The best way to ensure consistent branding across your various communications is to create a brand guide. This resource lays out essential aspects and applications of your brand to serve as a source of truth for your team.

To help you get started, we’ll review the key nonprofit branding elements to include in your organization’s brand guide, which we’ve categorized for easy reference. Let’s begin!

Organizational Basics

Including core information about your nonprofit in your brand guide will help ensure your branding is authentic to your organization.  Make note of your nonprofit’s:

• Name: Write out your organization’s full legal name, as well as any shortened versions that are acceptable in supporter communications. If you prefer to use certain versions of your nonprofit’s name in different situations (e.g., using the full name on first reference and initials only for subsequent references).
• Mission statement: As the guiding principle behind your nonprofit’s work, it should also feature front and center in branded messages—and therefore needs to be easy to find when creating those materials.
• Values: These principles inform the visual and messaging elements of your brand (which we’ll discuss later), so putting them in your brand guide will explain the “why” behind the “what” for your team.
• Tagline or slogan: This is an optional, shortened version of your mission statement or summary of your values—think of UNICEF’s “For every child” or the Girl Scouts’ “Do a good turn daily.” If you use a tagline or slogan regularly in your communications, write it out so your team can copy it word for word.

Visual Elements

When you think about any brand, visuals are probably the first things that come to mind. Make the visual aspects of your brand memorable by developing guidelines for your:

• Logo: According to Loop, your organization’s logo “translates your mission, vision, and values into a graphic that encapsulates who you are [and] what you stand for.” Include all approved variations of your logo (full-color vs. black-and-white, with your tagline vs. without it, etc.) in your brand guide so you can standardize their uses across different types of content.
• Color palette: Choose one or two main colors to represent your nonprofit, as well as a few secondary shades to add variety to your communications. Next to each color swatch in your brand guide, include both the color name and the unique hex code associated with it (e.g., “neon green” could be #c6fc03 or #ddff36). This way, you can enter the codes into any graphic design tool and get the exact same shade every time.
• Typography: Specificity is also important here—set guidelines for which fonts, typefaces, and sizes are acceptable for your brand. For example, if your main brand font is Poppins, you might specify that headings should be in Poppins Bold and copy should be in Poppins Normal, with headings being at least 6px larger than their associated copy.

Messaging

Establishing a consistent organizational writing style in your brand guide will help you tell your nonprofit’s story more convincingly, encouraging supporter loyalty. Define your nonprofit’s:

• Tone: How do you want your community to perceive your organization? Choose one or two main adjectives to describe your tone, such as “optimistic,” “welcoming,” or “passionate.”
• Positioning: What sets your nonprofit apart from other similar organizations? For example, if you run an animal shelter,it might specialize in rescuing a certain dog breed or be the largest no-kill shelter in its local area.
• Word choice: How do you describe your nonprofit’s mission and work? As you make word-choice decisions, keep in mind that similar phrases can have different connotations in practice—e.g., “helping” people vs. “partnering with” them.
• Mechanics: What rules will your organization follow for capitalization, punctuation, spelling, and other technical elements of writing? You could use an established style guide like the Associated Press Stylebook or the Chicago Manual of Style, or you can adapt the existing rulebooks to create your own mechanics guidelines (for instance, some organizations will use the Oxford comma but otherwise adhere to AP Style).

Use Cases

As Getting Attention’s nonprofit marketing guide explains, multi-channel marketing allows your organization to connect with more supporters and drive more engagement with your mission. Keep your branding consistent across all channels by including examples of how your visuals and messaging should be applied in various marketing materials, including:

• Key pages of your nonprofit’s website (such as the About page, donation page, and blog roll)
• Email blasts and newsletters
• Social media posts and profiles across different platforms (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, etc.)
• Digital and print flyers
• Presentation slides and handouts for stakeholders
• Direct mail appeals

If your nonprofit decides to rebrand, make sure to update these samples along with the rest of your guidelines so your brand guide remains current. Also, as you branch into new marketing channels, create additional content examples for those platforms.

About the Author

Joshua Layton is a multi-disciplinary social impact designer based on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm Territory (currently known as Vancouver, Canada). Having worked with some of the leading nonprofits at both grassroots and global scales, Josh enjoys exploring the intersections of design and social good.

He is particularly passionate about creating brands and custom websites for changemakers addressing issues of 2SLGBTQ+ rights, criminal justice, and food security. Josh co-founded Loop: Design for Social Good in 2012, where he collaborates with an inspiring creative team and clients across various social impact verticals.