what you say, what you do, and what others say about you when you’re not in the room. That last bit is really about stakeholder perception. And our stakeholders were saying: you’re a valued partner with amazing analytical skills, you come up with brilliant ideas, you’re a trusted broker of relationships, you roll up your sleeves and get things done… but you’re a bit too clever for your own good and we often don’t understand what you’re saying. 

Why does this matter? Because real, lasting, widespread social impact is never the work of a single organisation. 

We’re here to help others achieve that impact – the partners working hard to fund and deliver services, the communities around whose needs the most effective services are designed. These are all smart people and if they can’t understand us, then we won’t inspire confidence. Being clear about who we are, what we stand for, and how we can help is as important as our skills in financial analysis, data science, strategy, and partnership building.

In other words, brand is a critical part of the social change toolkit.

Our brand was always supposed to embody the balance between our technical skills and the people-centred impact those skills are trying to make. Our name captures this tension – Social (impact) Finance (skills) – as does our circle and square logo, which we feel symbolises the heart / head balance in our work. But somewhere along the way we got too comfortable with the technical side and created the impression of being very corporate and aligned more with the Finance aspect of our name. While we are good at financial analysis, money is not why we exist. We’re here to achieve social impact for people, and we needed to rediscover the lost human touch. 

So we decided to refresh our brand. It’s not the first time I’ve enjoyed overhauling a brand, but a couple of things did strike me particularly strongly this time round. 

Embrace complexity

We’re not in the business of flogging cut-and-paste models of social change. I see a lot of people touting patented off-the-shelf approaches that promise three easy steps to save the world. Really? You’re not Tom Cruise, mate.

Our own framework of routes to scale impact in social issues is based on over a decade of our own learning and many more insights drawn from changemakers across the world. It’s not simple, because social challenges are not simple. But it is going down well with partners who are as frustrated as we are with poor outcomes for high costs, and who have a passion for changing how systems work for the people using them and whose voices are often not heard.

We’ve put an acknowledgement of this complexity at the heart of our brand. Obviously we’re not trying to create complexity, but to bring clarity and rigour to the solution of complex problems. The first step is acknowledging those problems exist and not pretending there’s a magic wand to wave them away.

For us that means we will never arrive with stock answers. We will listen, learn, question, model, test, adapt and deliver. Together. That’s our brand promise.

Don’t be afraid of breadth

We work on a huge range of social issues in the UK and in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe. We work with local and national governments, philanthropy, charities, social enterprises, service providers, and social investors. We work with communities to listen and learn from them, to co-design solutions and ensure they take decisions. We do data, finance, digital, strategy, research, and design.

We think there’s something special in the way we combine our skills in different ways to respond to the specific needs of different issues and communities. But having all of these specialisms in-house and working on such a range of issues, does present a challenge to a branding approach that might favour honing in on a perfectly unique proposition. You can spend far too much time and energy worrying about this.

Our solution is to see breadth as a strength and to reflect it in our brand. Our new vision is deliberately broad: A fairer world where together we unleash the potential of people and communities. Is it totally unique in our sector? No. Does it describe the future we want to see and does it give us the flexibility to decide how to work towards it? Yes.

I increasingly see the emphasis on a wholly unique brand model as a trap. The way out is to focus on telling the stories that only we can tell, because only we and our partners have done a particular project successfully. That’s how we can bring a unique angle to a broader vision.

You can warm up without dumbing down

We tackle complex and enduring social problems, and with that often comes sensitive subject matter. It might be end of life care, tackling domestic abuse perpetrators, or mental health and jobs. Or it might involve modelling innovative financial solutions for affordable rented housing or data solutions for children’s services, and with that often comes very detailed analytical work.

This stuff is hard and it’s why our partners commission us. Some of my colleagues were worried a brand refresh might lead to a watering down of the intellectual firepower that we bring to the table. Others were worried that without a revamp we would just sound like number-crunching Daleks. We had to find the balance between head and heart.

So our brand has flexibility baked in. We now have a much broader colour palette with muted colours we can dial down for serious topics and vibrant colours to dial up for lighter subject matter. We’ve introduced hand-drawn graphical touches to help us humanise the way we present data. And we’re trying to centre people’s voices more in our work, while balancing this with the analytical detail underpinning our initiatives.

We’ve even taken photos of our team doing things other than staring at post-it notes, flow charts and pivot tables.

Go back to brand basics

We didn’t want to completely rebrand. We still think the Social / Finance dynamic is important and we hope our new approach makes it clear that we’re not a financial institution. And we didn’t want to risk losing the awareness and good reputation that had accrued in our name.

So we went back to basics. We kept the name and logo, but developed a maximalist treatment of it. The strong geometric shapes of our logo suggested a way forward and instead of protecting the logo like a holy relic, we started to play around with it. We’re using it as a graphic device for holding photos; as a pattern grid to overlay on photography; and as colour blocks to add visual impact. 

We are a nonprofit, we don’t have deep pockets, and we need to make every penny of our marketing budget work hard. I know a lot of others in our sector feel the same. So if anyone else is pondering a change, I’d encourage going back to basics rather than creating a completely new identity. Have a look at what you’ve already got in your brand toolkit and see if it can be repurposed in creative ways to support a new direction you want to take.

None of the above was easy. We spent a long time asking ourselves probing questions, searching for the threads that run through everything we do, agonising over the finer detail and the exact words to describe our role in social impact. In the end, the answer was staring us in the face: be clear about complexity, and be honest that solutions are hard.

Simple as that.