Are You Ready for a Rebrand?

By Deroy Peraza, Partner, & Kade Burns, Sr. Strategist at Hyperakt

Rebranding is a pivotal moment in the life of a nonprofit or foundation. While it may seem like an exercise in aesthetics, a rebrand often signals something much deeper—a reflection of where an organization has been, where it is now, and where it aspires to go.

By Sruthi Sadhujan, Senior Strategy Director at Hyperakt

“Our work speaks for itself.”

It’s a common mindset among nonprofit leaders. Everything, from fundraising to recruiting to programming, is focused on activating the mission.

But letting your work speak for your organization is risky — because the work itself is technical, opaque, full of jargon. Often people outside your orbit can’t understand it. So your work doesn’t speak for itself. Not really.

By Deroy Peraza, Partner at Hyperakt

Nonprofit organizations come to us with different branding needs. Some have a clear mission and voice but need a modern visual identity and design system to drive engagement. Others recognize that they have deeper challenges, that they need to build alignment around their organization’s positioning, voice, and visual identity so their brand resonates from the inside out.

By Julia Zeltser, Partner at Hyperakt

A brand is a living thing. It requires continual cultivation to reach its potential as a strategic differentiator that furthers your organization’s mission. We've seen many sparkly brands win design accolades, only to fade over time.

By Deroy Peraza, Partner at Hyperakt

There are cheaper, faster shortcuts for everything. But the real question is: Are they worth the tradeoff?

I’m a big fan of metaphors and I have a serious sweet tooth, so I’m going to bring those two loves together to make my point a little tastier.

I love maple syrup. Not the crappy generic kind labeled “syrup” (and formerly named after a racist stereotype) that most Americans grew up with — that’s just corn syrup. I love the real thing made from actual maple trees. Admittedly, the real stuff is expensive and not as widely available as the fake stuff. It’s so good, though, that I’d rather have real maple syrup once a year than have the fake stuff once a week.

By Deroy Peraza, Partner at Hyperakt

It’s a familiar scenario for many organizations: the marketing website feels outdated, confusing, and disconnected from what the organization truly represents.

The straightforward solution seems to be a new website. Tangible engagement metrics on Google Analytics make it easier to persuade leadership to set aside funds to fix your primary channel for marketing and communications.

By Sruthi Sadhujan, Senior Strategy Director at Hyperakt

It’s not often that a nonprofit organization changes its name. Honestly, it probably should happen more than it currently does. But renaming an organization is challenging, fraught, and often tangled up in lots of emotions, frustrating decisions-by-committee, and the inability to make difficult but inevitable tradeoffs. For any organization considering a name change, here are a few hard truths to swallow before you decide whether it's the right path for you.

By Sruthi Sadhujan, Senior Strategy Director and Deroy Peraza, Partner at Hyperakt

There may be some comfort in putting together a Request for Proposal and sending it out to a selection of design firms. In theory, it makes sense: You spell out exactly what you need and when you need it and the agencies attempt to convince you they would be your ideal partner. You get to compare proposals, see how pricing differs, possibly even get some initial ideas for solving the problem you’ve outlined. No-brainer, right? Well, not really.

By Julia Zeltser, Partner at Hyperakt

We've seen many an RFP in our day. There are many reasons why most creative partners don't love them. One reason is the impersonal nature of the process. Many RFP processes are designed to actively avoid conversation, but the best thought partnership is born out of human-to-human connections with great chemistry.

By Deroy Peraza, Partner at Hyperakt

We’ve noticed there’s a tendency in the nonprofit space for organizational leaders to think investing in a rebrand means investing in the rebrand process and consider the effort done when the updated brand debuts. Similarly, we find that many nonprofit marketers go into a branding project thinking about it as a short-term initiative. The excitement and pressure of a rebrand often clouds consideration for how the brand is activated, used post-launch, and built over the years that lay ahead to tell stories about the organization’s work. Essentially, they’re buying a new car and leaving it parked in the garage.

What if we were to think of the launch of a new brand not as the end of a project but as the beginning of a multiyear life cycle when the brand has its greatest impact?