Managing your brand in a digital world

Howard Lake | 15 March 2013 | Blogs

• Tagged with:
• brand
• Digital
• Individual giving
• Management

I went to a very enjoyable breakfast seminar by CharityComms about managing risk and reputation. There were two great speakers with Jill McCall, Senior Brand Manager at Cadbury’s and Adrian Thomas, Head of External Relations from the British Red Cross.

I found it especially interesting as it is increasingly challenging to manage your organisation’s brand within the social media world we are now in. As Adrian said “Brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room” – That room is online and widely accessible to anyone and everyone who wants to listen or join in!

There was a lot of great content shared by the speakers, but there were a few key summary points I took away and wanted to share are below:

On your brand

• Keep your product at the heart of your marketing and brand

  • It’s important to remember why people buy from you or support you. This can get lost sometimes. The whole horsemeat scandal has happened because the product owners got too far removed from their product

• Have clear brand values

  • What does your organisation or your product stand for?

• Build an open & diverse culture

  • Brand values should not live just on a powerpoint created by marketing team. The values need to go all the way down the chain. Everyone in the organisation, plus volunteers, suppliers and other parties involved all need to live the brand values. It’s important that staff also feel comfortable to highlight risks or issues.

Handling negative issues from via social media

When handling an issue it’s important to follow the 3 key rules: Be 1. Open, 2. Honest, 3. Responsive. With social media and the press it can be easy for something to snowball out of proportion. Therefore when responding it’s important to:

• Be responsive not defensive
   
• Be transparent
   
• Use humour if appropriate
   
• Apologise, if you are to blame
   
• Know your audience

All organisations are open to their reputations being challenged, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a charity or a commercial organisation.

There is a storify kindly put together by @LondonKirsty from the seminar for those who’d like to read more from the seminar.

Vicky Reeves is MD of charity sector digital communications agency Chameleon

About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale. He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.