Nonprofit Branding Strategies for 2025 [Templates, Tips, Products]
Nonprofit branding strategies follow a similar framework as brand strategies for other types of businesses, but the process is a bit more nuanced for a handful of reasons. Don’t worry; in addition to knowing how to start an agency and keep it up and running, our team at Slam Media Lab is full of knowledge and resources for branding a nonprofit organization.
With years of experience handling brand strategy and identity for startups, nonprofits, and Fortune 500 companies alike, we have the tools and knowledge to help you with building a nonprofit brand and nurturing your nonprofit brand strategy. Plus, we also specialize in content writing and strategy, SEO, and Webflow design and development, so we can help with every facet of your digital marketing strategy.
Slam is a nonprofit branding agency and nonprofit website development services agency, making us a great resource for all your nonprofit brand strategy needs. We’ve proven that we know how to start an agency, growing into a $2M business in just three years, we’re confident that our products and services can take your brand to the next level, too.
Our team believes in a custom approach for every client, and we build the foundations of our strategies with cohesive templates and courses backed by research and real results! We have experience helping nonprofits achieve their unique goals, including launching the Microsoft Community Skills Initiative, creating a brand identity and Webflow website for Prepared to Teach, and restructuring content for The Center for Community Solutions for better brand cohesion.
These are just a few examples of how we’ve redefined brands and crafted next-level digital marketing strategies that stay true to the organization’s values, and now we’re ready to help you with yours!
Without further ado, let’s dive into nonprofit branding and how our 501(c)(3) nonprofit agency can help you achieve your goals for your organization with a stellar nonprofit brand strategy.
Why is Building a Brand Identity for Your Nonprofit Important?
Nonprofit branding refers to how you show and tell outsiders what your organization is all about. Successful nonprofit organization branding goes beyond the visual elements of a brand; it should encompass your mission and show supporters how they can be a part of it.
The importance of branding a nonprofit really boils down to their inherent need for donations and support from their communities. Nonprofits don’t make the majority of their money from selling a product or service; instead, most stay up and running through:
- Auctions
- Donations
- Grants
- Sponsorships
- Volunteers
- And more!
That said, building nonprofit brand awareness isn’t a luxury; it’s a necessity. Nonprofits use their brand as a fundraising tool, but it’s important to have a strategy in place in order to create a lasting impact that resonates with your organization as a whole.
Non-Profit Brand Guide: How to Brand a Nonprofit Organization in 2024
Every nonprofit organization is different, but your overarching brand strategy should follow this outline:
- Define Audience, Goals, Identity, & Mission
- Layout Your Brand Story
- Make Initial Style Choices
- Create a Brand Style Guide
- Test & Refine
- Develop Brand Kits
- Review & Adjust Regularly
Define Your Audience, Goals, Identity, & Mission
The first step of the nonprofit branding process is to define your purpose clearly. Most nonprofits have a large, overarching mission that they want to achieve. It’s up to you to get to the root of the cause, so you know exactly what to share with your audience. As you do your research and brainstorm, consider:
- Your mission
- Your identity
- Your goals
- Your audience
Lay out Your Nonprofit Brand Story
Storytelling is a great tactic for any brand to use, and it’s especially prudent for nonprofit organizations. By weaving a story through your brand, you can humanize it and therefore better connect with your audience. As you start to consider the more complex aspects of your brand identity, keep that story at the center of your work.
That way, you can lead with authenticity and infuse it into every facet of your nonprofit brand strategy. Inherently, people tend to trust nonprofits more than for-profit brands, which can be helpful for earning and retaining viewers, donors, supporters, and more. However, even that trust is declining these days, according to the 2023 Independent Sector Trust in Civil Society report.
Consider this as you figure out how you want to share your brand story with your audience, so you can put your best foot forward and make the best impression at every touch point. We broke down some nonprofit storytelling examples to help you gain a better understanding of how to use your story in your nonprofit branding strategy.
Make Initial Style Choices for Your Nonprofit Brand
At this point, you should begin to have an idea about the visual elements of your brand. These style choices will dictate how people see you and can sway their decisions one way or the other. Consistency is key when it comes to earning and retaining nonprofit brand awareness, so do not take this part of the process lightly.
By using tools like Canva, you can workshop different assets that show off your ideas and get an idea of what looks good and what isn’t working, so you can commit to some overarching themes and grow from there.
At this stage, you should be thinking about:
- Colors
- Fonts
- Images
- Logo (and variations)
- Slogan/Tagline
Create a Style Guide with Your Nonprofit Branding Guidelines
Once you’ve made your decisions about how you want your brand to look, you should compile them in a style guide for your entire team.
