Nonprofit Branding: How To Market A Nonprofit With Low Cost & High Impact

May 7, 2012 · 2 Comments

Planning a cause-marketing collaboration? Discussing a fundraising or membership program? Gearing up your own branding campaign? Just looking for badges of affinity? Want to get the biggest bang for your branding buck?

There is a reason nonprofits annually invest nearly $50 million on logo-mugs. Each year!

$50 Million! On Logo-Mugs! Let’s discuss……

That $50 million is calculated marketing investment. It has a measurable return.

Here we’ll report on years of market research. The research corroborates lessons we learned from supplying over 16,000 marketing and fundraising campaigns with branding products – including bazillions of logo-mugs.

Basic premise: your brand is an ever-evolving abstraction. Fed by accumulated impressions, it lives out there as public perception. You can’t control it. You must nurture it. That’s why nonprofits became the biggest consumer of imprinted branding products. Logo-Mugs are among the most cost-effective.

Advantage: Logo-Mugs are powerful branding tools.

Research conclusion: A mug with your logo will have more impact per penny spent than promotion in any print or broadcast medium – radio, TV, newspaper, magazine ads. (Later in this post we’ll report the cost comparisons with other media.)

Advantage: Logo-Mugs can be incredible fundraising premiums.

Our Experience: VisABILITY’S public broadcasting clients (radio & TV combined) raised $200 million using coffee mugs as contribution incentives.

Advantage: You can drink out of logo-mugs.

Three big advantages. They bring us right to Burke’s Unified Law of Mug Power:

Without a logo, a mug is a generic thing that holds beverage, but no affection.

Apply your nonprofit logo and BINGO! You waved the wand and made that mug become a powerful nonprofit branding tool. Moreover, with your logo it is now a powerful display of affinity for the owner. A nonprofit branding tool AND a personal branding tool.

That’s the combination we’re looking for….personal branding and nonprofit branding in one package! Because of that double benefit logo-mugs are prized by nonprofits and by their constituents.

LOGO-MUG FACTS: Years of market research lumps together all mug users – for-profit and nonprofits. Even without unscrambling the results, the relationship between market impact and cost is surprising and persuasive. (Then we roll out the Nonprofit Bonus. THAT one will knock your socks off.) Look at the numbers:

The national average: an imprinted logo-mug is used 6.3 times a month for about half a year. (Usage seems low to us…)

During that time an average of 1,307 people see the mug’s logo.

That’s 1307 “impressions” in advertising lingo. Impressions are what commercial media sell and what advertisers buy. (If you have been reading this blog, you understand “impressions.” But, if you are unfamiliar with marketing metrics like impressions, check our glossary, accessed through a tab at the top of this page.)

It costs $00.004 (four tenths of a penny) for each pair of eyes that sees the logo on an average mug – each impression.

The cost per impression of an average logo-mug is about 2/3 the cost of an average radio spot.

The cost per average logo-mug impression is about 1/5 the average cost of an impression on prime-time TV.

LOGO-MUG CONCLUSION: Impressions produced by your logo-mug are a less expensive and more productive than broadcast media can deliver. Repeat after me: brand promotion delivered by radio & TV commercials, be they syndicated, cable or prime-time commercials, costs more than impressions delivered by logo-mugs.

Consider the implications of that good news. For every dollar invested in marketing, your nonprofit can present its branding elements to more people with a dumb coffee mug than it can with a sophisticated broadcast commercial or print ad.

Not satisfied. Want more? Here it is:

For nonprofit organizations, the national research understates the market impact of logo-mugs. It also exaggerates the cost. There is an incredible nonprofit bonus to the cost/benefit of logo mugs as branding tools!

Pause Button: This bonus thing is BIG. We want you back here next week, so we’re gonna be coy about it. Next week we’ll explain the Nonprofit Bonus. As with all good things, there are downsides, risks, and gremlins to using mugs as nonprofit branding tools. We want you to know about them, too.So, next week’s post we’ll also report on the secret underbelly of logo-mugs. (Stop reading here – go up to the right and subscribe to the Nonprofit Branding Blog. Then you will an email notice about this stuff when it is fresh – as we roll it out. We’ll all feel better!)

Today’s Bonus: The dynamics of personal affinity and self-branding are basic tools in the Swiss Army Knife of nonprofit management . They energize your nonprofit’s fundraising, marketing, positioning, niche-retention, brand recognition and so much more. Every nonprofit professional must be firmly rooted in these concepts.

So, here’s Today’s Bonus: if you understand the dynamics of personal affinity and self-branding, you will be invited to all the best parties. The understanding will also help you do your job. Two reasons to check out: Why The Lord Of Logos Rules Your Marketplace.

COMING NEXT: OK. We promised. Next week we explore the Nonprofit Bonus. We’ll take a look at the nasty side of coffee mugs. We’ll also reminisce about the owner of a great mug factory. Determined to help us protect the illustrious brands of NPR and public radio stations nationwide, he hauled his mother into the factory to work the night shift.