Odds are, you’ll have more than one person creating content and other elements for your organization, and it’s important to maintain a consistent tone of voice and style. You can also create multiple brand templates for different media, so everyone knows how to present your brand across every channel.
Test & Refine Your Nonprofit Branding Strategy
There’s no one right answer for your nonprofit brand, so it’s up to you to test out nonprofit marketing strategies and adjust as needed. At this stage, you can invite outside perspectives to see how your nonprofit brand is resonating with your audience.
We suggest searching for people that already support your organization, as well as those that are not familiar with it, so you can get the most well-rounded answers about how you’re being perceived by the outside world.
Develop Different Brand Kits for Your Nonprofit
First things first, you’re probably wondering what is included in a brand kit. Brand kits essentially is a simplified version of your brand guidelines that you can share with everyone that works on your brand. It lays out your logos, typography, variations, and any other images that should be used throughout your content.
Brand kits help make your content more adaptable, so you can work across different channels without having to waste time manually changing brand aspects.
Review & Adjust Your Nonprofit Brand Strategy Regularly
Creating your nonprofit brand strategy is one thing; nurturing and growing it is another. Your nonprofit brand is not a singular project but rather an all-encompassing aspect of your organization, and it’s important to give it the attention it deserves forever.
While this sounds like a lot of work, it’ll pay off in the end. We understand that a lot of nonprofits don’t have the manpower to handle daily tasks on top of testing and updating your nonprofit branding strategies.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, see how you can leverage AI for nonprofits and clear up your schedule for these more important tasks. According to Feathr’s report, The State of Nonprofit Marketing 2024, only about 6% of nonprofits are actively investing in AI-powered tools while over 60% of organizations are interested in it.
Best SEO Practices for Branding a Nonprofit
Building a nonprofit SEO strategy presents unique challenges, and we’re here with best practices to navigate them. Many nonprofits share a common goal: attracting donors. So, they will try to target keywords and build a strategy around that end goal.
It’s not enough simply to target high-ranking keywords because most will have high competition, too. Many institutions will target the same keywords even if they’re not in the same sector, making it hard to rank highly for those words even if you’re paying for them.
That said, learning how to choose keywords for SEO and how best to leverage them for your nonprofit is not impossible.
We have a keyword research template to get you started, but let us leave you with a bit of advice on what to look out for as a nonprofit brand. Targeting high-volume words like “donate” or “donation” won’t be enough. Before you choose keywords, think about what you offer, what is specific about your organization, and what are your goals. Then, build your keyword lists around those offerings.
With our technical SEO tools and other agency tools, you’ll never be left in the dark about where your content stands and how you can improve. You can use tools like Keyword Insights and Ahrefs to create comprehensive keyword lists, track metrics, and make adjustments as needed to ensure you’re optimizing your keyword strategy. Plus, Slam makes it easy to measure SEO with our SEO ROI calculator.
Take a look at these nonprofit advertising examples that have grown a community and raised money!
Nonprofit Branding Ideas for Your Website
The main goals of any nonprofit website is to make an impact and drive more people to interact with your organization—whether you’re looking for food donations, volunteers, money, sponsors, or anything in between.
Slam makes it easy to optimize your website with a quick audit, so you can curate content to match your goals and get it in front of the right eyes. Moreover, you can use resources like Nocodelytics to track metrics and Jetboost to improve Webflow CMS.
If you’re building a brand-new website, you don’t have to start from scratch. We’re a nonprofit website development services agency that’s ready to bring your nonprofit brand to life. Even if you’re not ready to partner with Slam yet, you should check out these nonprofit website examples to get inspired and organize your ideas with our nonprofit website template.
In addition to optimizing the content about your nonprofit, you can continue to foster new leads and connect with your audience by housing a blog on your website. Slam specializes in Webflow blogging and can help you craft the perfect blog title for SEO,
Best Nonprofit Branding Ideas for Email Campaigns
According to a 2023 Hubspot report, donors are more likely to give when reached through email marketing campaigns and social media. Email donation efforts make up for about 26% of donations—with social media close behind at 25%—while other media can account for about 12%. That said, it’s important to have a good email marketing strategy in place for your organization.
Even though email continues to be the most successful avenue for a nonprofit brand to engage its audience, it’s up to you to build on that success with the right email marketing strategies. It’s not enough simply to ask people for donations—or sponsorships or whatever else you need.
Additionally, you should implement unique ways to incentivize your audience to interact with your brand. For starters, you can keep an open line of communication that goes both ways. Ask questions, and give people a place to speak back to you.
Storytelling is an important part of curating a brand, but that doesn’t mean you just have to tell your story. You can also leverage nonprofit content marketing strategies to share things about your supporters, the people you’re helping, and more. We also have great contest software for you to earn audience participation for bigger projects, too.
Keep these tactics in mind while putting together your emails:
- Stay up to date with guidelines
- Segment your emails for greater impact
- Tell engaging stories that resonate
- Show donors how they are making a different
- Express gratitude whenever you can
Once you have an idea of the type of content you want to include in your emails, you have to learn how to structure and send them out. We gathered some of the top email marketing tools for nonprofits to help with your search:
Building a Nonprofit Branding Strategy for Social Media
Social media is the second biggest medium for getting As a nonprofit, you rely on people for support. For this reason, it’s more important than ever to be talking to your audience and not at them. No matter which platforms you’re using, there are best practices to learn that will save you time, money, and effort.
Whether you need help with strategies for nonprofit Instagram, nonprofit on TikTok, Facebook, X, or other platforms, Slam has got your back. We, ourselves, use the Airtable social media calendar and Airtable social media automation to simplify our social media processes, and we encourage you to check them out, too!
In addition to Airtable, Sprout Social and Iconosquare are a couple other great resources for social media management, so you can plan ahead and stay on track all while keeping everything organized across multiple platforms.
How to Brand a Nonprofit Organization: New vs. Established Businesses
There are a lot of nonprofit marketing ideas for new and established organizations alike, but the overall strategies for both may look a bit different. Here’s a quick look at what you should focus on as a new nonprofit brand vs. one that’s been in business for a few years or more.
New Nonprofit Branding
When it comes to nonprofit branding for new entities, a big part of the job is learning how to build brand awareness for a nonprofit. You can be saying all the right things, but it won’t matter if you can’t get your content in front of the right eyes.
You’ve probably recently finished the non-profit brand creation phase, and now it’s time to share it with the world! At Slam, we go above and beyond simple brand creation; we breathe life into them, letting your mission speak for itself. Between your passions and our strategies, you can spread the word about your nonprofit brand in no time.
Nonprofit Branding for Established Organizations
Organizations that have been in business for a while have already done the heavy lifting in terms of brand awareness, and will shift their focus to non-profit brand management. This involves making updates to your content, nurturing current marketing avenues, and sharing your success stories so far!
Nonprofit Branding Examples from Slam
Slam has been working with nonprofit organizations for years, so we have a lot of nonprofit advertising examples from our own past projects. We are committed to coming up with the best nonprofit marketing campaigns for each individual client.
In 2023, we helped Prepared to Teach move their website to Webflow and created a new brand identity for them along the way. This organization had a handful of issues with their current brand strategy—the primary problem being their old WordPress website. In addition to being outdated, the organization themselves didn’t have control over the CMS, making it a challenge to change anything.
Slam helped by transferring their content to a functional Webflow website that they could update on the fly. While we made this transition, we also helped redefine their entire brand, so their mission and values aligned with the content they were putting into the world.
We also worked with The Center for Community Solutions to elevate their content and restructure their design. Not only did they have an outdated website that didn’t resonate with their cause anymore, but the website itself was also lacking a real hierarchy. Our team helped create a modern and user-friendly design while updating the content housed on the site, too.
These are just a couple organizations we’ve had the opportunity to work with, so be sure to check out the rest of our case studies to see our team in action!
Bring Your Nonprofit Brand to Life with Slam
The best thing you can do for your nonprofit branding is to work with a 501(c)(3) nonprofit agency that understands brand strategy and identity in and out. Slam is a full-service nonprofit branding agency with years of experience working with mission-driven businesses. That said, we’re ready to help you with branding your nonprofit—no matter the sector.
Contact our team to learn more about how we can take your nonprofit brand strategy to the next level. In the meantime, stay ahead of the curve with Slam’s arsenal of digital marketing resources. You can start with these:
- 4+ Nonprofit Marketing Courses to Boost Your Outreach [Masterclass + Examples]
- 2024 Editor X or Webflow: What’s the Best Website Builder for You?
- How to Start a Business on Social Media and Earn a Full-Time Salary with Just Your Phone
- The Complete Guide to Instagram for Small Business 2024
- How to Grow a Digital Marketing Agency: 10+ Strategies for Scaling Your Business [Full Course + Templates]
